First of all, let me make it perfectly clear I am simply a humanist. I do not advocate the targeting of civilians. On the other hand I abhor lying, so I am neither inclined to cater to a double standard, particularly when the morality that the standard is based upon is replaced by a hypocrisy whose righteousness stems from a sense of cultural, religious or racial supremacy, and the same measures for judging morality are then not applied to all parties concerned. Therefore, I can no longer stand by in silence, while I observe what I judge to be malfeasance with regard to the overwhelming bias within U.S. mainstream news coverage as it pertains to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, in violation of all moral dignity and in direct opposition to Peace.

Nothing surprisingly new really, the U.S. mainstream seems guided by exactly this sense of high, but very selective morality which exercises a kind of bias whose aim is to reinforce the strengthening of convictions rendering the lives of one side worthier than the lives of the other. In their conscientious intent to moralize the Israeli side, while demoralizing the Palestinian, through highly unbalanced news coverage, U.S. mainstream network and cable news have succeeded in keeping America's attention squarely focused upon only that harm that enables the continued justification of Israeli strategy and Israeli aggression. With relevant facts to suggest otherwise completely obscured, America fixates upon the suicide bomber, the suicide bomber. Our fears heightened, we only sympathize with the victims we can see. Our moral indignation led to flair. Thus fixated, free thought becomes stagnant. It is interesting to observe really, thought control in action.

American opinion manipulated in this manner, we are not privy to any footage substantiating the fact that the Palestinians have been the victims of Israel's half a century, slow-motion dispossession of them from their homes, displaced from their land and their livelihoods, with Israel over the years gaining control of more and more of that portion of the land mandated to those indigenous to this land. Apparently, this is irrelevant, a mere footnote. Within the last three years, the Israeli Occupation has been pushed farther and farther into the background, rarely ever mentioned, barely remembered. Out of sight out of mind. Instant amnesia. Instead, the suicide bomber, the suicide bomber has been utilized as a form of hypnosis to emphasize the evil morality of those we are told hate us purely out of jealousy, if for any real good reason at all.

With America's attention drawn to focus solely on Palestinian aggression, with no attention paid to where these aggressions stem from; all Palestinian resistance becomes terrorism. Without its proper placement within its rightful historic context; this terrorism is made to appear baseless, having no apparent rationale, but for some kind of corruption within, if not the Muslim him or herself, than a corruption within the whole of Islam stemming from an intrinsic moral bankruptcy with no relevant provocation, but for a baseless and irrational hatred for Jews and for Americans.

For this reason, I can not help but question the selective morality at play here; nor can I resist taking a moment to ponder the veracity of this implication that only Muslims have been guilty of purposely targeting civilians. By the very freedoms I, as an American, have come to cherish, by that very morality I hear articulated by America's leaders, I feel obligated to consider this conclusion Americans are being led to jump to: that the whole of the Palestinian population are engaged in terrorism.

At the very same time, I can not help but also take this opportunity to briefly touch upon the use of Israeli propaganda (as best that I can), as disseminated by U.S. mainstream media, who by a calculated, but subtle form of thought manipulation, without the help of any pragmatic historic analysis, our attention is purposefully focused myopically upon only: The suicide bomber! The suicide bomber!

It is the only time Palestinians make the U.S. mainstream evening news, without a second thought, or any news coverage as to what transpired just before the first suicide bombing in 1994 (article originally posted in The Independent), or what transpires in-between one suicide bombing and the next--Voila! In record time Palestinians demoralized as foe. Not victims, only terrorists. American opinion hijacked by one image. The suicide bomber comes to misrepresent 4-5 million Palestinians. Refugees --- the faceless enemies of the United States and her client State of Israel. With no knowledge of the history, there is no cause for resistance.

Unbeknownst to American's only following U.S. mainstream nightly network or cable news coverage, much of what is disseminated, adheres to what is called official Israeli doctrine having a very specific agenda. Unbeknownst to those who's opinions are being formed by these doctrines; the overwhelming substantiated fact of the matter is that Israeli doctrines (which the United States have adopted and disseminate verbatim) have always been and remain guilty of a calculated fabrication of history, in support of their agenda.

