The Israeli Propagandists Go on the Offensive in L’Express
15.01.2024
Who will the Israeli State turn to when it gets kicked out of its offices in Pretoria, from where it is in charge of South Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, Lesotho and Eswatini? Well, the Israeli State has been working on this for a while, and has found the ideal country to test for size: Mauritius.
Only problem, in Mauritius there are no overtly pro-Israeli forces in society. No-one defends Israel here. With reason. Not the MSM-led government, not any Opposition Party in Parliament or outside, no church or religion. No newspaper. There are only crypto-Zionists like “the press” as an institution, so “western” it cannot see outside the USA-led colonial visors that it is unaware of wearing, the MBC (inasmuch as it is now controlled by the BJP), and the local Catholic Church hierarchy, which persists being on the wrong side of history – from abolition of slavery to universal suffrage, from Independence until the freeing of Palestine. Secret allies are no good to Israel. It needs overt support.
So, the Israeli State had to find a way to get overt support. And they have found it: L’Express. Dead easy. Later mu. They had, we observed, already pre-tested the ground. They had roped in Marie-Annick Savripènne to write up two rather obscene pieces of atrocious Israeli lies. One took the form of an interview on 18 September 2021 with an official Israeli spokesman on, of all things, the notorious Abraham Accords, which are now thankfully buried in their own disgrace. Just in case she was merely ignorant, rather than something much worse, a LALIT member was caring enough to contact her in writing, sending her links for objective information, warning her of her moral folly.
Even in the middle of a genocide being committed by the State of Israel, the Israeli State could get L’Express to send another of its journalists, Anju Ramgulam, on an Israeli Defense Force propaganda stunt to Israel. How is that for taking sides with the perpetrator of genocide, during the commission of the crime?
She brings back all the Israeli lies, told as “fact” in three whole pages of L’Express 14 January, just after South Africa, three days earlier, had outlined its compelling case against the Israeli State for its genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, before the ICJ, and in such stark terms. The very words of intent to commit genocide, words uttered by those who paid for the visit of Anju Ramgulam, still ring in our ears: “human animals”, “Amalek” (meaning kill every last one including the sucklings, which the IDF is patently doing), “no food, no water, no fuel”, “flatten” Gaza, “make Gaza uninhabitable”, “there are no uninvolved”. Reminiscent of the ultimate colonial line, condensed in literature, in the words of another colonial agent, the mass murderer Kurtz, who aimed, like Anju Ramgulam aims at some “good”. Kurtz said, “By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.” But, being a colonial agent, by the end we hear him shout out “exterminate all the brutes!” Anju Ramgulam, sent by L’Express, hosted by the IDF and paid for by who knows who, is in exactly that kind of moral position, as an agent of a campaign of extermination.
This journalist Ramgulam, already so superficial as to be the queen of puns in poor taste – punning being the lowest form of humour – titles her article, “Chronique d’une journaliste mauricienne aux frontières de l’irréel (sic)”. How funny! A pun on the X-files? Why her puns are bad is clear: Not only is a genocide not funny, but she was not on the “frontiers” of Israel at all, as her pun implies, and which a better class of pun would demand it was on the frontiers of Israel. She is inside the very bowels of Israel. She is a hostage of the IDF, the very perpetrator of the genocide. So, her pun tells a lie. She is not on the frontier of Israel, but INSIDE Israel. And it is real. Not unreal. She, like Kurtz in the novel Heart of Darkness, is inside the colonial project. The IDF is the very “force” that encircles Palestinians, bombs Palestinians’ family homes to smithereens from the air, kills 25,000 Palestinians mainly mothers and children in 100 days, slaughtering the aged and infirm and already wounded, and corrals the rest of the Palestinian families who have escaped the bombs into an ever-smaller area of Gaza, each carrying one small motri, then the IDF starves them, cuts off the water on purpose, blows up the sewerage system, and then bombs them there, too, and bombs all the hospitals, schools and public libraries where they might try to take shelter. And then the IDF awaits epidemics to help advance their genocidal intent faster.
While this same IDF welcomes Anju Ramgulam to sit safely on the “frontieres de l’irréel”? She is in fact sitting outside of, on the frontier of, “aux portes de” not Israel but Gaza. That is the truth. She sits by the walls of concentration camp run by her hosts.
She sits there outside Gaza, protected by the IDF, sits there on the wrong side of the Apartheid Wall, the most hideous barricade ever erected on the surface of the earth, built around Gaza making it into a concentration camp. That is a fact. She sits right there, on the wrong side of history.
Let it be known:
The truth is this. No journalists are allowed in to Gaza. Who stops them? The IDF, the Israeli state, does not allow them in. The IDF keeps them out at the pointed end of an IDF cannon. And L’Express accepts to send its journalist on a paid trip to Israel, escorted by this IDF?
