29-Nov-15: In Jerusalem, the knives continue to speak

The scene of today's attack, as depicted in a news photo of an earlier
essentially-identical attack at the same place, on October 14, 2015
[Image Source]

It's a bright, sunny Sunday morning here in Jerusalem and the knife-borne hatred is, once again, out there and on display for anyone wanting to understand.

Via Israel National News:

A policeman was injured in a stabbing at Jerusalem's Damascus Gate, outside the Old City, initial reports indicate Sunday morning. A Palestinian Arab attacker managed to stab the policeman as he was stopping the attack, reports say; the policeman is suffering from light injuries. The attack unfolded on Hagai St., a flashpoint for terror in the Old City in recent weeks...

Damascus Gate is one of the two major entrance/exit points for the Old City.

Times of Israel, in a slightly more updated report, explains that the victim's injuries are not so light. He was stabbed in the neck and is said to have suffered light to moderate injuries, After emergency treatment at the site, he was rushed to the Hadassah hospital in Ein Karem. The attacker was shot and killed by officers at the scene. The same source reports that the attacker is a resident of Nablus - we call it Shechem in Hebrew, and the Damascus Gate is called Shechem Gate in Hebrew - aged 38. AFP says his name is Bassem Salah. Witnesses heard him shout "Allahu akbar" as he plunged the knife into the victim's body. A second knife was found concealed in his clothing, indicting thwarted plans for additional savagery.

Unrelated - but of course related - there's security camera video [here] of an Israeli Border Guard officer being attacked from behind by an assailant with a knife in Nahariya, in Israel's north, on Friday night. The stabber turns out - yet again - to be a 16 year old Palestinian Arab boy.

12-Aug-06: The peace toll

The toll from yesterday's missile attacks on Israel:

• 68 missile landings
• Injured by shrapnel: 8 people
• Treated for shock: 17 people
• The damage toll since 12th July: Missiles striking Israel: 3,650; Missiles landing in an urban area of Israel: 835

Missile strikes in the area of:

• Kiryat Shmona: 930
• Nahariya: 730
• Maalot: 584
• Safed: 448
• Tiberias: 181

And of course many deaths and many injuries.

The civilian toll so far today (Sunday):

• Heavy missile barrages all morning in the general direction of Israel's northern communities, with several landings in the Haifa suburbs. (UPDATE: Yediot says there have been 153 missile landings so far today, Sunday.) (5.45pm UPDATE: The tally of missiles has risen to more than 210 for the day. The havoc and hatred that every one of them delivers is incalculable.) (8.15pm UPDATE: 250 missile so far; 6 hits on Haifa at 7pm, and some sixteen separate rounds fired at Haifa throughout the day)
• One person, a man of about 70, killed following a direct missile hit on a house in Shlomi (the town itself is pictured above)
• Nine injured - most of them treated in Safed and Nahariya public hospitals, both of which have been struck several times themselves by Hizbollah's missiles.
• Street demonstrations in the United States and Europe yesterday, supporting the people who launch these missiles at Israel, are extensively photographed in Sunday's media. What puzzles us most about these images and reports is that AP and Reuters consistently refer to the people holding Hizbollah posters and pictures of the fanatical Shi'ite leader Nasrallah in these often-violent demonstrations, as 'peace' protesters.

We check routinely, and have yet to see a single caption referring to Israeli efforts at stopping Nasrullah's monumentally large missile arsenal as being related to peace. But the fact is, for anyone close enough to the action to not be misled by distorted reportage, that when Nasrullah's arsenal is destroyed, there will be peace. We Israelis expect little more than the peace of the graveyard until that time.

1-Aug-06: Using Dead Lebanese Children for Ammunition

Those of us living in Israel or concerned for Israel's welfare have a pretty good idea what's happening in Haifa, Nahariya, Safed, Afula. This is in large measure because of the real-time, mainly-unfiltered reportage and live television coverage from there and from every other part of this robustly democratic and open country.

But do you know what really happened in Qana? In Tyre? In Beirut? No, neither do I. What we think we know is what the news media – papers, TV, blogs, radio – feed us, generally after the fact, sometimes days afterwards. How safe is a diet like that? Well, as with most diets it's a matter of how carefully you want to check. Here's a look at who's doing the feeding and at the additives, preservatives and other foreign materials that are mixed into what reaches us.

