15-Feb-16: Weaponizing of Pal Arab children goes on as major news media pretend not to see

"Israel shoots dead..." is the entire message
Today's Melbourne Age [source]

A tragedy is being made worse by those who report it. Or better: fail to accurately report it.

Those of us following with horror the ongoing and escalating weaponization of children by the Palestinian Arab leadership will not be surprised to find corners of the mainstream media for whom the telling of the events entails a reflexive laying of principal blame at the feet of the Israelis.

Reuters, for instance.

Here [link] is how a syndicated report they issued on Sunday night [link] is being megaphoned via news channels across the global news landscape today. It's their take on the violence and bloodletting we reported here yesterday ["15-Feb-16: Capping a long day of extreme violence, an Arab-on-Israeli shooting attack in Jerusalem", and "14-Feb-16: Sunday bloody Sunday"]. But at a deeper and more worrying level, it's an instance of agit-prop packaged up to advance a shallow, misleading and eventually dangerous re-telling of the Palestinian Arab descent into self-destruction.

Reuters professional editors and reporters - along with most of the editors at the news channels who syndicate their stories - manage not to even notice (or pretend not to) how most of yesterday's Arab-on-Israeli shootings and stabbings were done by children. The words child and children are completely absent. This takes determination and, to an extent, talent.

By looking away from the real story - the indoctrination of yet another generation of hope-deprived youngsters and equipping them with the zeal and self-negation that it takes to kill and be killed - ensures more deaths and injuries of children in the days to come. The toll is already far too great.

Click for some of our previous posts about the astonishing ways Pal Arab society relates to children's lives - not only its own, as we as bereaved parents of a murdered child know, but especially its own.

How great if the Reuters people would take to heart some words we quoted here a few months back [20-Oct-15: Children and what a soulless society can do to them]. An acclaimed leader of oppressed people who understood how this works said:

 "There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." - Nelson Mandela 1918-2013, addressing the launch of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, Pretoria, South Africa, May 8, 1995 [source]

14-Jan-16: In Indonesia's capital, a mall and a Starbucks now under terror attack

From Australia's Channel 9 News:

A massive police operation is now underway in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta following a series of deadly explosions that has left at least seven dead. Several blasts rocked the area around a popular shopping centre, the Sarinah at the crossroads of Thamrin Road and Wahid Haysim Street, as suicide bombers and gunmen carried out attacks on a Starbucks café and a nearby police post about 10.30am local time (2.30pm AEDT). Jakarta police spokesman Colonel Muhammad Iqbal said the explosions had killed seven people, including four of the attackers.
Video from the scene shows at least one attacker detonating a suicide vest near the shopping centre, exploding as he approaches the building. Indonesian media has reported that three suicide bombers targeted the Starbucks in the shopping centre, while two gunmen attacked the police station, triggering a gunfight.
It is understood some of the attackers are now holed up in a nearby building, with police surrounding them. There has been at least one fresh explosion nearby as dozens of counter terrorism police moved in on the building. Counter terrorism police are searching several nearby buildings, including a McDonald’s, and occasional gunshots are still ringing out. Local authorities have confirmed a police officer died during the attacks.

Police crouch outside the Starbucks an hour ago [Image Source]

It's summer in the southern hemisphere and Australians travel in large numbers to holiday in Indonesia. Over at The Age (Melbourne), they are reporting on

at least seven explosions... in Central Jakarta on Thursday, including two suicide bombings... Explosions occurred near Sarinah, a shopping mall in Central Jakarta, near office buildings and fast food outlets... There are other unconfirmed reports of similar explosions in Cikini (Central Jakarta), Kuningan (South Jakarta), Simatupang (South Jakarta) and Slipi (South Jakarta), as well as reports of gunshots in the area of Palmerah (West Jakarta). 

CNN are quoting

one analyst (who) likened the timed attacks to the Paris massacre where ISIS struck several locations at the same time.

The disingenuous BBC, caught up as usual in a bout of self-muting corporate bashfulness about calling this attack what it is and what everyone knows it is, is currently confining itself to such purely-functional descriptors as "series of bomb blasts", "further explosions", "gunfire", "suspected attackers" (because you wouldn't want to prejudice the potential legal case against the men hurling the bombs and firing the automatic rifles by making assumptions, Heaven forbid). The editors at the BBC leave it to a local political figure, the Indonesian president Joko Widodo, to extract them from their politically-correct know-nothingness by providing a quote, naturally inside a pair of quotation marks, that this is an "act of terror". Thank you, Mr Widodo, and good luck in the challenging days undoubtedly lying ahead.

