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………..Due to a life-or-death medical emergency in December and a long recovery time, I will not be moving around town to get interviews and stories of social injustice. However, I hope to share what others write, do, or say until I can get out more. ####
Queen Rania of Jordan has given numerous interviews in the United States regarding the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Below is one I summarized of Queen Rania talking about America’s double standard in war reporting
There has been a glaring double standard since October 7. The world immediately and unequivocally stood by Israel and its right to defend itself and condemned the attacks that happened. All of us are united in our grief, regardless of our origins. But we are being told that it is wrong to kill entire families at gunpoint, but it’s okay (for Israel) to bomb and shell a population as a whole to death. There is a glaring double standard here. And it is shocking to the Arab world.
This is the first time in modern history that there is such human suffering, and the world is not even calling for a ceasefire. It makes the Western world complicit through their support and through the coverage that they give Israel that it is their right to defend themself. Many in the Arab world are looking at the Western world, which tolerates this and aids and is abetting it. And this is horrendous and deeply disappointing to all of us. The rules of engagement need to apply to everybody.
I want to emphasize that what happened in this conflict did not begin on October 7. However, it has been portrayed that most networks are covering the story under the title of Israel at war. But for Palestinians on the other side of the separation wall and other sides of the barbed wire – war never left.
This is a 75-year-old story of overwhelming death and displacement for the Palestinian people. It is a story of occupation under the apartheid regime that occupies land, demolishes houses, confiscates lands, and military incursions of the nuclear armed regional superpower that occupies oppressors and commits daily documented crimes against Palestinians. This is missing from the narrative.
For too long, the Palestinian people have been living under oppression and dehumanization. They suffered daily indignities and human rights violations. They are being jailed, humiliated, and harassed, and they do not have freedom of movement. There are over 500 checkpoints scattered all over the West Bank. A separation wall deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice separates the territories into 200 DISCONNECTED parts. We have seen the aggressive expansion of settlements on Palestinian land. Those who drafted the plan to cut Palestinian territories into small pieces so that a continuous, autonomous, independent Palestinian state is not viable. So you see, all this is the background of this conflict.
People need to understand that under the guise of (Israel), it has the right to defend itself. We are witnessing atrocities. Every country has a right to defend itself, but not through war crimes and not through collective punishment. Now, over 35,000 civilians have been killed so far, and the majority are children; how is that self-defense? We are seeing butchery at a mass scale using precision weapons. We have seen the indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza. Entire families were wiped out, and residential neighborhoods flattened to the ground, targeting hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, medical workers, journalists, and UN aid workers. How was that self-defense?
Why is it that whenever Israel commits these atrocities, it comes under the banner of self-defense, but when there’s violence by Palestinians, it is immediately called terrorism? Is the word terrorism just reserved exclusively for Muslims and Arabs? There’s a real double standard here.
There are not two equal people in the conflict; one is an occupier, and one is the occupied. One has a military, the mightiest in the world. And the other doesn’t have a military at all. So, there is a false symmetry here that is being drawn. And when you say the right to defend itself, that does not tell the entire story. It doesn’t tell of Israel’s violation of international law or international humanitarian law. It doesn’t tell you the suffering of an occupation. Israel has violated more than 30 UN Security resolutions that require it, and it alone, to act to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967 to stop the settlements, the separation wall, and the human rights violations. This is the crux of this issue, not this hyper-fixation on Hamas. It is a fight for freedom and justice for Palestine.
All photos were found online.
Streets of Atlanta 