Qana question

As painful as what happened in Qana is to most of us, there are some very disturbing aspects about the tragedy which go to the root of what happened. Some of them:

• Did Hezbullah stage-manage the Qana incident? A Lebanese source (translated from French to English here) says yes. It suggests disabled children were brought to a building which served as a base for a Katyusha battery because the inevitable destruction of such a building by the IDF and the deaths of children would have such a powerful effect on world opinion.
• As revolting as this sounds, the cynical parading of dead children's bodies tells you we're dealing with people whose culture and humanity are unrecognizable to most of us.
• We're also dealing with newsagencies (Reuters, AFP, Associated Press) whose photographers are active collaborators in this disgraceful pornography. The evidence is in the bullet below.
• A small handful of Hezbollah low-lifes appear in one staged photo after another, posing with a dead child's body, hamming up a range of facial responses. If you can stomach it, see The Parade of Dead Children - Euphoric Reality; What Really Happened in Qana? - Wizbang; Qana: The photographic evidence (Update: Bodies from Tyre?) from Hot Air; and especially EU Referendum.
• It may be that the dead bodies from fighting some days earlier in Tyre were trucked in to Qana. Ridiculous? Maybe. But you may want to read this before dismissing the idea entirely.
• In its briefing for journalists at the end of the long day on which the Qana incident happened, the IDF raised several more serious questions. Customarily careful to avoid saying what might not be fully confirmed, the spokespeople presented whatever they were confident to show. This included video footage of missiles being fired from immediately next to the destroyed house several hours before the IDF attacked Qana. CNN's Brent Sadler has just been on our screens this afternoon (Tuesday), reporting live from Qana, pooh-poohing Israeli claims that the town was a launching pad for Hezbollah war ("Nope, no Hezbollah people here"), and asserting that Israel has failed to bring any evidence to the contrary. If you have Sadler's email address, we'd be glad to know he gets this link to the film footage.
• Sadler or his CNN producers might also be interested to hear - since they evidently have no clue - that Qana was the source for no fewer than 150 rockets fired into Israeli civilian settlements in the past three weeks, as documented here. Hezbollah salvos from Qana have crashed (among others) into Haifa, Nahariya, Ma'alot and Kiryat Shmona. They caused the documented, proven and undisputed deaths of 18 Israeli civilians and hundreds more wounded. Brent, our email address is on this page for when you get a free moment to send the people of Israel your apology.
• Reuven Koret over at Israel Insider has some additional, cogent and bothersome questions. Please visit his excellent site to read them.
• We know how hard it can be for some people to accept that Hezbullah would ever treat their Lebanese brethren poorly. But there is some evidence that this is not entirely beyond them. Try looking here and here and here.
• As for the general credibility of Hezbullah, its record as one of the bloodiest of the bloodthirsty speaks for itself... though evidently not loudly enough.

But the western media would surely blow the whistle on stage-managed news fakery, right?

Reporting from southern Lebanon (and quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review), freelance journalist and Time magazine contributor Christopher Allbritton drops this little gem:

To the south, along the curve of the coast, Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I'm loathe to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist's passport, and they've already hassled a number of us and threatened one.

To be clear, he doesn't say that Hezbollah fakes the news events. Or that they manipulate the journalists. But he doesn't need to. And we're left wondering: on what other aspects of this complex story are he and his colleagues loathe to report? And what have they reported as fact that perhaps ought not to have been reported as fact? Fair questions, no?

CNN's Nic Robertson can supply a helpful answer to that. Last week, Howard Kurtz – on his Reliable Sources show on CNN - interviewed Robertson about reporting from Lebanon. Here's Columbia Journalism Review's analysis of their exchange:

Just a few days before, Hezbollah minders had taken Robertson on a tour of a neighborhood in southern Beirut that had been hit by Israeli missiles. Robertson told Kurtz, "Hezbollah has a very, very sophisticated and slick media operation," and in southern Beirut, "they deny journalists access into those areas. They can turn on and off access to hospitals in those areas." He also said that Hezbollah "designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn't have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath ... Hezbollah is now running a number of [press tours] every day, taking journalists into this area. They realize that this is a good way for them to get their message out, taking journalists on a regular basis. Robertson [said]: "We went in to those southern suburbs of Beirut with that media representative from Hezbollah. They haven't let western reporters into some parts of that very, very, very carefully controlled southern suburbs ... they took us in because they wanted to show us what was being damaged." He then ended by again reminding viewers that it was a "very, very brief and swift tour escorted by Hezbollah." The disclosure that Hezbollah acted as tour guide does put the report into perspective, but still, Robertson could have dwelled a bit more on the calculated photo op CNN's cameras were provided by an obviously interested party.

(Source: Paul McLeary, Lifting the Cover of the Hezbollah PR Effort). McLeary also quotes CNN's Anderson Cooper from a week ago (transcript here):

We found ourselves with other foreign reporters taken on a guided tour by Hezbollah ... They only allowed us to videotape certain streets, certain buildings... This is a heavily orchestrated Hezbollah media event. When we got here, all the ambulances were lined up. We were allowed a few minutes to talk to the ambulance drivers. Then one by one, they've been told to turn on their sirens and zoom off so that all the photographers here can get shots of ambulances rushing off to treat civilians ... These ambulances aren't responding to any new bombings. The sirens are strictly for effect.

