"IF you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
How true. Did Virginia Woolf have the Zionists in mind? Yes, they and everyone who is averse to truth. Truth has been a casualty in the ancient land of Palestine since the birth of Zionism.
Theodor Herzl, a European Jew who founded the ideological movement to create a land only for the Jews in 1897, spread the first Zionist lie: "a land without people for a people without a land".
And that, too, borrowed from the Christian Restorationist movement. Even in the late 19th century, Palestine was home to many indigenous Palestinian Muslims, some Palestinian Jews and fewer still Palestinian Christians, all living harmoniously.
All three attest to this. As for the Jews being without a land, it is another lie. They had the whole of Europe to call their home.
But trouble started when the first European Jews set foot on Palestine, with settler colonialism in their mind. The West's divide and rule colonial policy made the forced birth of an apartheid Zionist regime possible. The very same policy is responsible for the continued carnage of the Palestinians there for over a century.
Today, there is a ministry of misinformation in Tel Aviv, only that it is not so named. Like Malaysia's rice rogues, they falsely label lies as truth. And some journalists choose to swallow them hook, line and sinker.
Truth be told, journalists are of two types. One type — the real one — speaks truth to power. The other, a very dangerous sort, chooses to lie. Israel kills the first and nurtures the second, most of whom work for Western mainstream media.
Since Oct 7, Israel has killed 85 journalists, mostly Palestinians, though the Zionist regime tells the world that it doesn't target journalists. But the world knows that one can't kill 85 journalists by accident.
All were premeditated, like the targeted killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist of Al Jazeera, on May 11, 2022. If the journalists don't fall victim to Israel's bullets, they surely will to the regime's terrorism law, which was amended on Nov 7 to include the publication of "words of praise or sympathy or encouragement for an act of terrorism", as translated by Reporters Beyond Borders on its website.
If you classify every Palestinian as a terrorist, as Israel has done recently, then no Palestinian journalist can escape the imprisonment imposed by the act. What is worse, Israeli courts, like the Zionist regime, are never just to the Palestinians. Justice can't be blind if apartheid is on the bench.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is right to condemn Israel's systematic misinformation campaigns on human rights violations and targeting of journalists, as it did on Sunday at an extraordinary session of its information ministers:
"The ministers are also concerned that Israel, the occupying power, is seeking to conceal the truth about the unfolding atrocities in the Gaza Strip, including by murdering babies, children, women, elderly journalists, healthcare workers, academics and humanitarian workers through systematic disinformation campaigns." Searing words, but true.
On the killing of journalists, the OIC was equally harsh: Israel is "on a campaign to silence the voice of truth tellers". Israel must know that killing the messenger doesn't kill the message. Truth emerges, eventually.
