[softy54534]

Miss Ahmed is a doctor, a Pakistani by birth who writes in HuffPo (of all places, they must be shrieking like apes over this!)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qanta-..._b_613660.html

From news article:
At no point have I heard a sane discussion on the complex reasons why a blockade was in place or indeed why Egypt had for years cooperated in maintaining the blockade through the closure of Rafah. Rafah remained firmly shut throughout the entirety of Operation Cast Lead, immutably so, even in the face of pleas from the Arab world. Egypt's collusion in Operation Cast Lead was an acutely felt betrayal which resonated globally.

I was in Riyadh in those first days of what would become known as Operation Cast Lead, watching the episode unfurl from within the region. Within the first week, Saudi Arabia had gathered massive humanitarian aid at the behest of apical leadership. Despite the military incursion on Gaza, passage of aid was categorically and absolutely obstructed. It wasn't the Israelis refusing access to regional Arab aid - no the deniers of the Saudi appeals were not Jews, they were Muslims. It was Muslim-majority Egypt which refused to allow Saudi Arabia access to an open border even to deliver medical aid and supplies. Quite uncomfortable for Muslims to think about, wouldn't you agree?


And was Egyptian denial due to fear of Israeli retaliation? Perhaps -indeed that is a convenient construct, which does likely contain kernels of reality. However, more significant, the borders remained closed because, simply put, Egypt doesn't want to face a mass migration of Gazans.


These and other such details are irritating distractions, messy deviations, from a chiseled, binary portrayal which both the media, its bipolar audience and master media manipulators seek to display when we think about Israel and Palestine, Muslim and Jew. As world media becomes ever more comfortable with the portrayal of Israel as monolithic villain devoid of conscience, anti-Israeli criticism begins to ascend in volume, and commentary further deteriorates. This is a frightening descent and should concern all of us, irrespective of one's politics, faith or relationships.
At one stage, a spokesperson for Hamas appeared on the BBC citing that Gazans have no need for aid, adding " we do not need to fill our bellies". Well, the world thinks otherwise. In his astonishing defiance revealed by a casual, throwaway comment, the spokesperson revealed the prime goal of the Flotilla's mission, as he perceived it: to run the gauntlet against the blockade, not to alleviate material needs of his suffering electorate. The Flotilla was a bald and blatant political move designed to humiliate and provoke.


By minimizing Israeli concerns, by uniformly portraying not only a nation, but an entire culture, whether one thinks of 'the Jew' or 'the Israeli' or the 'Bani Israeel' we are feeding into the lethal rhetoric of a frightening war. This is a reality that applies to every Muslim who subscribes to antisemitism, that resurgent, 20th Century disease of modern 'Muslim-hood'. In making sweeping simplifications, we ourselves (whomever we are) become as monstrous as the opponent we have thus sought to portray. Such base generalizations are the foundation, the bedrock for atrocities, as Professor Kathleen Taylor, author of Cruelty, explains in her work on morality and neuroscience at the University of Oxford