A subjective distorting of fact by way of omission, a good percentage of Israeli doctrine nothing more than propaganda distorted in such a way as to have provided Israel with her one-sided justifications over these many years, by way of denying intents, motives, and those transgressions, which form the bases of the Palestinian resistance, their losses, their plight and their cause. Israel having been permitted to maintain her one sided and mendacious assertion that Israel only defends herself, rendering the very righteous claims of the Palestinian and their resistance null and void. U.S. media has fully obliged Israel's propaganda agenda and war on the Palestinians, at the denigration of fairness and accuracy in news reporting.

Israel's fallacious use of propaganda attempts to hide the fact that Israel and her Zionist founding fathers never wished to recognize the nationalism of the Arabs of Palestine. The propaganda also attempts to hide the fact that these founding Zionists have always conspired to push all Arabs from that land, or in the words of Theodore Herzl, "spirit the penniless across the borders." Their intention to transfer the Arabs of Palestine evident within early Zionist and Balfourist publications and correspondence which date back to the late 1800s. Their attempt to deny the existence of a Palestinian nationalism evident, even in the face of some of the Zionist founding father's own observance of what was a very demonstrative display of nationalism by the Palestinians.

As more land was bought by the Jewish immigrants and more Palestinian farmers, mere peasants (fellahin) that had toiled the land, were once again being dispossessed with no compensation, and as the intent of the newly immigrated Eastern European Zionists began to reveal itself, a number of early Arab rebellions erupted in resistance to Zionist policy. In and of themselves, these rebellions a testament to Arab Palestinian nationalism and their attachment to the land of Palestine. They arose not primarily because of Judenhass, as we are repeatedly told, but in opposition and resistance to Zionist land dispossession schemes and developing transfer policies which culminated in what became called the Great Arab Rebellion of 1936. That some of these indentured farmers at one time owned the land they were left to toil under Ottoman rule, is a fact left obscured. Innumerable details such as this, if mentioned at all, become vague within Zionist doctrine. In its attempt to dismiss any and all claims being made by the Palestinians today, slanderous attempts have prevailed to malign the nationalism of the Arabs of Palestine.

That the Fore Fathers of the Jewish State were aware of this nationalism (whether all were inclined to consider its relevance or not debatable) became a topic of much concern and discussion, surfacing in publications and within correspondence between a number of the early pioneers of the State and British Authority in the early 1900s. Transfer was debated with discretion and a conscientious attempt was made to pursue these intentions inconspicuously. At the same time, transfer proposals were developed with petitions submitted by the Zionist state advocates with regard to borders preferred for the pending Jewish state, borders that well surpassed those finally partitioned to the State of Israel (Masalha, "Expulsion of the Palestinians," pp. 5-41).

There exists enough verifiable documentation to reasonably argue that the Eastern European Zionists shared the same sense of supremacy as the Saxons and Zionist Christians within British Authority, who's guns behind which they immigrated in on, with no sincere intent to ever negotiate at eye level with the Arabs of Palestine. The most obvious testament to this is contained within the correspondence that passed between the Zionists and the Balfourists well prior to the Peel Commission wherein the importance of removing all Arabs, from what was at the time envisioned to be Israel, was clearly articulated.

That there was call for this Royal Commission of Inquiry under Lord Peel to look into the cause of "Arab unrest," which unbeknownst to the Commission happened to be wiretapped by Jewish technicians so that the secret hearings could be heard in Jewish Agency Headquarters (Benny Morris, "Israel's Secret Wars" pp 12-13), can be viewed as an obvious denigration of the first order. The Zionists co-conspiring with the British Balfourist officials knew well the cause of Arab resistance. However, the Peel Commission was not the only response to this so-called anti-Semitic "Arab unrest." At the same time was launched the terror campaigns of the Irgun. "A campaign that involved such actions as placing bomb-loaded vegetable barrows in crowded Arab markets in Haifa and Jerusalem and firing indiscriminately on Arab civilian houses." (Masalha, "Expulsion of the Palestinians" pg. 30. Samuel Katz, "Days of Fire" pp. 31-37).

After the White Papers of 1939, various Irgun and Haganah campaigns of terror (or as Benny Morris calls it "guerilla campaign") were aimed at British Authority who at that time began their own crackdown upon the various intelligence and guerilla activities of the Haganah. This crackdown falling under the name Operation Broadside; it was "designed to arrest 5,000 members of the Haganah and almost the entire political leadership of the Yishuv." Operation Broadside was foiled by a coup, with the turning over of important documents which outlined the British operation (Benny Morris, "Israel's Secret Wars" pp 17-18, 37, 38, 45, 51, 74), these British crackdowns ultimately leading to the bombing of the King David Hotel by the Haganah which killed 91 people.

