By Denis A. Conroy

Interpretation, when applied to myth making, can and does translate ideas into artefacts for the purpose of objectifying the status of subjective reality. A subjective narrative that is woven into an historic narrative can consolidate the common identity of a people. However, without having recourse to mechanisms that can project the voice of the people beyond the local context in which they exist, the opportunity for dialogue is limited.

The sad story of Anne Frank 1929-1945, a Jewish victim of genocide found its final resting place in mythology thanks to the creative efforts of those people intent on keeping her memory alive. Anne Frank died from disease and the depredations that came with life in a concentration camp in Germany 1945. Her diaries were read by a vast number of people and subsequently a film was produced and shown to millions of people across the Western world, becoming an iconic work and classic exposition of man’s inhumanity to man.

The equally sad story of Kaukab Al Dayah 2005-2009 a Palestinian victim of genocide, decapitated in 2009 when an Israeli cruise missile slammed into her home in Gaza during Operation Summer Rain will never make it into film or fanfare. For Kaukab Al Dayah, a symbol of genocide in Palestine, there would be no ensuing fanfare to remember her death. Palestine is under occupation and all matters concerning this hapless country are taboo subjects in much of the Western media… hence the indifference and suppression of information relating to a war on defenceless citizens. Zionism is having a field-day erasing Kaukab and countless others to make room for re-settlement. Sadly there is no force to get between those vulnerable people and that rapacious killing machine that has America’s backing. Their existence has become an embarrassment to the café latte marionettes sipping caffeine in the Western comfort-zone.

So the questions that arise here, is selective concern for life an expression of racial bias that can value-degrade one child’s life while value-adding another’s, evidence of ingrained prejudice? Something doesn’t add up here. Is Western Civilisation in need of a coronary bypass to unblock the calcified moral fibre that refuses to recognise the truth of the ‘other’?

In our modern world, where media and propaganda conspire to interpret objectivity for the masses, the success of the Anne Frank story is a triumph for those who control the levers of power and the means to promote a narrative of choice. Mythology, when serving the diktats of pseudo artistry can and does frequently use pathos discriminatively when converting subjective bias into objective truth to manipulate the emotions of the chorus of the baa-baa-sheep it wishes to enlist in the myth-process; witness how Hollywood’s mantras influenced generations of Americans to adopt their stereotypical and oversimplified renditions of cultural caricatures as fact.

Zionism had entered America in many ways, not least via Ellis Island. The Zionist credo, once it acquired traction in America became a force that wheedled its way into Hollywood where it used every tool at its disposal to disseminate its political ends.

Palestine in the early part of the 20th.century, on the other hand, had no means of projecting its identity. To the European Colonial elites the Palestinians were essentially an amorphous group of Arabs of little interest to them. They were not of the ‘white-family’ and besides, they had no oil.

Kaukab Al Dayah and 257 other children were killed and 1080 injured as a result of Operation Summer Rain. It could just as accurately be described as Operation Summer Overkill. The carnival of death unleashed on the open-air prison known as Gaza, became an exercise that could be best described as killing fish in a barrel with cruise missiles…Kaukab Al Dayah and many others were decapitated in a frenzy of killing! Knowledge relating to the defenceless citizens of Gaza being mown-down, blown-up and generally terrorised by the almighty Israeli Air Force, was skilfully managed by the Western Press. After all, Western media had a history of devaluing the lives of Arabs. They were only meant to have a walk-on, walk-off role in the colonial narrative…as slave, as servant, as waiter, as camel driver, as belly dancer, as baggage handler…the un-emancipated others could only be visible when a lowly function was found for them to serve the narrative underpinning Western mythology.

Hollywood over time became the factory that packaged mythology in America. The silver screen was where the gun-toting American celebrity hero rode expeditiously into the narrative to apply a made-in-America-law-and-order solution. The celebrity heroine was included as ‘booty’ to demonstrate what natural-selection looks like in the minds of those who live by the rules of heft and hype for the purpose of focusing the audience on action as an end in itself. The silver screen doing its bit to titillate the more robust hormones of gullibly glib supplicants lining up to be part of the chorus validating hogwash.

Hollywood became the medium where the ‘twain’ did meet. The medium where Oriental or Muslim values and identity were represented as links to an unexceptional and unacceptable form of otherness that tended, quite rightly, to be suspicious of American intentions. The subjectivity of the ‘other’ was objectivised for the purpose of drip-feeding narratives of convenience into a cultural ‘pantheon-in-the-making’ that required the masses to respond to myths and propaganda emanating from military gurus and their lackeys in the media. Those ‘heavies’ waiting to feed the public propaganda from the wings were more than vigilant…auguries foreboding ill will toward the Middle East became ever more apparent as hostilities came to determine how the ‘twain’ should meet.

