29-Jan-08: Eyeless (and clueless) in Gaza

The magnitude of the disservice done by the agenda-driven reporting brigade and their editors is on view yet again today. This time it's via a revealing look by the Times of London at Gaza's humanitarian 'crisis'.

Referring to the widely-covered tearing down of the fence on the border between Gaza and Egypt, the British paper calls it an "audacious operation" that "handed the Islamist group Hamas what might be its greatest propaganda coup."

'Course, that coup required some help, conveniently provided by many of the world's most important news publications. Some examples of what the propagandists delivered:

• Hamas "spent months cutting through Gaza wall in secret operation..." [With all the reporters swarming over Gaza and the environs, you'd think one or another of them might have noticed. Nope.]
  
• The Times names and quotes a Hamas source, Lieutenant Abu Usama of the Palestinian National Security, saying the Islamist group "was responsible and had been involved for months in slicing through the heavy metal wall using oxy-acetylene cutting torches."
• Just to be clear about this: "It happened in the daytime but was covered up so that nobody would see." [Damnably clever people, these terrorists.]
  
• "Everything [chief jihadist] Haniya is saying is simply to exploit this situation to win political gains... It is a part of the problem, not the solution," said Ashraf Ajramim, a Cabinet minister in Mr Abbas's [Fatah i.e. anti-Hamas] government."
• As for the starving masses: "Some staggered back into Gaza carrying televisions, and others sported brand-new mobile phones. In Gaza City, prices of cigarettes - which had skyrocketed during the total blockade of the past week - fell by 70 per cent in a few hours."
• "Rami al-Shawwa, a 23-year old falafel vendor, said he planned to head to Egypt in the afternoon, after his brothers returned from there. He was going to buy waterpipe tobacco".

At the peak of the near-hysterical reporting of a blacked-out, humanitarian-disaster-struck, crisis-ridden, on-its-last-legs Gaza, hundreds of news channels reported on five Palestinian-Arabs who had died allegedly because of Israel's shut-down of the electricity supply. Very few of those channels have now owned up (the Toronto Star is a half-exception) to the truth - that they were manipulated, spun and shilled by bogus reporting from Hamas sources that they uncritically swallowed and then fed to their news consumers.

The role we have taken on ourselves in this blog is not to hold the press accountable but to speak about terror - about its practitioners and about its unbearably expensive price. But we also want people to understand that there's a connection between terrorism and the outrageously inaccurate and dangerously partisan reporting of events in Gaza the past week. Gaza is one of the few places in the world run, day by day, by an actual terror organization, Hamas. The jihadist government of Gaza is busy re-arming itself, preparing for a substantial escalation (perhaps from Egyptian territory) while continuing to fire rockets into a neighbouring country without only the slightest pretense that this has strategic justification or worth.

It's terrorism. The victims are not only Israelis but also - perhaps even more so - Palestinian Arab Gazans living under the jihadist Hamas regime. How news people can quote the self-justifying assertions of that appalling organization's ruling clique with a straight face is just beyond us.

By their gross irresponsibility, and their sometimes astonishingly idiotic (using that word the way Lenin did when he coined the expression useful idiots) way of reporting on events in Gaza, many members of the professional media have become indispensable players - willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly - in that terrorist enterprise.