These important details of Zionist history rarely see the light of day. Or if they do it always seems some kind of justification follows to draw attention away from the fact that it was a terrorist act. Justification, a privilege that only lends itself to Israeli argument, never Palestinian. What these justifications fail to mention was the 15 Jews that were killed in the bombing could have been dissidents who were also monitored by Haganah's intelligence (Benny Morris, "Israel's Secret Wars" pp 17-18). In arguing the justifications for Zionist or Israel's sacred terrorism, which became a matter of Zionist policy, what is rarely elucidated is that the Arabs of Palestine knew very well what was intended and what was going on.

As such, both European entities were clearly aware of the Palestinian resistance to their plans for transfer, as well as to the dispossessions that began as early as 1907. In an effort not to enrage the already suspicious savages, if you will, and "because of the Zionist leadership's awareness of the need not to provoke British public opinion [Chaim] Weizmann's 1930 proposal of transfer to Transjordan remained confined to internal and private talks with British officials. In fact, the leadership had largely refrained from airing this sensitive issue and was careful not to support the principle of transfer publicly, despite its importance to the achievement of Zionist goals." (Masalha, "Expulsion of the Palestinians," pg. 49 as culled from "The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann" vol. 1, series B).

Argued frequently, a common justification that is used to defray what is more than fair to argue was a causal factor, provoking Palestinian opposition and rebellion, is that the idea of transfer was not first proposed by the Zionists, and that it was an idea that was supported by the west. This strikes me as an irrelevant distraction, purely a tactic of debate. This justification would only be relevant if those Zionist leaders who were not in favor of transfer had prevailed over those that were, but this was not the case. It was the principles of Weizmann's transfer proposals, which date back to 1919, that were the guiding principles of that time. As such, in conspiring with the Balfourists, the Founding Zionists decided it best to develop Zionist policy more secretively, and pursue their dream most inconspicuously.

Right from the beginning, this being the first evidence of the kind of deception with which Israel has always done war. Deceit, deception, denial (the deniability factor), and justifiable retaliation became a matter of tactic that guided the strategies and criminal methods upon which the founding Zionists implemented the first forced Palestinian Exodus, what the Palestinians call the Catastrophe. An episode within the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict that official Zionist doctrine refuses to admit they had any hand in. These tactics playing a very intrinsic role within the earliest formulation of military strategy, influencing the organization of Zionist documentation of their operations (or lack thereof), thereby greatly compromising the merit of the doctrine and curriculum that dictates Israeli history today. From the very outset the conflict was subjectively framed to only support the actions of the Zionist state.

Till this day, the Jewish terrorism that flourished after the White Papers of 1939 and culminated in the first mass expulsion, and Palestinian village massacres, remains shamelessly denied by the propagandists themselves who subjectively recorded these events from only that perspective that best enabled the justification of their criminality's in a way that served to vilify the victims of their crimes after the fact. This vilification process found its place within Zionist propaganda strategies very early on. Thus, it has been disseminated to the Israeli public as historic fact, complete with distortion of intent and omission of those facts that would elucidate anything that would place the Founding Zionists in poor light. Today, Israel's American right wing, neo conservative supporters, and even those American Jewish and Zionist Christian scholars, both conservative and liberal, who in their advocacy for the State of Israel right or wrong, whether consciously or unconsciously, are simply echoing Israeli doctrine (as handed down by Israel's Fore Fathers) which has already been exposed as maligned by omission within a syntax that is subjectively one sided. These exposes, emerging in the last three decades, though well substantiated, still remain omitted--the current Israeli lexicon is in great need of revision.

The denials currently maintained represent a significant impediment toward any hope of Peace. The denial of the true Zionist intentions and ulterior motives; the denial of their deployment of terrorist operations, throughout pre mandate through till the official declaration of the Jewish State (and beyond), as cause of the first violent Palestinian exodus; the denial of the damages caused during that forced exodus, the war crimes committed; the denial of the deceptive military strategies aimed at making all Israeli aggression appear to be defensive in an attempt to break the identity of the fellahin in the hopes that they would Exodus of their own volition or to justify expelling them forcibly. These indicative of but a few of the denials still being maintained today in an effort to conceal the most important denial of all: Israel's continued illegal occupation and land expansion toward the realization of Greater Israel.