In the process, racism and propaganda became the prime drive ushering in an age of unilateralism. Marinated in prejudice, the doyens of the intelligence community set about establishing an empire-building-narrative as a matter of top priority. In order to satisfy devotees of ‘spin’, adept in myth making and scriptwriting of the dubious sort, a solipsistic culture came into being with Hollywood at the vanguard. As the tip of the propaganda iceberg came into view, the chilling operations of the puppet-masters made their presence felt in no mean order. They could not tolerate ideas that challenged the status of capitalism.

The hubris and glory that was central to this deep and dark allegoric time came to define the 20th century, but failed to deal with the race-issue. Over time, the Hollywood product came to be the model that defined that medium as the sole arbiter interpreting the lives of anyone and anywhere on planet earth. A licence to label the ‘other’ belonged to the ‘chosen-ones’ …there was only one way forward and Hollywood was in the driver’s seat.

The ploy orchestrated to determine who should be considered worthy of being on the same page as the people who manage the media, took the form of a game in which control of the moral-high-ground for political ends was equated with the ‘white-man-woman’s’ pedigree. What you gained in believing the propaganda that told you that you were entitled to feel that you were part of the moral-high ground, was life in a cultural bubble offering unlimited ‘feel-goods’ and that the ‘establishment’ was there to do the thinking for you.

Kaukab Al Dayah could not be on the same page as Anne Frank, because it would have exposed the Israelis to the charge of practising genocide on the Palestinian people. That would be akin to putting Anne Frank on the same page as 4-year-old Kaukab…and Palestinian children were now regarded as tomorrow’s terrorists in the eyes of the occupiers …who stood to sully the Zionist myth. Vanquishing these children became an insidious way of implementing ‘regime-change’.

Zionism seeks to control the narrative in Western media while capitalising on the Holocaust to avoid the truth of their own genocide in Palestine. Responses to the genocide in Palestine tend to elide into allegations of anti-Semitism if anyone dares to make the obvious comparisons. Pique is displayed as though the righteousness of the Zionist cause is beyond reproach in ways that suggest annoyance with subalterns at having the audacity to claim equal rights. Regime change abides by no rules…there would be no dialogue or ‘partner-in-peace’… occupation was not negotiable!

So the parallel with America is the parallel with Hollywood writ large…being ‘great-again’ seems to mean being unilaterally great again, and America and Hollywood love rhetoric that artefacts rhetoric.

The amount of energy that goes into combating anybody or anything who dares to disenfranchise the white-man-woman’s-burden myth is impressive. Hollywood’s solution to counteracting the poison of the ‘others’, is to send the Arnold –Schwarzenegger-Shtick-Myth machine into action with no holds barred, in order to teach the ‘deplorables’ of the world that their voices are irrelevant to the elites who determine what is American or un- American.

The love affair with action heroes reached its apotheosis when Schwarzenegger’s big sumo wrestler thighs and biceps flashed onto the silver screen to herald in the dystopian age. Supporting nothing less than a rocket-launcher under each arm, the supremely vulgar American way of making a stand in defence of the ‘white man-woman’s’ burden’ was to deconstruct all that was not American in the world at large.

The Love Guru (2008) Big Trouble in Little China (1986) Falling Down (1993) Black Hawk Down (2001) The siege (1998) Commando (1985)…all in your face by way of inaugurating the American century with bluster and bombs…which indicates that delusions of grandeur are the order of the day.

To behold a vision of what America is or what it might aspire to become, it would be necessary to leap-frog over its yearning for greatness so as to try and imagine what is lacking in its culture. The record of America’s relationship with all that is not America…the rest of the world…is abysmal. Its troubles seem to stem from believing itself invincible, so dialogue with the ‘other’ is perceived as unnecessary…the American voice is captive to a script of its own making that keeps on giving…the trouble is, it keeps on giving the wrong message.

And while the same old script keeps rolling along, the Left and Right in American politics appear to remain part of a bi-partisan theatrical experience that has become frozen in time, due to their inability to remove the persistence of racism in their midst. The propensity to adulate the virtues of white-male-woman-culture is central to the narrative of invincibility that protects myths codified to keep the lesser-evil quickstep dancing along to the same old tune.

