THE sentiments and doctrines tacitly held in the Western intellectual culture are so deeply rooted that the otherwise glaring illustrations of the elite hatred for democracy is somewhat covered gloriously in the soaring propaganda that says Western powers genuinely stand for democratic rule.

The assertion is inherently heretical.

The democracy that is wanted by Western powers in Gaza is not the rule of Palestine by the Palestinians and for the people of Palestine.

It is the rule of the Palestinians by the US-Israeli pact and for the people of Palestine.

This is why only the rule of the Western-backed Fatah is recognised as legitimate democracy, while the rule of the people-driven but Western-hated Hamas is defined as terrorism, notwithstanding the popular view of the Palestinians.

Cam Simpson wrote in the Wall Street Journal that despite the harsh US-Israeli punishment for Gaza, and the "flooding (of) the West Bank's Western-backed Fatah-led government with diplomatic and economic support (to) persuade Palestinians in both territories to embrace Fatah and isolate Hamas," the exact opposite is happening.

Hamas popularity is increasing despite efforts by the US-Israeli alliance to severely punish and isolate the Palestinian authority.

The goal is to punish the miscreants who fail to grasp the essential principle of democracy: "Do as we say from the West, or else."

Zimbabweans have severely been punished by Western powers for voting Zanu-PF in the 2000, 2002 and 2005 elections in Zimbabwe, and there is no doubt that a win for Zanu-PF in 2011 will result in yet another round of severe illegal sanctions against the people of Zimbabwe.

In fact, some Westerners innocently believe that no sane Zimbabwean can ever vote Zanu-PF, and this is a direct product of the powerful Western propaganda.

Democracy in Zimbabwe cannot exist without the rule of an MDC-T led government and that is by definition, and not necessarily by the will of the Zimbabwean people.

When Hamas won the January 2006 elections in the unfortunate free elections in Gaza, the response from the US-Israeli alliance was a sharp increase for the punishment of the people of Gaza, peaking with many killings in June, and then escalating sharply after the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, on June 25.

The Shalit capture was bitterly denounced in the West, and Israel's disproportionately vicious response was widely regarded as understandable, with little murmurs of it being a little too excessive.

The hypocrisy surrounding the whole matter stunk to the high heavens, but there was neither concern nor regard for this reality.

Just a day before the capture of Corporal Shalit on the front lines of the army that was murderously attacking Gaza, Israeli forces had entered Gaza City and kidnapped two civilians, the Muamar brothers, taking them to wallow in the torturous Israeli prison system, where hundreds of Palestinians are held without charge in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The kidnapping of the Muamar brothers was obviously a more serious crime than the capturing of a soldier on attacking duty, but nevertheless not much of this kidnapping was ever reported in the Western media, and the scattered lines of commentary on this had no noticeable criticism at all.

It is like Morgan Tsvangirai's call for the violent, undemocratic and unconstitutional removal of President Robert Mugabe.

There was hardly any comment from the Western media when Tsvangirai declared, "What we want to tell Mugabe today is to please go peacefully - if you don't want to go, we will remove you violently."

The Western media's silence on the criminality of the MDC-T is just like the silence of the same media on the criminality of Israel.

This is understandably hardly any news from the view point of Western powers. These are simple matters to be ignored.

There was hardly any Western reporting on the near-murderous attacks by a gang of MDC-T youths on the party's then Director General, Toendepi Shonhe on the 12th and 14th of April, 2010 — attacks reportedly done on behalf of Tsvangirai's cause in the power struggles affecting the party.

If a gang of Zanu-PF youths had attacked Dydimus Mutasa and grabbed his car, leaving the party leader assaulted for dead — there is no doubt that such an act would make headline news across the Western world — the criminal youths heavily decorated with accolades.

Any client party or state that worships at the shrine of the US Empire inherits the right of criminality from its master. One can look at Guatemala and El-Salvador in the early to mid eighties, Israel and its perpetual crimes against the people of Gaza, and Hamid Karzai's US-endorsed fraud in Afghanistan.

Western hypocrisy on matters to do with democracy is stunning. This is why Thomas Friedman had the audacity to instruct us all on how the lesser people must be "educated" by Western terrorist violence.

He wrote that Israel's July 2006 invasion of Lebanon was just an act of self defence in response to Hezbollah's crime of "launching an unprovoked war across the UN–recognised Israel-Lebanon border, after Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from Lebanon."

The shocking crime was the capture of two Israeli soldiers on the border, with the clearly declared goal of a prisoner exchange programme.

This was the first recorded significant border violation by Hezbollah in six years despite Israel's almost daily border violations since the Hezbollah-led resistance forced it to withdraw its occupation forces from Southern Lebanon in violation UN Security Council orders.

Friedman as the Middle East specialist of the New York Times must know for sure about the criminal practices of Israel in Lebanon and on the high seas.

These vastly dwarf Hezbollah's crime of capturing two soldiers at the border. These are daily atrocities where Palestinians are held for years as hostages.

Such crimes continue unabated, and they barely elicit a yawn from Western powers. It is like the September 2009 Israeli invasion of the North Gaza district, where the Israelis kidnapped five Palestinian children on their way home after grazing sheep.

There was virtually no English coverage of this story in the Western Press, though we are periodically reminded of the terrorist capture of Shalit, a soldier of an attacking army. We are told this act stands as a prime obstacle to peace.

When one looks at the "unacceptable" authentic free and fair election in Gaza in 2006, the resultant response from the US was the escalation of Washington-backed atrocities in Gaza.

