Freed Israeli's Look a Lot Different than Palestinians That Spend Time in Israeli Jails.

Richard Mellor
Look at the condition of the freed Israeli’s in this video compared to those we’ve seen of Palestinians released by Israel over the past period.

 

It was good to read Prof Stacey Patton’s piece this morning on Facebook that talks about this (below). It’s the most frustrating thing to read the reports in the mainstream western media about the so-called ceasefire from the Israeli genocide as we’ve learned through experience not to trust them. It’s bad enough the prancing about like a prince the predator in chief is doing taking all the credit for what is not really a cease fire but a pause in the genocide and ethnic cleansing of a people from their land.

 

But the coverage of the release of the Israeli’s is so frustrating. A couple of days ago the Zionist regime was threatening more violence if Hamas did not release the prisoners and I wondered myself if there would be a possibility of finding them given the near total obliteration of the area by the Zionists.

 

Ms Patton’s comments are spot on.  It’s more than frustrating really, it makes me so damn angry how the Israeli prisoners are talked about and the compassion shown by the western media for them and the Israeli’s as a whole. The BBC is among the worst. Ms Patton’s comments here helped alleviate that a bit, reminded me and hopefully everyone else that doesn’t drink the cool aid, that we must not forget what we are dealing with when we are confronted with western and in particular, US capitalism’s reports on any of these events. Venezuela, China, anything that occurs in the former colonial countries that we tend to call the Global South now. Let’s remind ourselves that the mass media is not a free media, it represents the ideology, aspirations and aims of the class that rules. It is the enemy of the working class internationally. Here are Prof Patton’s comments.

 

Stacey Patton on Facebook

Lissen Y'all, 

I’m watching the news footage of Israeli hostages being reunited with their families, and something about it stops me cold. 

Now, these are people said to have survived the unimaginable but their faces don’t tell that story. 

No bruises. 

No hollow cheeks. 

No trembling hands or vacant eyes. 

They look fed, rested, almost untouched by the devastation we’ve been told they endured. They're able to focus their attention, stand up and give interviews for the press.

And yet, Gaza, the place where they were supposedly held, is in ruins. A graveyard of concrete and dust. Buildings flattened, hospitals bombed, entire neighborhoods turned into moonscapes. 

People there are starving, dehydrated, clinging to life. So we have to ask: where, exactly, were these hostages kept amid all that destruction? In what hidden sanctuary, untouched by the hellfire raining down on every other corner of Gaza, could anyone remain this unscathed?

We have to question these media images because they shape what we believe is true. They’re not neutral. They’re curated to evoke certain emotions like sympathy, fear, justification. 

Every camera angle, every close-up of tears and hugs, tells us where to place our empathy and where to withdraw it. But if we only see the smiling reunions, and not the bodies beneath the rubble, we’re being manipulated into a one-sided story of humanity.

So yeah, we gotta look closer. We have to ask harder questions. 

How were these people sustained in a place where food, water, and electricity have been cut off for months? 

Who shielded them when thousands of Palestinians couldn’t shield their own children? 

These are necessary questions. Because when the images don’t align with the conditions, the truth is being staged. And in war, what’s staged becomes strategy.

IJS