Whether it is a murderer, a rapist, a wife beater or a child abuser, they all try to justify themselves by rationalising their actions - claiming their victim tempted, provoked, disobeyed or disliked them.  Thus, their victims only have themselves to blame for the violence and murder or any other atrocity heaped on them.  It is not just individuals that seek to justify their crimes by placing the blame on their victims; governments, power-hungry leaders, ethnic groups and religions use exactly the same rationale to support the indefensible - massacre, genocide, victimisation and brutalisation of entire peoples and the destruction of nations. 

For people to be able to commit these appalling atrocities, they have to see the victims as something less than human.  De-humanising the victim allows their basic human rights to be denied because they are not recognised as distinct human entities. Often they are demonised as a threat to "decent civilised people" or to their culture, race or religion.  This attaching of blame and denial of any human or moral consideration inevitably leads to them becoming vulnerable to oppression, discrimination, exploitation and extermination. 

This is what is happening right now in Palestine.  Israel is using all of its powerful influence with the western media to pose as the innocent victim of a violent, vicious and untrustworthy people - the Palestinians - demonising and blaming them in order to justify the violence, ethnic cleansing and oppression used by the Israeli Army and the Settlers to maintain their illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. 

Israel finds easy acceptance in the western press for its propaganda.  For decades the western media has drawn a picture of Arab culture and Islam that portrays the Arab people as fanatical terrorists who are intolerant and anti-democratic.  This has skewed and influenced public opinion in America and Europe, culminating in a distortion of perception that has led western democracies, particularly the United States, to support, almost without question, Israel's conquest of Palestine and the subjugation of its people.

Israel has learned one important lesson from German Fascism and Soviet Communism, namely, that to influence public opinion you have to be able to manipulate and control the media, so that they present the 'official' version of news and events.  

Though media bias against Arabs has been prevalent since the establishment of the British Mandate, it worsened significantly during the 80's and 90's, when the western press, television and film media almost always depicted Arabs as terrorists and religious fanatics.  However, since the Al Aqsa intifada began in October 2000, it has become clear that Israel is orchestrating a massive effort to discredit and demonise the Palestinians.  The Israeli government, America's massive pro-Israel lobby and other powerful Jewish oganisations have concentrated on putting pressure on all print and television media to accept Israelis justifications of its actions in Palestine.  To achieve this aim Israel has permanent press offices in all its embassies abroad, and in a bizarre attempt to control what is reported in the US media, the Israeli government has hired some of the largest and most professional public relations companies in New York to 'enhance' its image abroad and 'spin' the truth.  Far more worrying though, are the lengths they are prepared to go to in order to ensure their message is heard; for instance, CNN is being lobbied by pro-Israeli activists to replace its reporters of Palestinian descent with "pro-Israeli reporters".

It is quite clear that Israel has a hidden agenda.  It seems to be trying to prepare western public opinion, particularly in America, for some future escalation of violence towards the Palestinians.  It may even be for an attempt to achieve a "final solution", by re-occupying all of the West Bank and Gaza, and placing the Palestinians in ghettos guarded by the Israeli Army or expelling them. 

This intensifying of the media war is not just being fought in the conventional media; go to any pro-Israeli organisation's web-site and you will find action alerts charging the western media with pro-Palestinian bias.  The truth, is in fact, quite the opposite.  Since the beginning of the current Palestinian intifada, a group called the Palestine Media Watch (a media monitoring group) has calculated that newspapers in the United States run pro–Israeli opinion and editorial pieces at a ratio of 10:1, with only a handful presenting a balanced perspective. 

With this level of acceptance for its messages, Israel has been able to distort the reality of the situation in Palestine and completely silence any comment on the legality of what it is doing there.  Thus, they are able to paint pictures of fanatical Arab terrorists seeking to destroy the State of Israel and kill its people, instead of being shown the reality of brave settlers and soldiers who are defending their homes, families and their democracy.  Little attention is paid by the international media to the plight of the Palestinians whose land has been conquered, whose homes destroyed and whose family members have been injured or killed.  No one empathises with people who have been denied the right to return to their homeland. 