It is the maintenance of these denials that make up the malfeasance the U.S. mainstream is guilty of today, for the simple reason that Americans are being deprived of the information wherein it would be revealed that in the current escalation of militarism in the Occupied Territories our current tax dollar is not being utilized in support of peaceful reconciliation, nor is it in support of the maintenance of security for Israel within those borders designated by UN resolution 242, but most precisely it appears it is being used in support of ethnic cleansing toward the realization of Greater Israel. A Zionist dream that till this day has been the motivating factor guiding Israeli land expansion at the very same time that the motivating factor has remained secretive.

After all, the realization of Greater Israel is in conflict with UN resolution, as well as being in conflict with the rhetoric suggesting Israel is in compliance with pulling back to the borders of 1967, particularly when one considers that the borders of Greater Israel surpass that mandate and the current borders along which Israel's "security fence" now runs dig well over the Green Line surpassing those borders as outlined within all current Peace Plans. I am not sure most Americans are aware of this. Instead we are being led to believe that our current administration supports peace for which our country, an autonomous and separate entity from the State of Israel, has fostered a workable vision toward co-existence, reconciliation and lasting Peace, but for the suicide bomber, the suicide bomber, who has come to represent the one and only obstacle to peace between the Israeli and the Palestinian. This a gross misrepresentation of facts and factors.

These same motives, methods, tactics and strategies that have been formulated in a way, in essence, to maintain Israel's cold denials, remain evident in action on the ground in the Occupied Territories today. Without mincing words, Zionist propaganda campaigns, attempt to erase the existence of certain facts; by their methodical doctoring of Israel's historic record and have succeeded today in obscuring what constitutes the Palestinian cause and their resistance. It is a resistance against not just Israel's fifty-six years of dispossession and her brutal Occupation or collective punishment and oppression of the whole of the Palestinian's most basic human rights, but most importantly it has been a resistance against Israel's blatant, though successfully inconspicuous agenda to remove the Palestinians from history altogether.

In the face of these truisms, Israel's indignant accusations and exaggerations regarding the Arab's wish to push Israel into the sea for no real apparent reason, but for an intrinsic and irrational hatred for Jews, seems almost nonsensically irrelevant. How can Israel remain righteous in moral indignation and with a straight face expect to be recognized, when Israel from the very inception of the Zionist dream was intent upon circumventing the Arabs of Palestine, completely unwilling to recognize the cultural existence of her neighbor, the penniless fellahin? How does Israel suppose they deserve recognition from those Arab Palestinians whom they have actively dispossessed and expelled, blaming the Palestinians themselves for the expulsion, and whom Israel then sadistically oppressed for almost 4 decades? And better yet why with no real good show of faith should even the most militant extremist trust Israel?

While all governments of Israel, whose strategies echo those of Israel's founders, have gone out of their way to erase the Palestinians, not just from the land, but also from all official historical accounts; they have also taken meticulous care to leave intact (at the omission of their own terrorism) the operations of the Palestinian resistance, all so named terrorism. Premeditated omission made in an effort to suppress those harms caused by Israel to the Palestinian, and/or justify this harm in subjective terms, which is dictated to the American people (by way of our press) leaving no room for a warranted Palestinian defense. By the erasure of all pertinent facts from the historic doctrines, Palestinians have been completely disarmed of both their right to defend themselves by way of resistance, as well as their right to even a defense argument. In the face of these realities, why would the Palestinians, with no show of good faith from Israel in the last 36 years, out of hand be expected to recognize those that have never recognized the Palestinians? These are questions that beg for, not more plays on words, irrelevant one-sided justifications and out and out lying, but real answers.

Be that as it is, with full impunity and in outwardly direct defiance of the borders granted them by both British mandate in 1948 and Resolution 242 issued in 1967, and with clearance from the west, the facts of the matter reveal; Government of Israel (GOI) has been and is directly responsible for the terrorist killing, over the years, of countless more Arab Palestinian (Jordanian, Syrian, Egyptian, as well as British and American) civilians than all of the Palestinian guerilla operations combined. Kept quite the secret from the American public, all advocates for Greater Israel, right or wrong, come running to her defense in their admirable attempt to place Israeli transgressions in their proper perspective for the purposes of justification, and they have America's ear.