So whom can you believe?

In our opinion, no one deserves our uncritical support. Questions need to be asked, and no one is beyond criticism. Politicians will do what politicians always do, and terrorists will do whatever they can get away with. Our question is why are so few journalists doing what journalists do -- dig, question, investigate. Thus, the one action point we would urge on everyone visiting this blog is: never assume that reporters, editors, photographers are more credible or more objective than anyone else. It's perfectly plain that they're not and never have been. More than this, they are as capable of being jackasses and dupes as anyone else.

And working for a brand-name media channel is no defence.

14-Jul-06: A word about the BBC

BBC's Kim Ghattas

It's Friday afternoon. The television here in the living room is tuned in to BBC World whose noon bulletin from London kicks off with main headlines that are all about "Israel has again attacked", "Intensified Israeli raids", "Israel seems determined to send a message to Syria", "Here's the latest from our correspondent in Beirut" and "Let's hear from an academic expert".

And familiar old feelings are being aroused.

In choosing to present both sides of the frightening events of the past 36 hours, BBC's voice from Beirut happens to be that of Kim Ghattas (pictured), a born-in-Lebanon Lebanese who speaks English smoothly and is never identified as partisan or even (in our experience) Lebanese. The BBC's choice of academic expert is a Lebanese man based in Washington DC with a very Lebanese viewpoint. And the message from both (paraphrased by us) is: it's those belligerent Israelis all over again, and until civilized and cultured forces from outside step in, the bloodshed will continue. 

We're now into the second half-hour of this hour-long bulletin, and while there's not a single word - not one word, not one image - so far about what's being done to Israeli towns all over the Galilee, there is a diplomatic analysis, courtesy of Syria's ambassador to the UN. (Yes, Syria.)

The bulletin's now over. They're into the economic news. Not one word on how tiny Israel, smaller than the state of New Jersey, surrounded by the sea on one side, by a Hamas state on two sides and a Hezbollah state on the fourth, is under unprovoked intense fire today from three out of four directions, with the fire landing right in the heart of major centers of population.

Not one word about how Israeli forces, more powerful by orders of magnitude, could turn its enemies and their towns and cities to rubble in a 24-hour concerted effort - but don't. Or to put it another way: if all the weaponry in this region were in the hands of the Islamists and Jihadists, the result would be genocide; while if all the weaponry were in the hands of Israel, the result would be serenity.

Not one word or picture from Tsfat where a house - adjacent to Ziv Hospital - took a direct hit this morning, causing serious injuries and damage.

Not one word from Nahariya where another barrage of Katyushas crashed into the center of the city around noon, causing significant damage close to where a woman was killed a day earlier in previous barrages.

Not one word about Katyushas landing in the past two hours in a number of western Galilee locations. Not one word about missiles striking Kibbutz Kabri, Kibbutz Gesher Haziv, Kibbutz Saar and the community of Bat-Ami.

The reason we created this blog was our conviction, based on personal knowledge and the experience we have of living here close to events, that the people who work in the news media are causing real harm to the lives of innocent Israelis. Their reporting, their editorial decisions, the choice of which images and video footage are put to air and which not - all of these are fundamental to the process of how opinions are formed. We don't need the news media to think like we do, or believe what we do. It would be enough if they were able to present both sides of an argument without advocating one of them at the expense of the other in a subtle and unprofessional manner.

Experience shows that the editors of the BBC in London are not currently, and not going to be, held to any objective test of how fair, honest and accurate their work-product. (And yes, we are very familiar with the efforts made in the last year to bring them to account, with little meaningful or respectable result.) Given how pervasive their influence is, in the United States no less than in the UK, Asia, Europe and elsewhere, Israel's friends everywhere need to take an even more active role - and especially now - in challenging the way the BBC spins the narrative. 

There are people hard at work inside the BBC fashioning a message that is hostile to Israel and Israeli interests. It's important for us to recognize this, and to do the things that individuals can do.

13-Jul-06: A matter of proportion

Let's talk proportionate. The word is getting an inordinate amount of use today and this week.

During the past few hours, on a national fast-day recalling past destruction, the entire northern region of this small country has come under rocket and missile attack. The pictures are deeply upsetting - we're seeing them now on the evening news. Ordinary people, ordinary homes, ordinary towns - under fire, on fire, wounded, killed, being buried. Towns that ought to be filled with local and visiting holiday-makers - now deserted. The locals are in the air-raid shelters; the visitors have rushed away. No place is out of range.