This lack of global context in most coverage of the intifada is the most worrying aspect of western media coverage.  It ignores the fact that Israel has occupied both the West Bank and Gaza since 1967.  The United Nations and the international community, except the United States, has repeatedly condemned this occupation; but most of the American media has stopped referring to it as "the occupied territories" and now consider them to be part of Israel.  During the 90's, the term "the occupied territories" was frequently used in Associated Press articles on the Middle East; by 2000 it had almost stopped being used at all in their coverage.  In this out of context representation, the intifada appears as unprovoked Palestinian aggression, rather than Palestinian efforts to defend their land in the face of massive illegal settlement by the Israeli's.  Indeed, most reports refer to  "Palestinian violence" and "Israeli retaliation."  This violence they say, is the result of "Palestinian hatred"; therefore, the staggering Palestinian casualties are the inevitable, but unfortunate by-products of Palestinian aggression.

Since Sharon's visit to Harram Al Sharif that sparked the latest intifada against Israeli occupation, we have witnessed a tidal wave of senseless killing in the Holy Land, in which over 100 Israeli's have been killed, 26 of them children.  Almost 600 Palestinians, of which 167 were children, suffered the same fate, but the media coverage does not highlight this fact.

Israeli deaths receive headlines and constant updates, while Palestinian victims seldom make the news.  When Palestinians die we do not hear from their family or friends, we do not know what they did for a living or where they went to school, nor do we learn about their hopes and dreams.  Sadly, often we do not even know their names, for they are just another statistic.  Contrast this with the extensive news coverage of Israeli deaths; we hear from survivors, the injured, their families - ad infinitum.  We hear that the victim is loved and that a valuable life has been lost.  There are interviews with their friends and they become individuals to the viewer  or reader.  Their death is not allowed to become a meaningless statistic. 

This de-personalisation makes Palestinian deaths easier to bear when we see F-16s, helicopter gunships and tanks shell Palestinian civilians in their homes and villages - for they are a faceless, anonymous statistic - unlike Israeli victims of a Hamas suicide bomber, whose names and life stories are extensively covered by the media in their reporting of the bombing.  This bias in the coverage of events by the media strips the Palestinian dead of their humanity, thereby making it easier for Israel to continue violating the Palestinian people's fundamental human rights. 

Another useful ploy in the armoury of Israeli spin-doctoring is the use of the word "response."  It provides a ready-made reason for Israeli's actions and cleverly ignores the demands for further explanation.  It is just another way of blaming the victim.  It says: "Don't ask us why we did it, ask the other side."  Palestinian's are always presented as having started the violence and this creates an Israeli "response."  Israel always "responds", even when it strikes first!  If there has not been a specific attack, then it is a "response" to a security threat. 

Portraying the conflict as a series of Palestinian "actions" followed by Israeli "responses" lends support to the Israeli argument that if only the Palestinians would stop their violence, everything would be fine.  Of course, this would be true for the Israelis, but not for the Palestinians.  It builds a misleading picture of the overall conflict inasmuch as it is a form of deception; it fabricates a false symmetry between occupier and occupied, between oppressor and victim.  It implies that both sides are equal, when in fact, they are not.  You cannot equate a few youths with stones and a few semi-automatic weapons with one of the best-equipped modern armies in the world.  It is simply not credible that one of the strongest armies in the region is being 'threatened' by a largely unarmed civilian population.  Obviously, it must be a very frightening prospect indeed for a highly-trained, heavily-armed Israeli soldier wearing body armour - who can call upon tanks, helicopter gunships, artillery and air strikes for back-up - to face a Palestinian teenager dressed in jeans, with a sling-shot and stones, for Israel to consider itself so threatened by the Palestinians!

This is exactly what Israeli spokesmen would have you believe, in report after report; they speak about the Palestinian threat to Israel when defending Israeli Army actions in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel; they say they are surrounded by the Palestinians.  If this were so, then it would be the Israelis that were blockaded and cut off from the rest of the world by the Palestinians, and not the Palestinian territory cut off by the Israelis. 

