John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him." (see New Statesman: http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/10/obama-pilger-war-peace ).
John Pilger on the Palestinian Genocide (25 January 2007): “A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. “Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide”, wrote senior UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then Swedish foreign minister, in Le Figaro. They described people “living in a cage”, cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes… “Looking from the side” is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many Western Jews do, while those Jews who honour the humane traditions of Judaism and say, “Not in our name!” are abused as “self-despising”. Looking from the side is what almost the entire US Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist “lobby”. Looking from the side is what “even-handed” journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and suppress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.” [1].
John Pilger on Western lying and holocaust ignoring (January 2009): ““When the truth is replaced by silence”, the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie”. It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on Al Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why. They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist”. They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing”. Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled." Every subsequent "war" Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land … In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50% of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. Holocaust in the making.” [2, 3].
[1]. John Pilger, “John Pilger: genocide in Gaza”, Green Left Weekly, 25 January 2007: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/696/36148 .
[2]. John Pilger, “John Pilger: holocaust denied”, Green Left Weekly, 17 January 2009: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/779/40192 .
[3]. John Pilger, “Holocaust denied. The lying silence of those who know”, Antiwar.com, 8 January 2009: http://www.antiwar.com/pilger/?articleid=14015 .
Editor: Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh is an eminent Palestinian scholar (Bethlehem University, Palestine Museum of Natural History, Bir Zeit University; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazin_Qumsiyeh , https://www.bethlehem.edu/news/employees/mazin-qumsiyeh/ and http://qumsiyeh.org/aboutqumsiyeh/ ) and human rights activist. A dozen years ago he created an alphabetically-organized Honor List of people who support the cause of human rights for Palestinians ( http://qumsiyeh.org/honorlist/ ) - side-by-side under “P” were 2 Australians, my truth-telling, expatriate Australian hero, John Pilger, and, I am very honored to say, Gideon Polya.