Israel often feels like a very small place to those of us living here. We relate to the hourly radio news bulletins and the evening television news in the way families in other places relate to long-distance phone calls from members of the immediate family: Ssh, ssh, let me hear, what's she saying?

So what's on our news right now in these minutes? The fiancee of one of the IDF soldiers blown up in a tank yesterday, sobbing as she speaks of her lost future. Live video interviews from corners of towns that all of us know - Nahariya (in the picture above), Tsfat, Carmiel, Hatzor, Rosh Pina, Haifa - all in flames; suddenly they've become the war front. A military funeral in a Druze village. Coverage of Bnei Akiva youth group teens praying for the welfare of one of the kidnapped soldiers. (Unlike some of the naive and ill-informed reporters, we're familiar with what a Hezbollah kidnapping means. Two decades of fruitless efforts on behalf of Ron Arad have made their mark on Israeli consciousness.) And almost as an after-thought, scenes from the south - another war front - where missiles keep being fired, and a kidnapped Israeli teenager keeps being sought by those who love him.

There's a good deal of anger here. Israelis know better than anyone else how little we want to be at war with our neighbours, but we're not being offered the choice. We're barely out of the trauma of last summer: the lead up to prime minister Sharon's "Disengagement", then the very troubling scenes of uniformed Israelis forcibly removing dedicated families from homesteads and farms and businesses they had cultivated for decades - but the message was: this is for peace. We'll do this and then a major obstacle to better relations with the difficult people on the other side of the fence goes away. But the obstacle has of course not gone away. The ruins of those Jewish towns in Gaza are today Palestinian military camps and launching sites for missiles that now need to travel a slightly shorter distance to hit and hurt communities in undisputed Israel.

No one, unfortunately, is holding the Palestinian leadership to account for their massive historic failure to build something - anything - constructive for themselves. The image of Gaza farmers growing and selling hydroponic tomatos in the greenhouses left behind by Israeli agriculturalists is a sad joke. They never even came close.

A sense of how far our neighbours are from sharing values with us can be gotten from the news pictures this week of jubliant Arab men dancing and prancing in celebration of two more kidnapped IDF soldiers. As the frequency and intensity of lethal missiles fired anywhere in the general direction of Israeli centers grows, this is what they want - more than they want educated and safe and happy children. They are beyond our comprehension.

There there's the matter of Europe.

The European Union is greatly concerned about the disproportionate use of force by Israel in Lebanon in response to attacks by Hezbollah on Israel. The presidency [of the European Union] deplores the loss of civilian lives and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. The imposition of an air and sea blockade on Lebanon cannot be justified... Actions, which are contrary to international humanitarian law, can only aggravate the vicious circle of violence and retribution, and cannot serve anyone's legitimate security interests.

This, an official statement made this afternoon in Brussels, is self-serving nonsense. Actions which lead to the defeat of a leadership more interested in dancing with joy at having kidnapped the enemy's children than with improving their own lives do serve legitimate security interests. Europe understands this perfectly well, but only to the extent it concerns their enemies. Are we to learn about proportionality from the Russian treatment of the Chechens? Does the study of British or French or Belgian history help?

Proportionate is a code word. Remember when France's ambassador to the Court of St James, who never troubled himself to deny it, was quoted calling Israel "that shitty little country..."? Most people who took notice were miffed by his reference to excrement. But the real problem with Monsieur Bernard's snide candor was in his use of the word "little". What he was really saying is: How dare that little entity, that non-entity, presume to take self-defence measures that upset so many interests? So many French interests. That's in effect what European governments and the EU are saying tonight.

We've personally met with many European public figures and politicians since our daughter's murder by Hamas terrorists. Some are decent empathetic people. But many - including several European foreign ministers with whom we have had closed-door conversations - are transparent, crocodile-tear-shedding hypocrites. Proportionate when it comes from mouths like theirs means nothing more and nothing less than this: Keep killing one another's children because you're doomed to do it forever. But don't you dare presume to prevail, because that would cause enormous waves and even deeper humiliation and resentment on the part of the People-with-the-Largest-Chip-on-Their Shoulder in history. And we know what that means for Europe's cities.

We Israelis, with our hatred and fear of war, understand that unless we defeat the terrorists, we - and they - are going to keep paying a heavy price for their barbarism for years to come. We do still have a choice, and that is to ignore the double-talk of the foreign populists and the superficial, ignorant reporting of the media analysts - and to act decisively, to do what it takes. That's what Israelis from every part of the political spectrum are saying tonight. Hezbollah and Hamas are not our rivals in some sort of argument about the shape of future borders. They are terrorist thugs, committed to nothing constructive for their own people and massively obsessed with hurting us.

Perhaps you need to be sitting in front of an Israeli television tonight to understand that. The proportions look very different from here, tonight.