The victory of Hamas in a civil war has always been described as a military coup — demonstrating once again the evil nature of this people-supported terrorist group — as defined by the West.

We are never told that the Gaza civil war was incited by the US and Israel, and that they did this to try and execute a crude military coup to overturn the elections that had brought Hamas to power.

In April 2008, David Rose published a detailed and well documented account of how George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams "backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, torching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever."

In corroboration to this account was Norman Olsen, a US Foreign Service veteran of 26 years, including 4 years working in the Gaza Strip and another 4 years at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, before moving on to become an associate coordinator for counterterrorism at the Department of State.

Olsen and his son put in detail a report showing the State Department's shenanigans intended to ensure that their candidate, Abbas, would win in the January 2006 elections.

Abbas' victory would most certainly be hailed as a triumph for democracy, and this would warm up the hearts of loyalists to Western hegemony.

The West is good at manufacturing its own democracy where only its backed candidates win the elections.

So the US failed to manufacture democracy in Gaza, and the only other way to pursue a correction of the situation was to punish the Palestinians for voting the wrong way, and the US and Israel began arming Dahlan's militias, albeit in vain, as Hamas launched an effective pre-emptive strike to thwart the coup attempt.

Since the Oslo peace process of 1993, the criminal pair of the US and Israel has engaged in grand savagery that has resulted in the systematic isolation of the West Bank from Gaza.

Nonviolent reactions by Palestinians and solidarity groups are always viciously crushed and there is intentional ignorance by the West on this one.

There is just no notice at all. When Nobel Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire was shot and gassed by Israeli troops while participating in a vigil protesting the annexation wall — there was very loud silence from the West — not a word at all from the English-language print media, except for the Irish media.

Israel was advised in 1967 on the illegality of its settlement projects in Gaza by an Israeli top legal authority in international law, Theodor Meron; who said, "civilian settlement in the administered (occupied) territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention," and as such Israel is fully aware that it is engaging in illegalities with the full backing of the United States.

This is why Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dyan was so frank about the criminality of the enterprise he recommended when he suggested the "digesting" of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and merging them with Israel.

He said, "Settling Israelis in occupied territory contravenes, as is known, international conventions, but there is nothing especially new in that".

Evidently, Dayan expected the paymaster in Washington to make formal objections, albeit with a cheeky wink, as has been the regular practice, notwithstanding that the criminality has been underscored by numerous UN Security Council resolutions, and more recently by the International Court of Justice.

It is sad to note that the near universal agreement in the West, with the unfortunate inclusion of human rights groups; is that Israeli actions to "deter rockets" are legitimate self-defence, disproportionate or not, and even when these are clearly criminal.

This is the framework that was adopted with virtual unanimity when Israel carried out merciless attacks on Gaza in December to January 2008-9, a time defined by the Israeli Defence Minister as "a time for fighting".

This untenable position is a reflection of the power of the formidable Western propaganda system with its deep roots in imperial mentality.

Western atrocities and other murderous acts of terror are sanitised and formalised into the framework of manufactured democracy, while the shortcomings of the West's official enemy states, real ones or imagined; are condemned loudly and even thwarted by the use of excessive force.

This is why Roy Bennet can go to France to rhapsodise about the evil of Zanla, the liberation military wing that fought to bring independence for Zimbabweans, alongside their Zipra comrades. Bennet had the temerity to claim that Zanla "brought the fear of God — or is it of Satan" to the masses of Zimbabwe.

This is the son of evil colonialists who enslaved Zimbabweans for ninety years, and enjoyed unrepentantly the sweet fruit of the sweat of our slavery.

He dares to name as forces of Satan the very people that fought his devilish racist colleagues that exploited and oppressed us with absolutely no sign of remorse.

Bennet has no democratic right to insult the people of Zimbabwe, and this must be made very clear to him and his audience.

By condemning Zanla as a force of Satan, Roy Bennet hopes to rebrand his own brutal and evil past as a ruthless police officer in Ian Smith's thuggish BSAP.

He hopes to help manufacture a democracy that serves Western interests in Zimbabwe — a democracy that nullifies the liberation legacy, propping up the absolutely hopeless puppet MDC-T party as the face of this manufactured democracy, a facade that will be glorified as a success story for Africa — all for its friendly acceptance of Western hegemony.

There is no better democracy that can ever happen in Zimbabwe than the democracy that took away the farmland that Roy Bennet used to occupy in Eastern Zimbabwe.

That was people power at work, and Bennet's loud cries about the fate of a handful of slave workers he used to have are frankly laughable.

Bennet thinks he was an employer and not a slave master, and that arrogance is quite revealing.

If white commercial farmers had a million workers as Bennet claimed, then the Zimbabwe land reform programme needs to be all the more applauded for freeing a million slave workers whose sole purpose for existing was to enrich white commercial farmers in exchange for their compound slavery.

These so-called farm workers were largely enslaved immigrant workers earning slave wages and bottle necked to basic primary education so as to ensure their docility and compliance.

This is what Zanla fought to end, and Bennet cannot invite black anger the way he did in France without expecting to pay for his mischief.

After Roy Bennet's unmeasured utterances his MDC-T party must absolutely forget about him ever serving in a Zimbabwean Government in whatever capacity.

If they chose not to forget about the appointment of Bennet as a deputy minister, then they can safely forget about them being taken as a party that has any semblance of respect for Zimbabwe's liberation legacy.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@rwafa warova. com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

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