12-Aug-12: More firing, virtually no reporting

Home-made

It's Sunday evening here, and very warm. 

Around 5:30 this evening local time, we received an unofficial report of three mortar rounds having been fired into the Eshkol region of southern Israel. Eshkol abuts the Gaza Strip and is home to some fourteen kibbutzim and 13 moshavim, as well as several additional communities. Fortunately no reports of injuries or damage, with the mortars exploding either on the Gazan side of the border or in open fields. 

From the Gazan side, we received a report this morning via the EU-funded GANSO office of what it delicately calls "1 HMR fired from Al Maghazi, MA, toward the Green Line" where HMR stands for "home-made rocket". It's a highly misleading way of describing lethal rockets that have killed people on the Israeli side and sowed widespread terror right across southern Israel. 

Then again, European money is not being spent in this part of the world in order to protect Israeli lives or to be, Heaven forbid, judgmental about the motives of the Islamists of Gaza who sit on a stockpile of tens of thousands of such devices. For European consumption, then, the routine use of this "HMR" label is meant to delegitimize the dangers of having a terrorist regime sitting on our southern border, with rocket launchers and explosives embedded deeply within Gazan residential structures. It's not really a threat, you understand. It's home made.

War by other means.

We have not seen any reports of an overnight rocket today which might indicate it was another "dropped short", exploding somewhere on the Gazan side of the fence. As we keep reminding our readers, and entirely without cynicism or exaggeration: no one in the news industry pays the slightest attention to Arab rockets that strike Arab civilians in Gaza. The newsworthiness starts only when Israelis are victims or perpetrators.