The same is not true for the Palestinians. The Palestinians have yet to receive their due process. They do not have America's ear, they never have. Therefore, placing the Palestinian perspective within its rightful context is not something that has been done with the meticulous attention their perspective deserves. There are no talking heads commiserating over, "The Case for Palestine." Those that advocate a case for Palestine are commonly dismissed to the far corners of the left, vilified as anti-Semites, self-hating Jews and now, overnight if you dare advocate for the Palestinians, dare scrutinize what deserves to be scrutinized this also makes one, anti-American. Pragmatic analysis is only relevant to those whose lives have been deemed most worthy. Thus, the Palestinian perspective does not seem to warrant its fair pragmatic analysis. The double standard of selective morality is in full swing within the U.S. mainstream media. As such, the Palestinian perspective remains fully blacked out and continues to be ignored, instead the Propaganda War against the Palestinian prevails, passed successfully off as full truth, and dare anyone question its veracity!

With such poor coverage of the conflict over all these many years, what should be common knowledge isn't. This part of the crime: censorship itself. In this fashion, both the propaganda and what it is meant to deny stands, in and of itself, as a major obstacle to peace as it remains in place to hide the reality of the current crisis in Palestine, and leaves no room for negotiation. In fact, it is has been widely debated that no peace plan, from the Allon Plan through to the cul-de-sac of Oslo genuinely sought peace, but instead sought only to circumvent Palestinian grievances leaving many of the more pressing grievances to final status. Furthermore, none of the plans ever intended to relinquish Israeli control, but instead to institutionalize the Occupation and strengthen their "facts on the ground" and what Jeff Halper, the coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions calls Israel's "matrix of control."

Israel still wishes to circumvent all Palestinian grievance for the simple reason that in addressing Palestinian grievance, Israel would be made to admit what they have been allowed to deny for half a century. In this context, the denials, in their purposeful misrepresentation of the facts, become as criminal as the suicide bomber, if not more so, as what is being denied are those actions responsible for having created a wound into which further denial has helped foster an infection with Palestinian resistance its symptom from which has evolved the suicide bomber, the suicide bomber.

A form of obstruction, the denials are with purpose and premeditation facilitating aggressions of war. The propaganda guided by these denials becomes than a perpetrator of war standing obstinately in defiance of peace. Furthermore, these denials couched within Israeli propaganda (as disseminated by U.S. leadership and the U.S. media) are directly responsible for the censorship of those truths that would better inform the American public of what in actuality has been going on within the Occupied Territories. Deprived of this information Americans have barely come to understand the breathe of the Occupiers crimes as they have never been made to answer for them, but instead have been allowed to cover them up with U.S. clearance and complicity--it still not fully revealed the whole of their crimes.

The propaganda is dependent upon a heinously criminal double standard, which has allowed these impediments to withstand. Impediments to which the United States and the U.S. mainstream have been complicit co-conspirators in their mendacious attempt to persuade Americans that the current Prime Minister, his Generals, along with our US Likud loyalists, currently responsible for our policy with regard to Israel, seek peace. In actuality they stand directly as an obstacle to any mutual reconciliation in the foreseeable future and while masquerading so pretentiously, they stand in the way of peace. In Israel's need to blame their victims, in actuality, they have been allowed to provoke, instigate, and/or exacerbate violence and continue war while obscuring reason, logic, and truth.

These denials the propaganda supports most conspiratorially, have always been (among other factors) a direct impediment to the realization of peace between the Israeli and Palestinian, because they have hidden the fact (which there is much on the historic record to support) that for the Ultra Zionist, mutual reconciliation toward peaceful co-existence was never the ultimate goal. On the contrary, the very aims of the Ultra Zionists have been dependent upon war. And wherein admittance could prevent war, when used in this context, these denials are nothing more or less than a criminal weapon wherein war becomes crime. A crime to which the government of the U.S. are an accomplice and her media by way of propaganda, selective morality and its double standard are an accessory; both guilty of an obstruction of justice. However much Israel has been allowed to justify herself by way of denial, omission, and assorted euphemisms, certainly (amongst many other acts of terror she has committed) the planning and actual enactment by any means of fifty-six years of dispossession, the humiliation, starvation and subjugation of the whole of the Palestinian people, by way of denial, constitutes the targeting of innocent civilians.

Teresa Michelle Rossomando, a long time observer of the Middle East with an interest in Middle Eastern Studies, is a Freelance Graphic Designer who resides in Southern California.