3 Billboards Outside Ebbing or Outside Epping or Anywhere…
Driving past a vacant advertising hoarding earlier today, I thought about the Oscar-winning movie “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” in which Frances McDormand plays a mother who rents giant roadside billboards to draw attention to the police’s failure to find the man who raped and murdered her daughter.
Maybe we should copy her. Maybe we should rent roadside billboards to push back against the tsunami of lies, libels and disinformation which began just one day after Hamas invaded, slaughtered, butchered, raped, sexually mutilated and abducted in Israel, and several days before Israel began its operation in Gaza in response to those atrocities.
What if billboards could be used to disabuse at least some people of at least some of the outrageous lies and libels which have taken root as a result of a highly professional and eye-wateringly expensive campaign of disinformation against Israel?
Like the mum in the movie, I’m going for high impact rather than creativity so what about a billboard reading in foot-high letters “THERE WAS NO GENOCIDE IN GAZA”.
Obviously listing all the reasons why it was absolutely not a genocide and why it is absurd to think it was, cannot go on the billboard. But in this digital age, the billboard could offer a web address, where all the reasons could be listed, such as asking whether, in any “genocide” in all of human history the population of the alleged victims of genocide increased significantly year on year; or that the survival rate of the Gaza population following the “genocide” was 97 percent while in Europe in WW2, the survival rate of Jews was 30 percent And in the Gaza statistic, half of the 3 percent who died were combatants. It could also ask where else the nation/entity alleged to be committing genocide provided or facilitated mass humanitarian aid; where else the party alleged to be committing genocide warned the civilian population to move to safety even though it jeopardised their own soldiers; where else the party alleged to be committing genocide had the ability to wipe out the entire “victim” population from the air without a single military casualty but chose not to; and where else the alleged “victims” of the “genocide” held victory parades while the alleged “genocide” was allegedly taking place.
The website could also note the fact that many fewer civilians would have died if the extremist, Islamist, Jihadist combatants had not deliberately embedded among civilians. Or if they had allowed civilians to shelter in their tunnels deep underground that were built to store weapons, missiles and for other offensive purposes, and were exclusively used to protect jihadist fighters rather than children or civilians.
And maybe our second billboard should read: “THERE WAS NO FAMINE IN GAZA”. Again, all the facts explaining why there was emphatically not a famine in Gaza though there was an expensively-wrought, cleverly-conjured illusion of famine, and there were pockets of deprivation for photo-ops. But none of that can go on the billboard so, again there could be the address of a website or even a scanable QR code where all the reasons could be listed along with all the images of well-fed Gazans; pictures of bustling streets and new restaurants, alongside the fake AI images, or images of children allegedly “starving” but with pre-existing medical conditions giving them a skeletal appearance, or children really starving but in other places and other conflicts; or evidence of the hostile NGOs, UN and Aid Agencies which actively promoted the fake narrative.
And for our third Billboard, how about this slogan in foot-high letters: “PALESTINIANS ARE VICTIMS. BUT NOT OF ISRAEL.”
The website could list all the relevant facts of their real victimisation, starting with their leaders turning down an independent Arab State of Palestine in Palestine in 1947, and refusing – or sabotaging – every subsequent offer of Statehood, because, for those exploiting and manipulating the Palestinians, their value lies in their PR and propaganda role appearing to be pathetic “refugees” and “victims of Israel”. As well, of course, to be incited/radicalised for terrorism and, oh yes, to keep the UNRWA gravy-train on track.
Our website would also name the real victimisers of Palestinians – ie those who oppress and use them and who include Arab Nationalists, the Moslem Brotherhood and the IRGC. Just not Israel.
The background information would also set out how media bias has been so helpful in not just creating the perception of Palestinians as “victims” of Israel, but how it has helped to reinforce and amplify that perception through its failure to include crucially vital background and context in, literally, thousands of reports over dozens of years.
Our information-packed website could even offer an example:
Picture the scene. It is the early noughties in Ramallah (or Nablus or Jenin or basically anywhere in Palestinian territory). A BBC camera crew is filming for the broadcaster’s news bulletins which are seen across the globe as well in millions of UK households.
The camera pans over a scene of destruction. Weeping, wailing Palestinians are sitting amid the rubble of their home. The reporter – and we can take our pick from a list which includes Plett, Doucet, Guerin, Keane and perhaps even Bowen before he was removed from his role as Middle East editor – is giving a graphic description of the scene, and carefully telling viewers that the “Palestinian family home” was demolished by the IDF, and that the family is mourning a dead son (or daughter).
The reporter will slip in – but as inconspicuously as possible – the fact that the dead son (or daughter) whom the family is so pitifully mourning, was a terrorist, but without explicitly stating that that is the sole reason for the demolition.
In fact the dead son (or daughter) was a suicide bomber who had murdered multiple Israeli civilians in a bus, or in a market, or in a café or in a pizza restaurant or a bar, but the reporter will do everything possible to make that fact and the demolition appear to be unconnected.
Indeed whichever one of the BBC’s finest was reporting this story (and I use “finest” ironically, obvs), he/she would have framed it as Israel’s “brutal revenge” on the poor, tragic – and, of course, bereaved – Palestinian family.
The context which the BBC correspondents without fail ignored in these reports was that, at the time, Israel was under siege from a highly organised, generously funded, murderous Palestinian terrorism campaign in which suicide bombers were lavishly incentivised with benefits (in addition to martyrdom and 72 virgins.) Radicalised Palestinian were promised pensions and, I believe, new homes for their families in exchange for crossing into Israel and murdering Israeli men, women and children with explosives. Roughly 1,000 Israeli civilians died and hundreds more suffered life-changing injuries in the years 2000 to 2005.
It can be argued that demolition of the family homes of Palestinian suicide bombers was a massively misguided policy whose main success was as a recruiting sergeant for more terrorism. However, there is also not the slightest doubt that the one-sided, biased way in which this policy was reported – especially by the BBC – won millions of Western supporters (including many Jews) over to the Palestinian “cause”.