WANT to know how to invent reality? Go no further than Palestine. There, the West is at its inventive best. Should the Palestinians take up arms to defend their homes, lives or limbs, the Western worldview has only one word for them: "terrorists". No surprise here.
What can you expect from a vision of reality based on Holocaust-guilt and hate for the other. And never mind also if the West helped the Zionist Israelis to rob Palestinian land to create Israel and, in the process, maimed and killed tens of thousands, not to mention the million or so driven off their homes as refugees.
They were not Palestinian soldiers fighting Israeli soldiers, but unarmed, helpless civilians. The killings and persecution continue with the West reducing the persecuted Palestinians to its limited vocabulary: "terrorists".
Similarly, the narratives in Western mainstream media are stomach-turning. Take the latest conflict there. To The Economist, a Tel Aviv-can-do-no-wrong newspaper, Hamas' response to more than 70 years of genocide by the Israelis is "carnage".
If this isn't enough, it adds another word: "slaughter". The Economist never uses such words when Israelis kill Palestinians. And the disproportionate bombings by the Zionists in response to Hamas? A right. Let the Israeli army bomb 500 Palestinian civilians — which it did by Monday — is never deemed carnage.
By the way, to this English newspaper, Hamas fighters are "militants". Please, Hamas is a democratically elected government and those who help it defend its territory must necessarily be soldiers, not militants or terrorists.
Remember, language has the dirty habit of inventing a reality that doesn't exist. Journalism must never perpetuate what politicians in London, Brussels, Washington or anywhere else invent. Instead, it must question their inventions. Good journalism and bad politics must never keep close company.
Do not get us wrong. We don't condone the killing or maiming of civilians, be it by Hamas or Israel. Neither too attacks on hospitals. Tel Aviv is doing exactly that. Yet no condemnation by its Western allies.
The old refrain is back: Israel has a right to defend itself. Now, "itself" isn't what it is supposed to mean. In the United States' carrier strike group, which is heading there to assist Israel fight Hamas, Washington and Tel Aviv have become one in "itself". An aircraft carrier for a Zionist regime that is the most weaponised in the region? Yet, no help for the persecuted?
To the eyes of the Western powers, aided by its servile media, the terrorised become the terrorists. Distorted reality such as this points to one thing: the West is doing all it can to deny a homeland for the Palestinians.
The Oslo Accords never saw the daylight because it was not meant to. Built on the foundation of hypocrisy, the West's promise of peace for the Middle East means only one thing: that the Arab world learns to live with a genocidal Zionist regime. Be killed, but don't kill.
The West can't be more deluded. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians are liberated. We are glad that this is Malaysia's expressed stand.
The plight of the Palestinians is a direct result of the distorted worldview through which the West sees them. Malaysia is right in correcting this distorted reality.
