“What Israel’s doing is much worse than apartheid,” explained Chomsky. “To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by ‘apartheid,’ you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There’s a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce. … The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just don’t want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.”
Chomsky made the remarks during an insufferably long interview conducted by Amy Goodman on her equally insufferable “Democracy Now!” program.
But that wasn’t all that the so-called “cognitive scientist” had to say. He let it all hang out, once he began accusing Israel of purposely starving Gazans for political purposes:
“That’s basically the debate within the Israeli top political echelon: Should we follow Dov Weissglas’s position of maintaining [Gazans] on a diet of bare survival, so you make sure children don’t get chocolate bars, but you allow them to have, say, Cheerios in the morning? … Israeli experts have calculated in detail exactly how many calories, literally, Gazans need to survive. And if you look at the sanctions that they impose, they’re grotesque. I mean, even John Kerry condemned them bitterly. They’re sadistic. Just enough calories to survive. And, of course, it is partly metaphoric, because it means just enough material coming in through the tunnels so that they don’t totally die. Israel restricts medicines, but you have to allow a little trickle in … Keep them on a diet, literally. And the reason is—very simple, and they pretty much said it: If they die, it’s not going to look good for Israel.”The supposed starving of the citizens of Gaza by Israelis has been a widely circulated talking point for years among the anti-Israel crowd, but it has also been completely debunked. Back in 2010, Israel Today attempted to put some of those rumors to bed after the Gaza flotilla incident:
In the wake of the Gaza flotilla incident, anti-Israel activists around the world have worked to boost their message that the Gaza Strip is the most destitute place on earth, where famine and plague rule. But remarks by Palestinians living in Gaza to international media outlets covering the aid flotilla story paint a very different picture.”There is no starvation in Gaza. No one has died of hunger,” Khalil Hamada, a senior official at Gaza’s Ministry of Justice, told London’s Daily Telegraph. Sticking to the Hamas party line, he then went on to criticize Israel’s embargo as “inhumane” and “brutal.” Since much of the international media ignores Palestinians when they admit Israel isn’t so bad, Israel itself tried to counter the misinformation regarding the Gaza embargo by publishing figures showing how much aid enters the territory. According to figures released by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, in the first quarter of 2010 (January-March), 94,500 tons of supplies passed through Israel’s border crossings with Gaza. That aid included 40,000 tons of wheat (equal to 53 million loaves of bread), 2,760 tones of rice (or 69 million servings), 1,987 tons of clothes (the equivalent of 3.6 million pairs of jeans), and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food.
Of course, you won’t hear the likes of Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman citing those statistics.
“Democracy Now”? More like “Democracy Never.”
Unless by “democracy,” they mean the complete destruction of Israel while Hamas dances on Jewish corpses. Which is exactly what they mean.
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