With hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians now under active day-and-night missile attack by the Hamas regime's Gazan thugs and their rockets, it's an especially irksome experience to read how this is being portrayed by some of the big-name news agencies.An AFP report, put out this afternoon to thousands of media channel subscribers around the world, is a depressing example. In the wake of yesterday's massive bombardment of southern Israel from Hamas-ruled Gaza, AFP says "escalating violence has dimmed prospects of a new truce... after a day of tit-for-tat attacks between the Israeli army and Hamas". Read the entire piece carefully and you will get no sense at all that the Gazans did all the rocket firing, and that Israel has been patiently holding back from launching its far-superior weaponry at the terrorists. A person unfortunate enough to be raised exclusively on a diet of Agence France Press reports on the Jihadists-versus-Israel conflict would have not a clue of the degree of Israeli restraint and of Hamas provocation. Tit-for-tat? We call it classic agenda-driven reporting.
The Times of London, in an article this afternoon entitled "Pope appeals for peace in Middle East against backdrop of violence", manages to use the same puerile analogy: "His appeal came against a backdrop of tit-for-tat strikes between Hamas militants in Gaza and Israel after the breakdown of a truce." Their article, at least, did include details of the Hamas missiles raining down on Israeli civilian settlements and quotes an un-named person speaking in the name of the Israeli foreign ministry who says what the overwhelming majority of ordinary Israelis are saying: "The main objective is to reach a durable truce. If that proves impossible, all other options will be examined."
Al Arabiyeh describes yesterday as "a day of tit-for-tat strikes around the Gaza Strip, an impoverished territory of 1.5 million sandwiched between Israel and Egypt." This is a recurring theme: earlier Al Arabiyeh reports have characterized the steady escalation of terrorist actions on Israel's southern border as a "series of tit-for-tat attacks involving Israeli raids against Islamist militants and showers of largely ineffective rockets fired into Israel from Gaza".
That's really the heart of the problem: the deaths of innocents under the hail of rocket-powered explosives, flung into the air daily by Gazan thugs who don't care where they land is nothing more than a minor issue for people like Al-Arabiyeh's reporters and editors. This is true even when those rockets hit Palestinian pilgrims en route to Bethlehem as one of them did today (described here).
Al Arabiyeh, AFP and many media channels like them are so intent on purveying a strong-versus-weak narrative to advance the Palestinian Arab cause that they have crossed a morally-indefensible line, becoming apologists for terrorism and its perpetrators.