(Some of our previous Indonesia-focused blog posts are here.)

11-Oct-07: Kuta beach, five years on

It's been five years since terrorists carried out a ghastly bombing attack on entertainment spots on the Indonesian island of Bali. 

The jihad attack was the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of Indonesia. 202 people were killed. 164 were foreign nationals, 38 were Indonesian citizens. 209 people were injured.

Many were Australians. 

The Melbourne Age has published an especially evocative slide show (here) today to honor the anniversary. Back in 2003, the same paper published an excellent overview ("The night terror touched our lives") of those terrible events.

When the Kuta Beach massacre happened on 12th October 2002, the Melbourne Herald-Sun newspaper contacted Arnold Roth, one of this blog's authors. They asked for a first-person response, an open letter to the families of the victims. 

Like most of the victims of Bali massacre, our daughter Malki was also an Australian-born victim of vicious terrorists acting in the name of Islam. She had been murdered one year earlier. Arnold's article was duly submitted, but for some reason was never published in the pages of that Melbourne newspaper. 

The paper's editor at the time failed to respond to our several emails asking for an explanation. Nor did anyone else at the paper. 

A mystery.

The Jerusalem Post eventually published it instead, on October 30, 2002 [it's archived here].

Here it is.

A letter to the families of the Kuta Beach victims
Arnold Roth, Jerusalem

I never felt more like a father than when taking the hand of my little daughter Malki and crossing the street with her. There is something so right and solid about being your child's protector.

I never felt more wretched, frightened and alone than on the night the call came saying her body had been identified. My daughter was murdered by a deliberate act of explosive horror. I was not there to protect her.

Grieving for your murdered loved one will be the most intensely lonely and personal thing you ever do. No one else can feel the depth of pain inside you. 

Friends and family will want to share the burden, to wrap their love and support around you, to lighten the load by their sincere care and concern. But the ache remains, along with the feelings of guilt. 

The cold truth will never change: an innocent life was deliberately and violently erased - and the monsters that did it are delighted with their work of their hands.

I wish I could pass along some wisdom that might help you through this awful time. 

I can't. The best I can do is share some thoughts. The massacre at Kuta Beach is too raw, too huge, for anyone to fully comprehend. Time will help you to put it into a context, but you should not expect the answers to come easily... or ever.

Time plays a key role in Jewish mourning observances. Some practices are specific to the first seven days. Others are designated for the first thirty days. And in the specific case of the death of a parent, Judaism prescribes a full year of mourning. This seems strange. A parent's passing, no matter what the circumstances, is always hard. Isn't the death of a life-partner or a child harder? But that's the point: a year after a parent dies, you can expect that life starts getting back to normal. But there's no normal life after burying a child or a spouse.

It's a certainty you are thinking about the people who did this. You may be imagining them getting out of bed that day, praying to their god, storing their equipment and driving the lethal load to a site of pleasure and enjoyment - their minds focused on a lust for the destruction and death of others. Like me, you may feel this was barbarism: cold-blooded, primal, bestial - an act of pure hatred.

But get ready for the cold, clinical analysis of others. For them, the terrorists are "militants". The hatred is "desperation". The pointless destruction of life is "strategic". 

An Australian journalist [Tim Palmer] requested an interview with me in Jerusalem days after Malki was murdered last year. When I agreed, he told me it would make sense for his audience only if he could combine it with an interview of the suicide-murderer's father. He said there were two sides to the story and the opinions of the bomber's family were a "counterpoint". I was dumbfounded. His professional standards demanded, he said, that the interview could not take place under any other conditions. So it never took place.

Some people see life as if through a TV screen. For them, your private loss can only be understood as part of a political drama. Point and counterpoint. But no one should tell you how to mourn, how to grieve. There is no standard - no over-mourning, no under-mourning. No one can tell you how it feels or how it ought to feel.

If you're asking what can be done, I want to offer this. 

When a young life ends, a huge empty space is left behind. How do you fill it? With hatred, thoughts of revenge, evening up the score? After our daughter's death, we sat down as a family and asked ourselves how her life and actions should be remembered. We decided to raise money and give practical help to families raising a child with disabilities. Malki, a very practical teenager, did this herself and believed in it. It would have made her smile.

Perhaps it's not politically correct to say this but I believe evil does exist in the world - a great deal of it.

How do you answer evil? For us, the right response has been to do things which we hope will increase the stock of good in the world. We know this will have no impact on the barbarians who killed our children and loved ones. 