There are many examples of how Israel and the powerful pro-Israeli lobby's spin- doctoring has been able to use its influence to create false impressions in people minds when viewing or reading news reports on the conflict in Palestine.  In Israeli 'news-speak', Hebron becomes a "divided city", when in fact 99.8% of the inhabitants are Arabs (the remaining 0.2% are illegal Israeli settlers), whereas Jerusalem becomes an "undivided city", although at least a third of the population is Arabic.  Similarly, Jews live mainly in "communities", while Palestinians live mainly in "areas".

By far the most vicious piece of spin-doctoring to date, is the public relations campaign created by the Israeli publicist Dan Margalit, to, in his words, "attack the Palestinian uprising by combating Israeli  'misrepresentation' in the media."  The main thrust of this campaign is the argument that Yasser Arafat "sacrifices children."  Stories have been planted in pro-Israeli newspapers, telling of Palestinian mothers who raise their children to become martyrs, to enable them to receive payments from the Palestinian Authority for their children's martyrdom.  Mass e-mail messages were sent out to assert that Palestinian gunmen use children as human shields.  The implication here is that Arab mothers care little about their children and that Arab means are to cowardly hide behind children.  This obviously reflects badly on Palestinian society by equating Palestinians to pagans and devil-worshippers, who practice child sacrifice.  This is a classic example of the racist strategy of blaming the victim and de-humanising the enemy. 

This distortion was a blatant effort by the Israelis to defend their policy of deliberately targetting young Palestinians with lethal sniper fire.  Even the description of the ammunition used to kill and injure Palestinian children is misleading.  The projectiles fired are described as "rubber bullets"; this description brings to mind a large baton round whose projectile is made entirely of rubber that  is mainly used by police forces for crowd control during riots.  This is not a description that could be used for the Israeli Army round, which is full metal jacket ammunition whose steel projectile is coated in rubber.  It is far more powerful than a police baton round and can cause severe injury, even death. 

Another strand to the campaign was highlighting the closure of Palestinian schools.  Again, Yasser Arafat was blamed for deliberately closing them in order to allow children to throw stones at Israeli soldiers and get shot; but the truth is that the Palestinian Ministry of Education was forced to shut the schools to minimise student exposure to Israeli gunfire, on the way to and returning from school.  It has been shown that children who were nowhere near the check-points had been targetted, some walking home or to school, others in the gardens of their own homes, and most had been shot in the head or upper part of the body by high-velocity rubber coated bullets.  If one was cynical, the conclusion could be drawn that  the shooting of students on their way to school was a deliberate act by the Israelis to encourage the closure of schools in the occupied territories - thus reinforcing its propaganda campaign. 

Although there will be cease-fires and peace talks, the intifada will not simply go away.  The Palestinian people have a legitimate grievance with regard to the military occupation of their homeland.  Their right to resist this occupation, enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention, is legitimate.  However, the people of America and Europe do not perceive the story this way.  Their perception is based on media coverage of the intifada by western media, which in the main receives nearly all its information from Israeli sources.  Only a very few journalists bother to develop news sources in the West Bank and Gaza, other than the Palestinian Authority.  They seldom go to refugee camps or visit Palestinian homes; rarely do they interview Palestinian people who have been affected by Israeli violence.  Tellingly, no American journalist lives or has an office in the Palestinian areas, preferring the comforts and amenities of Israel to the bleak poverty of the West Bank.  The very act of living in Israel affects the way the occupation is reported, as it is inevitably coloured by Jewish friends and neighbours. 

The intifada and its underlying causes will continue to remain enigmas to American and European readers/listeners, while they continue to receive a distorted pro-Israel view from their sources of news.  Until there is a major change in the way the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is portrayed by the media, ordinary people in both America and Europe will remain ignorant of the real issues that surround the conflict and stay unsympathetic to the real victims of this tragedy.  If Palestinians had as much influence as the pro-Israel sympathisers with the media, a rather different view of the conflict would emerge.  Equal influence with the media would certainly affect and change public opinion in America.  This in turn would force the US government to have a far more balanced and rational approach to solving the problems caused by Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine and the denial of basic human rights to its people.