So don’t count on Kaukab Al Dayah or Anne Frank being conjoined in genocidal symmetry anytime soon. Hollywood is only the tip of a ‘deep state’ iceberg where money is the medium controlling the political agenda through myth creation. The myth of white supremacy, forever shoring up its stock of munitions… with malicious intent… hides behind a façade of exceptionalism believing that being king-of-the-castle gives them an incontestable right to privilege and dominion over the earth.

Yet privilege is not something afforded to Kaukab Al Dayah or to countless other Palestinian children slaughtered by the Israeli occupying forces stealing their country from them; their voices haven’t made it to mythology in any western sense, so the erasure of their history and culture can occur in full view of the Western media. While the Western intelligentsia nit-pick over the interpretation of border rearrangements and who’s entitled to what…without even consulting the communities who live in those ‘exotic’ places…the killing of innocent civilians becomes as much a trivial matter as sliced bread.

So it becomes the threat of the other as ‘terrorist’ that keeps them anonymous and off the page…a threat manufactured so as to condone the aggression that is heaped on all those who resist the avarice of the occupier. They who have the courage to challenge the facts behind the myths we extend them are regarded as peasant ingrates or terrorists. They must not be named, but referred to as the enemy, the ‘terrorist’ or ‘the- unknown-assailants’.

Off-the-page means out of sight and out of mind. The propaganda components central to Zionist mythology work to promulgate the idea that Israelis are civilised and their opponents anything but. The alleged ‘only Democracy in the Middle East’ has a very thick hide. The Irgun or the Stern Gang or the pilots dropping white phosphorus munitions on the women and children of Gaza would appear to think that not all genocides are equal.

And it was Hollywood as the ‘DREAM MACHINE’ that selectively told bedside stories to a gauche American public while baptising them in the pejorative waters of a mean-spirited brew that left the world outside of America suspicious of the AMERICAN DREAM. From the ranks of the immigrants pouring through the turnstiles of Ellis Island, came the denizens of dream-craft to add their pique and proselytizing to an inchoate narrative in possession of native prejudices.

The fact that Anne Frank died as the result of disease and depredation suffered in a concentration camp in Germany is indeed noteworthy in the context of genocide. That Kaukab Al Dayah…equally a symbol of genocide…a child, one of countless children slaughtered by Israeli occupation forces there for the purpose of erasing the subjective narrative of Palestinian history by which ever means it chose to, is equally noteworthy in the context of genocide.

Genocide in Palestine represents a rude way of clearing a path for Zionism to destroy a country. In spite of the best efforts of the ‘press’ to look the other way, the shame of it all is palpable. America the corrupt ‘broker’, no stranger to genocide itself, is part of the ‘lie’. The truth of genocide in Palestine cannot be admitted lest the twain shall meet. Dialogue unfortunately, is not something entered into when annihilation is the first port of call!

The most potent myth that seeks to achieve permanent residence in the pantheon of myths is the myth of the ‘White Man-Woman’s-Burden’…witness the shenanigans of the ‘pantsuit-brigade’, Hillary Clinton, Victoria Nuland, Samantha Power, who also carry the burden of ‘white commitment’ into myth and warfare.

The myth behind the idea of the ‘white-man-woman’s-burden’, proffers a system with redemptive powers for the purpose of retaining its position of superiority. Under the direction of white-man-woman mythology, the world should benefit from ‘greatness’ wrought in American myths…but don’t look too closely at the consequences as they apply to the Middle East.

While myth-makers postulate unity of thought, reality shows us that the American community at large is not geared towards creating equitable outcomes for itself…Frank Sinatra’s “I did it my way” being the bipolar anthem of a bipolar society celebrating individuality while desirous of being part of the homogeneous hive-dwelling community safely housed within the patriotic fold…and a walled-in one at that…speaks volumes about how the schizoid American dream is ultimately about self-aggrandizement.

So while the myth of the ‘American way” covers the back of Zionism doing-it-their-walled-in-way, it is hard not to notice the zeitgeist that connects America to Israel. A measure of polarizability as conquering species coming together to find common cause in doing-it-their-way…but don’t let truth spoil the party…lest it upset that apple cart bearing strange fruit.

In conclusion, it behoves me to bowdlerizing “THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT” nursery rhyme, in tribute to the children erased from Palestine.

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THIS IS THE HOUSE THAT BIBI BUILT

This is the olive tree that stood behind the house Bibi built
This is the rat that chopped down the olive tree that stood behind the house Bibi built
This is the cat that that killed the rat that chopped down the olive tree that stood behind the house that Bibi built
This is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that chopped down the olive tree that stood behind the house Bibi built in the occupied territories.

– Denis A. Conroy is a writer who contributed to many online newspapers including Counter Punch and dissident Voice. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.