But we're absolutely determined that they won't be impacting us any more than they already have. They and their values are irrelevant to our lives.

Update "31-May-12: Highly effective terrorist, now on trial, is really sorry. Not."

Update "12-Oct-12: How do you answer evil? Ten years after the Bali terror bombing"

Update "12-Oct-14: Anniversary reflections on the Bali Islamist massacre"

7-Aug-06: The truth, the whole truth, and a whole lot more than the truth

It's 11.30 at night on Monday here in Jerusalem and we're sitting here thinking about the ethics of the news industry. 

Depending on where you look at this hour, you are going to get radically different versions of what seems like a very straightforward black-and-white report today about the tragedy of war.

The Melbourne Age | More Die as US and France Fail to Strike a Deal | Jonathan Pearlman and Sam Ghattas - August 8, 2006: AN ISRAELI air raid killed at least 40 people in a Lebanese village yesterday, Lebanon's Prime Minister said, and other air strikes killed 19 after efforts to end the 28-day-old war stalled. "An hour ago, a horrific massacre took place in Houla village as a result of the intentional Israeli bombardment that resulted in more than 40 martyrs," Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Beirut. Residents of Houla said they feared up to 60 people, including many children, had been killed. They said most of the people were shepherds who had refused to flee the fighting.

Pretty much the same story can be found right now at other Australian media where it's the high-news-consumption morning rush hour right now. This includes the Sydney Morning Herald (Bombing kills 40 in village) and The Australian ('Forty dead' in Israeli raid).

Over at Reuters, they say:

Lebanon demands ceasefire | Lin Noueihed Mon Aug 7, 10:14 AM ET: BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's prime minister, choking back tears, demanded a "quick and decisive ceasefire" on Monday after an Israeli air raid that he said killed more than 40 civilians sheltering from fighting in a southern village... His eyes brimming with tears as he spoke about the suffering of civilians, Siniora demanded a quick ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon.

Meanwhile at Associated Press, they have a post-oops version that appears to have been available for some hours already:

AP News Alert | Aug 07 11:17 AM US/Eastern BEIRUT, Lebanon: The Lebanese prime minister says only one person died in an Israeli air raid on the southern village of Houla, lowering the death toll from 40.

With Reuters now freely admitting to having published fake images of damage and destruction, and the Lebanese now admitting to claiming a huge death toll that was really nothing more than a bogus emotional grab at the facts with near-zero actual basis, we onlookers are left to ask: 

So where do the professionals of the news media find the arrogance that lets them sit down at their word processors or stand up in front of the cameras and state with utter confidence the things that, frequently, they are really just guessing or simply hoping to be true?

7-Aug-06: Making a Sharp Point About My Truth and Your Truth

John Spooner in the Melbourne Age today.

UPDATE: In case the point is made too delicately, here's a link to a more pointed version that ought to leave people in no doubt about the fraud that's underway in full force. It's one thing to manipulate public opinion - Hizbollah and Hamas do this routinely and most folks take it into account when assessing their credibility. It's entirely another when the world's most authoritative sources of news, like the New York Times and Reuters, are involved up to their corporate eyebrows with faking the news. Think that's an overstatement? Go here and view the images; see a dead man come to life, courtesy of the NY Times. This is far too important to be swept under the carpet.

21-Jul-06: Lies, larger lies and cartoons

Spooner cartoon in Friday's Melbourne Age 

It's been some decades since Israeli society right across its broad, noisy, fractious spectrum has been as united about something as this war. From our living rooms and bomb shelters, we residents of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Sderot, Nahariyah and Tsfat needed very little commentary and no political analysis to understand what Hassan Nasrallah meant when he said "We are the ones who are choosing the time and the place" for Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli towns, settlements and homes.

Nor were any of us especially surprised to hear, read and see the context-less news reportage, the total focus on Israel's actions instead of on the unprovoked series of calculated attacks against it. The painting and re-painting of familiar, old stereotypes: powerful Israel, disproportionate Israel, victim-free Israel. It's there in enormous doses, and no place seems to be free of it.

The cartoon above appears in Friday's Melbourne Age. (We're originally from Melbourne.)

To many it will be hard to see what's wrong with it. But the way it's wrong, the tremendous wrongness of it, goes to the very essence of the distorted narrative that has brought so much misery to this region over decades. Perhaps getting it right was simply too challenging for Spooner, the cartoonist. After all, how do you include 13,000 deeply entrenched missiles in your drawing? What kind of visual abstraction is needed to show Israel sitting quietly on its side of the Lebanon border for six years, watching jihadist leaders prepare for war, day in, day out? If you have never been inside an Israeli bomb-shelter, how do you communicate visually the fear that comes with 1,000+ missile firings? And how do you portray voracious military powers like Iran and Syria gleefully pulling the strings from the distance, financing and supplying the front line war?

