By Carel Moiseiwitsch, Gordon Murray and Drew Penland
[Winnipeg Free Press, Sun May 4 2003]

We recently returned from the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza where we volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Upon returning to Vancouver, we were shocked by the disconnection between our experience of Palestine and its portrayal in the Canadian media. During our stay there, we accompanied and supported people whose daily lives were being interrupted, interfered with and strangled by the Israeli military. We saw humiliation, pain and death inflicted on ordinary Palestinians.

Back in Canada, we saw newspaper stories about the heroic Israeli victims of barbaric Palestinian terrorists. Our point is not that Israeli suffering is irrelevant or that Israeli deaths are inconsequential, but that the North American media treat Palestinian suffering and death as irrelevant and inconsequential.

In the West Bank and Gaza, we observed soldiers beating medical personnel and using them as human shields, taunting young children to throw rocks at their tank so they could respond with live ammunition, forcing women with infants to stand for hours in the cold a few metres from their homes, destroying food and water systems, and firing heavy machine guns into residential streets and buildings.

Read full article...