10-Jul-06: Far from the headlines

Our collective failure at conveying the danger that follows from having neighbors with a Qassam fetish is going to bite us in a serious way.

While some of the largest brand-name media channels keep referring to the Palestinian Qassam missiles as "home made" with all the pooh-pooh-ing that this entails, the terrorists have been quietly going about the business of causing real harm.

Today, a Palestinian girl is critically injured by a Qassam missile strike. She is a 10-year-old whose family lives in Beit Lahiya. She's doubly cursed because while this tragedy (for her and for her parents) will change her life, it will likely cause less than a blip on the media radar screen. No posters, no protests, no promises of compensation money from sympathetic Arab governments. Might have had a different effect if her family had lived on a beach...

Palestinian sources say Palestinian Arab terrorists (not the word they used) fired the rocket towards Israel - and missed. One of the Qassam heros is shown in this newsagency picture (above) which was snapped in the poor child's actual hometown yesterday.

Meanwhile, there is a report that the Palestinian terrorist forces, inspired by what they have managed to do to ordinary civilian life in Sderot, Ashkelon and the communities and kibbutzim near Gaza (check any of dozens of our short articles below), are raising the stakes. Palestinian sources confirm they have fired a Qassam missile - according to some reports, three Qassams - from a village near the Palestinian city of Tul Karem, 10 miles east of Netanya on Israel's coastal highway. It's reported that the rocket exploded prematurely and therefore the damage was slight. But what's likely to happen next is fairly clear. The center of Israel, the airport that serves Tel-Aviv and the rest of the country, the largest concentrations of Israeli population, industry and life - all are well within firing range from Tul Karem and from the dozens of other Tul Karems scattered the length of our land.
In case anyone's in doubt as to the lethal nature of flying explosives, here's a link to a valuable article on deaths among Israelis that have resulted from Qassam attacks on civilian areas. The Hamas regime has an unwavering commitment to this particular form of "resistance". In this, it has many unwitting (and not so unwitting) allies (or useful idiots, in the terminology made famous by Lenin) among those Western reporters, editors and photographers who - against all the evidence - persist in collectively minimizing the threat these pose to our lives, rendering Israel exposed to charges of disproportionality in its military response.