21-Sep-06: More Rockets on Israel, More Absence of Media Reporting

Qassam rocket lands in Sderot; no injuries reported

Published: 09.21.06, 07:14
Palestinian gunmen fired two Qassam rockets from the northern Gaza Strip toward Israel. One of the rockets landed in the southern town of Sderot, causing damage to a water pipe. The second rocket landed in an open area near the city. There were no injuries in both incidents.

Sderot: Building hit by Qassam rocket may collapse

Published: 09.21.06, 08:17
A Qassam rocket that landed in the southern town of Sderot early Thursday destroyed the water infrastructure of a residential building and split one of the four pillars of the building. An engineer from the municipality said that the damage to the building made it hazardous for residents and in danger of collapsing.

Neither Google News nor Yahoo News know much about this right now. They generally know little about earlier daily rocket attacks either, other than what is carried in the three main Israeli papers (Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Yediot Aharonot).

For the record (according to Wikipedia), Sderot (Hebrew: שדרות) is a city in the Southern District of Israel. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), at the end of 2004 the city had a total population of 19,900. It is not part of any occupied territory, and never has been. Ordinary people have been killed and injured in Sderot for months, as a result of terrorist rocket attacks from Gaza where the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas (with its multiple, overlapping police forces, army and private militias) is in charge.

Some questions for concerned readers to ponder.

1. Why are these daily rocket attacks on an Israeli city un-reported in the media that serve your community?
2. How many rocket "hits" would it take before this would be regarded as a war-like attack worthy of a war-like response to prevent it from happening again, and to protect the civilians living in the targeted area? How many dead people would there have to be?
3. What if the terrorists taking responsibility for these daily rocket attacks were part of an identifiable political organization? An organization headed by the Palestinian prime minister? Would that be worth reporting? (At least one paper thinks so.)

With utter certainty, we can say that when Israel's military finds the rocket firing devices, the people who operate those devices, and the houses and workshops where those devices are made and stored, the steps taken by the IDF will get significant coverage. This will include radio interviews with the 'victims', graphic photographs of arms-raised-heavenwards women wailing at the site of a ruined building, and disdainful headlines and reports of "Israeli occupation forces" "once again" attacking "defenceless", "desperate" Gazan Arabs.

That reporting is the real cycle of violence.