16-May-07: Barrages

Another day of muddled mainstream reporting that obscures more than it explains.

The BBC leads its Middle East coverage today with a somewhat laconic report that "Sporadic gunfire has continued in the Gaza Strip, despite a third ceasefire". In its customary tit-for-tat, "cycle of violence" manner, the BBC report mentions in passing that "14 people were killed" among the Palestinian Arabs, while "Four Israelis were injured, one seriously, by a rocket fired into the town of Sderot, near the Gaza Strip."

What in fact is going on in Gaza is an internal war among Arabs. 14 killed yesterday, dozens injured, by Arab gunmen of all political stripes. About 150 dead in the past few months in Gaza alone.

And in the traditional way of the Arab world, rather than deal with the fractiousness and self-inflicted dysfunctionality of their society, they turn to Israel. Let the dreaded Zionist enemy fulfill its historic scapegoat role - to unite the gunmen, the victims, the politicians and the religious rabble-rousers against a hated common enemy.

That's why Arab terrorists fired 21 Qassams into Israel yesterday; go here to read the details and don't waste time at the BBC since they chronically and deliberately fail to report the scope of Arab attacks on Israeli civilian life. Yesterday was no exception.

The terror attacks are motivated by hatred and the need to create a diversion from the catastrophic chaos that Pal-Arab leadership has perpetrated and perpetuated in the lives of their people.

What is happening in southern Israel is horrifying: far from the cameras and notepads of the reporting classes, one of yesterday's rockets made a direct hit on a home, injuring a mother and her son, age 4. More than twenty other Israelis in Sderot - a peaceful civilian town unfortunately located close to Palestinian Arab hell - were hospitalized yesterday for injuries and shock.

Reporting from this country, the BBC and so many other agenda-driven news sources manage to chronically and systematically ignore the evidence in front of their eyes. They persist in telling an ill-informed global audience that Palestinian terror is about liberation, self-determination, resistance, nation-building and other such self-serving nonsense.

Not today though. Today, the BBC slips into the unaccustomed role of telling it like it is - revealing what people who live in the neighbourhood have known for generations. Quote: "The BBC's Aleem Maqbool, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, says whatever the militants started fighting for, the killings are now in the name of revenge."

Good call, Maqbool. Do you perhaps see a pattern here?