So, the IDF, who host Anju Ramgulam, keeps all foreign journalists out of Gaza. The IDF prevents them from knowing the truth of what is happening to Palestinians and then from sharing it in their reports. Though judging by her fear of the home-made rockets from Gaza, she would fall apart under the bombardment that the women of Gaza, and their little children, are suffering from the IDF war planes. She, Anju, was there, in Israel, chatting to the IDF perpetrators. But what happens to the Palestinian journalists on the other side of the concentration camp wall, there in Gaza, doing the actual reporting? The answer is the IDF is killing them. The IDF has assassinated 82 media workers so far. Targeted them and killed them. This very IDF that welcomes Ms. Ramgulam. Dead and gone, are the 82 media workers. One journalist has had his entire family wiped out by the said colonels and lieutenant colonels Ms Ramgulam was chatting to in Israel. Then in another attack, they killed his cameraman, and wounded him. And in a third attack they killed another of his sons, also a journalist. Yet, he works on. He is not vengeful. He is a journalist. His name is Wael Al Dahdouh.
The over-line of Ms. Ramgulam’s article is, of course, the short version of the Israeli State’s “defense” to the charge of genocide: She heads the article: “Guerre Israel-Hamas”. Yes, she is trapped in the IDF’s framing of its genocide. She, like them, is denying the genocide against a whole people, even as South Africa lays out its case, and she insists, instead, that Israel is, as a “fact”, fighting against only “Hamas”. Thus “Guerre Israel-Hamas”. In her logic, the 25,000 Palestinian people killed are just “in the way” or “by the way”. And, presumably bad luck to them. Or, perhaps they are not noticed? Or not reported on in Israel? Or are they “Hamas”? Israel is fighting, according to this insane logic, only against Hamas. The IDF has forcibly displaced 85% of the population of Gaza, and this is incidental? The IDF is not fighting against the Palestinians, for this lady, only against Hamas? This poor reporter is out of her depth in lies, drowning in them. Even as she spews out her sick puns. During a genocide, “Tel-a-vivre”, for example. Very funny. “L’etre (in)humain” used not for the IDF fighters, who have killed thousands of children in cold blood, and continues until today to do the same thing, but for the Hamas fighters who the IDF says killed 1,100 Israelis, including military men, and including also those, as it turns out, who were killed by the IDF tank shells and even by IDF helicopter hell-fire missiles. We agree there must be independent investigation of the killing by resistance fighters of civilians. Of course, there must be. But it is not a justification for genocide. Ms Ramgulam is blissfully unaware that the Israeli military base Erez that was taken over by Hamas, as part of its military aim, was then, this very Israeli base, bombarded and destroyed not, as she says, by Hamas, but by the IDF helicopters taking it back, using their so-called hell-fire missiles. This is a fact. The IDF helicopters killed Hamas fighters and Israeli soldier hostages alike in there. In the very Kibbutz Ms. Ramgulam mentions “Kibbutz Be’eri” she does not mention that many of the dead are now known to have been killed by the IDF tanks and soldiers as they took the Kibbutz back. Nor does she mention that this bit of what is now Israel used to be the land of two-thirds of the people of Gaza, who fled as children in 1948 and now still lived, before they were bombed out of their homes, in those refugee camps that the IDF is now still pounding with 2,000 pound bombs, and leaving babies and grannies buried in the rubble, making any survivors refugees anew. That would mean looking further back than the 7 October. The Western leaders and their tame journalists cannot manage this intellectual exercise.
And now, this journalist promises an interview on Wednesday this week with the perpetrators’ representative here, “ambassadeur d’Israël Eli Belotserkovsky,” who might soon have to leave South Africa.
Oh dear. What a newspaper. Its editor Nad Sivaramen sends his journalist into the heart of the Israeli State, where she is surrounded by this “colonel” and that “lieutenant colonel” of the IDF in IDF buildings, and she is invited to watch the much-challenged Israeli war-propaganda video about 7 October Hamas attack. And the Editor thinks he can cover up for all this by hedging his bets, and saying, “il est importante de soutenir l’initiative juridique de l’Afrique du Sud devant la cour internationale de La Haye”. But, this one phrase cannot excuse the moral repugnance of a newspaper being hosted by the IDF during its perpetration of genocide. Nor is it any excuse to print one page of snippets from Wikipedia, Reuters and AFP after three pages of Israeli war propaganda, so as to create the illusion of balanced reporting.
The best way to support the South African initiative would be for Mr. Sivaramen to call, instead, on the Mauritian government to add its voice to that of South Africa at the ICJ.
LALIT, 15 January, 2024.