The human price paid by Israelis in this ongoing war has always been tightly linked to distortions, half-truths and outright lies communicated by the mainstream media. It ought to be perfectly clear that you can be dishonest with your images no less than with your words.

26-Jun-06: "We know what to do..."

It's been a day of clenched-teeth speeches: the Israeli prime minister and a host of senior military figures, reacting to yesterday's tunnel-borne attack on an Israeli miitary post on sovereign Israeli territory say - literally in some cases, figuratively in others - we know what we have to do, we're doing it (or we're going to do it real soon); and the bad people had better watch out.

Meanwhile, irrespective of whether Israel really is about to unrestrain itself, here's some of what the bad people have been doing this afternoon and this evening:

• A Palestinian terror group says it kidnapped an Israeli tonight, this time somewhere in the vicinity of Nablus. If true (and no one on the Israeli side is confirming it at this stage) it would be the second kidnapping of an Israeli by a Palestinian terror group in as many days. For what it's worth, the gang claiming victory this time, according to Yediot Aharonot, is the Popular Resistance Committee.
• The PRC says it plans to keep on kidnapping. And why not? Activities of that kind enhance the appeal of their 'resistance' struggle in certain quarters. They establish beyond doubt the fitness of their compatriots to have a state and to manage it, and affirm the depths of their 'desperation' as well as their membership in the ranks of the world's liberation movements. Of course, there is a different way of looking at this: there's neither morality nor politics in their hideous hatred - they're little more than thugs for whom anything that hurts the other side must, by definition, be good.
• At around 10 tonight, there are reports of a terrorist infiltration in the area of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, an Israeli community close to the northern end of the Gaza border.
• Qassam missiles have been fired repeatedly this evening from Gaza into several Israeli communities.
• There's a report of a civilian injured by one such Qassam missile landing in battered Sderot tonight. The same missile causes a power blackout in Sderot's southern suburbs.
• And a separate report that 4 people are injured in Sderot by shattered glass after another Qassam rocket lands in the area. Magen David Adom paramedics evacuate the injured to Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon. Paramedics also treat two patients with heart conditions. 11 people suffer from shock and are treated at the scene (Ynet).
• There's a heightened state of terror alert in various parts of the country. The police have established an enlarged presence in and around Jerusalem; in the areas close to where undisputed Israel and the Judea and Samaria areas meet; and in crowded public areas; all of this according to Israel Radio tonight. Checkpoints are being set up on an unannounced basis in many locations.
• The Israel Prison Service has its personnel on elevated alert in response to the general state of agitation. The Palestinian 'street' is in a state of excitement now that the kidnappers of Corporal Gilad Shalit have stated their terms - which include the release of all female Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails. Meanwhile family prison visits are suspended.
• Israeli vehicles are stoned and/or shot tonight at various locations in Judea and Samaria.
• Islamic Jihad says it's developed a new rocket with a longer-range for use against Israeli civilian targets, according to Israel's Channel 1 news tonight. They call it the "Quds 4" and claim a range of 20 kilometers, three times longer than conventional Qassams. Sderot is about an hour's drive from Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem, so longer missile range, if true, really means something in this part of the world.

What's especially irritating to us about all of this escalation and bad language is how certain corners of the foreign media seem unable to withhold their gloating. Their message seems to be: finally, those uppity Israelis are being cut down a notch. The Melbourne Age, which we watch closely for old times' sake, seems especially prone to this.

But we're not persuaded. We would really like someone smart and incisive to explain to us how resurgent, aggressive Palestinian terror actions make things better for anyone. It's always been clear to most Israelis that Israeli military restraint is a policy of choice, not necessity; at any moment, the restraint can be eased and some really serious damage can be done to the fabric of Palestinian Arab life, not to mention the physical health and well-being of individual high-profile Palestinian figures. The enormous ring of Israeli armour deployed tonight at all points around the Gaza border (see the picture above) gives palpable physicality to that aspect of the asymmetry between the two sides.

The irresistable conclusion - at least for us - is that the thugocracy of the Hamas-led PA actually wants more suffering for their people, and sees some kind of long-term benefit in this.

A more demented view of political leadership would be hard to conjure up. These are not uplifting times.