30-Dec-11: About oil stains and stains of a moral nature

It's December 2008 and this Israeli boy's home in Ashkelon,
Israel, has just been destroyed by a Hamas rocket,
one of the thousands fired indiscriminately by
the jihadists of Gaza. Their official representative
to the UN called them "Xmas firecrackers".  [Source]

We've been writing about rockets from Gaza and now we want to ask: how often do you hear or read of them failing to reach the Israeli side of the fence and exploding among Gaza's 'teeming masses'? Probably not very often.

This is not because it does not happen. It happens routinely. The terrorists of Gaza are animated by such single-minded hatred of Jews, and the reporters who cover their exploits have so incredibly little regard for the value of the lives of Gaza's non-terrorist population, that such matters simply (for the most part) go unreported.

Our thanks to Elder of Ziyon whose cogent, articulately-formulated blog focuses on some of those 'accidents' you haven't heard about during the past few days. Such 'accidents' as the UNRWA school in Gaza taking a direct hit by one of those Gazan Palestinian Arab missiles. We mean the Gazan injuries and Gazan damage that followed. We mean the condemnations by UNRWA officials in Gaza that resulted. Try finding them mentioned in the news media that reach you. And good luck.

Elder also reminds of this past week's third anniversary of the Hamas all-out rocket campaign on Israel that they called Operation Oil Stain: in a single day, 31 Qassam rockets, 54 mortar rounds, two Soviet-made GRAD missiles. And that 'proud' total, coming from the Palestinian MAAN newsagency, includes only the firings from Hamas. Other terror gangs fired their own additional weapons, the purpose being to fling anything explosive over the fence at anything Jewish or Israeli. This was a major barrage even by the standards of the ongoing Gazan Palestinian Arab war of terror against Israeli civil society. 

Operation Oil Stain, you ask? Surely we mean Operation Cast Lead? No - those opening salvos, literally, were the initiative of Hamas, but almost no one remembers, and almost no one even noted it at the time (December 2008). Rockets from Gaza into Israel is a matter of routine. Rockets from Israel into Gaza is major headlines. 

Which is why most people will have failed to see that the first victims of those Gazan rockets were a pair of Gazan girls, sisters aged five and three. Their deaths came from Qassam rockets, fired by the heroes of their own community on December 26, 2008 - rockets that fell short and failed to kill Jews. A spokesthug for the Palestinian Authority told a UN forum that such rockets are mere "Xmas firecrackers". But they are not. They are the weapons of terrorist warfare, and they kill children. What makes this an 'accident' is that the children killed were not Jews. But we can't accuse the jihadists of not trying, even if the results were less good than their hearts desired. 

We can't blame them because it's what their society has programmed them to do for generations. But what can we say about the professionals in the news media who are tasked with framing, captioning, photographing, reporting and presenting the news to other people too far away to see these events with their own eyes?