Galway IPSC protests against the political show-trial of Mohamed Bakri, Director of Jenin Jenin

galway | rights, freedoms and repression | news report

Sunday July 01, 2007 18:35

by TD - Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign

"Only an unbelievably brutal world can look at the remains of what was once home for 13,000 impoverished 1948 Palestinian refugees ... and say 'we don't know what actually happened'" (Irit Katriel)

Following BBC and Democracy Now news reports that the Director of the internationally acclaimed and award winning documentary, Jenin Jenin, Mohamed Bakri, is being sued and facing possible jail time in a case brought this month in Israel by five Israeli soldiers who are accusing him of libelously portraying them and their comrades as war criminals in his film (the five are not shown or mentioned by name in Jenin Jenin). Galway IPSC, yesterday, outraged at this obscenity too far, took to the streets in protest.

Initially banned in Israel until a reversal by the Israeli Supreme Court the film is dedicated to Lyad Samoudi, the producer, who returned home to Yamun after the shooting of the documentary was completed. On June 23, as Israeli forces besieged Yamun, Samoudi was shot and killed as he was leaving a military-closed area with three friends- in response to the ban, Mohamed Bakri said' I hope they will censor every film I do. I want them to understand my reality, another truth ..."

In 2002, in the course of its murderous assault on the West Bank, (Operation Defensive Shield) according to John Pilger in his book: Freedom Next Time, the Israeli army "attacked the refugee camp using fifty tanks, armoured bulldozers, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers. Every day for a week, the F-16's had fired an average of 250 missiles against less than one square mile of shacks housing fifteen thousand people, half of them children". Twenty-three Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinian fighters which "sent Sharon into a fury. Describing the defenders as 'terrorists,' he approved the demolition of the homes of four thousand people, some with the occupants inside". Amnesty International cited the case of Jamal Fayed, a 38 year old severly disabled man who his family "had shown [his] ID to the soldiers, who were preparing to demolish the house, to prove he was paralysed and could not get out of the home without their help. The soldiers refused to help and soon afterwards a bulldozer approached the house. The family yelled at the driver to stop. He didn't, and Jamal Fayed, still trapped inside, was killed. " According to Pilger; "Amnesty also described how two boys, aged six and twelve, were killed by Israeli tank fire as they went to buy sweets after the army had announced that the curfew had been lifted".

Then Foreign Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres told then UN Secretary- General, Kofi Annan that Israel would welcome a UN investigation into the atrocities, "Our hands are clean" and then, in cahoots with the yanks proceeded to scupper the team Annan had assembled for this task - after meeting senior US officials as the UN team prepared, Annan cancelled the investigation because of "the Israeli government's refusal to co-operate". That the atrocity had taken place outside Israel, in illegally occupied territory, was apparantly not a factor to supine, lap-dog, Annan. "It was the UN at its most craven, with Annan affirming his role as a placeman for the United States" (Pilger).

Tanya Reinhart, in her book Israel/Palestine says: "What is particularly frightening about the events of Jenin is how Israel managed to cover up its crimes, and silence protesting voices". but, what is more frightening, is the loathsome denial of the Jenin massacre and the virulent, in your face, striving for the moral high ground by the five IDF soldiers and the Israeli judicial system in countenancing this case, then again, an unbelievably brutal, pro-Zionist inverted and perverted world may agree that Bakri has indeed impugned the "Purity in Arms" IDF?.