“Do you beat your wife?”
When confronted with this question, how do you respond? It assumes an existence of facts that simply do not exist. The question itself is faulty and offensive.
I feel the same way when I read reports like this:
Israel sets hyenas on Palestinians
The Israeli occupation forces together with the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority have this week set wild thirty hyenas in the northern Jordan Valley that are attacking the farmers and Palestinian communities in the area.
The animals have started attacking the communities and are a threat to the farmers and especially their families and children.
Striped hyenas as in the picture have been historically living in Palestine. Yet, since years the number, ways and locations in which Israeli authorities and settlers release wild animals in the occupied West Bank has turned these animals into part of Israel’s methods to make live unbearable for Palestinians in small communities whose lands Israel aims to annex and whose homes it wants to destroy.
In 2010, Maan News reported that Israeli military even threatened to invade Kufr Thuluth, in the Qalqiliya district, using the search for a ‘missing hyena’ as an excuse.
More often than hyenas, Israel uses the placement of wild boars so they destroy the crops and attack poultry and even people.
While wildlife protection, including the protection of the striped hyena would be a laudable act, using these animals as part of a systematic strategy to ethnically cleanse people from their homes is despicable.
In other cases attacks by wild animals already naturally living in the West Bank have as well been triggered by the building of the apartheid Wall and Israel’s settler infrastructure. Animals find their habitat destroyed, their movement barred and they are trapped together with the Palestinian population behind in the ghettoes built by the apartheid Wall.
Unlike other libels I have successfully debunked, I cannot point to an original photo or report that has clearly been distorted and falsified. This is just plain idiocy. There are no reports of hyena attacks.
In short, this is a matter of just making shit up.
Don’t believe me? Google ‘hyena Israel’ or ‘hyena palestine’. You won’t find anything, except reports about how a neglected hyena (and 39 other neglected animals) were evacuated from a dilapidated Gaza zoo and resituated in Jordan and South Africa.
Perhaps the hyena escaped during transit and decided to avenge its treatment at the hand of palestinians.
And if you find that hypothesis offensive, than even more so you should find this latest libel.
This is no laughing matter.
Hat tip: Tommy
