Jan 13 2009

At least now the AP admits it

Category: Hamas,Israel,mediaharmonicminer @ 10:00 am

The AP’s earlier report on the Israeli attack near a U.N. school alleged that the UN school had not been a location from which attacks on Israel were launched.  Now it admits the truth, but without referring to the failure of it’s earlier reporting, though others certain knew the facts at the time.

Earlier this week, an Israeli attack outside a U.N. school killed nearly 40 people. Both Israel and Palestinian witnesses said militants carried out an attack from the area moments earlier.

Some may say that the AP is “correcting the record”. But you can’t correct the record unless you specifically mention your previous failures, and then make the correction in a prominent place sure to get some attention, as opposed to burying it in paragraph thirteen of another story.

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Jan 10 2009

Palestinian rocket scientists

Category: Hamas,Islam,Israelharmonicminer @ 10:29 am

Mark Steyn’s take on the rocket scientists of Gaza, and the double standard of expectations between Israel and Hamas:

After all, when French President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel’s “disproportionate” response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a Western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of “desperation.”

Hence, this slightly surreal headline from The New York Times: “Israel Rejects Cease-Fire, But Offers Gaza Aid.” For whatever that’s worth. Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health. Well, what do you expect? It’s “desperation” born of “poverty” and “occupation.”

If it was, it would be easy to fix. But what if it’s not? What if it’s about something more primal than land borders and economic aid?

A couple of days after Hamas voted to restore crucifixion to the Holy Land, their patron in Tehran (and their primary source of “aid”) put in an appearance on British TV. As multicultural “balance” to Her Majesty The Queen’s traditional Christmas message, the TV network Channel 4 invited President Ahmadinejad to give an alternative Yuletide address on the grounds that it was a valuable public service to let viewers hear him “speak for himself, which people in the West don’t often get the chance to see.”

In fact, as Caroline Glick pointed out in The Jerusalem Post, the great man “speaks for himself” all the time, when he’s at the United Nations, calling on all countries to submit to Islam; when he’s presiding over his international conference of Holocaust deniers; when he’s calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, or (in his more “moderate” moments) relocated to a couple of provinces of Germany and Austria. Caroline Glick forbore to mention that, according to President Ahmadinejad’s chief adviser, Hassan Abbassi, his geopolitical strategy is based on the premise that “Britain is the mother of all evils”, the evils being America, Australia, Israel, the Gulf states, Canada and New Zealand, all the malign progeny of the British Empire. “We have established a department that will take care of England,” Mr. Abbassi said in 2005. “England’s demise is on our agenda.”

So when Britain’s Channel 4 says that we don’t get the chance to see these fellows speak for themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they speak for themselves incessantly but the louder they speak the more we put our hands over our ears and go “Nya nya, can’t hear you.” We do this in part because, if you’re as invested as most Western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as “England’s demise is on our agenda” becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he’s a genocidal realist, and we’re the fantasists.

The civilizational clashes of professor Huntington’s book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the West no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from “moderation” and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.

If you haven’t yet read America Alone, it’s not too late, and the paperback edition has a nice forward.

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Jan 07 2009

Don’t believe the AP

Category: Hamas,Israel,mediaharmonicminer @ 2:04 pm

Here is what faux reporting actually looks like: Israel, Hamas briefly hold fire to allow Gaza aid – Yahoo! News

The United Nations called for an inquiry into Israel’s deadly shelling of the U.N. school in Jabalya refugee camp on Tuesday. Israel said Hamas militants at the school had fired rockets. The U.N. said there were no gunmen on the premises.

Here is what actual reporting looks like.  Don’t you wonder why it is that Michelle Malkin is able to get information and background on Israel’s “attack on a UN school”, but the AP is not.  It’s pretty simple.  She just looked for it.

And does anyone believe anything the U.N. official spokesdweebs say?

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Dec 27 2008

AP reporting of Israel’s attack on Hamas

Category: Hamas,Islam,Israel,mediaharmonicminer @ 8:06 pm

AP has done worse in its reporting, though this report has some of the usual weasel wording, calling Hamas terrorists “security forces” and so on. And the AP report puts this very interesting bit in paragraph ELEVEN, after reporting on the carnage.

Militants often operate against Israel from civilian areas. Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.

I would have thought such an interesting paragraph might have been, say, paragraph two, because that would have made the story more sequential.  Instead, we hear a great deal about the attack and its consequences, and only then do we hear about Israel’s attempt to reduce civilian casualties with warnings before the attacks.  But at least the AP mentioned it.  It usually does not, though this is common Israeli practice.

Once again, the lie of any moral equivalence between Israel and terrorist Palestinians is made very clear.  I’m actually surprised that the AP admitted that Hamas terrorists (called “militants” by the AP) operate from civilian areas.  At least the AP saw fit to include Israel’s warning messages to civilians who were perhaps not directly involved in Hamas’ terrorist activities.

Can anyone recall ANY similar warning ever given to ANY population, Jewish, Islamic, European, American, whatever, when Islamist terrorists are preparing an attack?  Of course, the whole point of such attacks is usually to kill civilians.  And when they attack American military targets, they wouldn’t need to warn civilians anyway, because American forces do not use civilians as “human shields.”

Israel’s major aims are two-fold: to kill Hamas leaders and terrorist personnel, and also to destroy weapons, bomb, and missile caches.  Israel has no designs on Palestinian civilians who are not attacking it.

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Nov 13 2008

Sorry for the inconvenience, but….

Category: Fatah,Hamas,Islam,Israel,terrorismharmonicminer @ 12:19 am

Yoni is a former special forces officer for the IDF.  He reports on yet another humiliating search at a humiliating checkpoint, a favorite trope of apologists for Palestinian terrorism, but this one found a pipe bomb.

If people were coming into my community from an area where known thugs were constantly recruiting suicide/homicide bombers to kill people in my community, I’d institute checkpoints and searches, too.  So would you.

More at the link above.

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Nov 10 2008

If Egypt can’t get the Palestinians together, who can?

Category: Hamas,Islam,Israel,Obamaharmonicminer @ 10:01 am

I’ve discussed the interest Egypt has in Palestinian peace and stability. And Egypt may cancel Palestinian talks because Hamas doesn’t want to play nice.
Continue reading “If Egypt can’t get the Palestinians together, who can?”

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Sep 30 2008

Undiminished by Jewish Death

Category: appeasement,arab,election 2008,Hamas,Israel,middle east,Obama,politicsharmonicminer @ 11:10 am

A Hamas MP:Clip Transcript

Following is an excerpt from a press conference held by Hamas MP Fathi Hammad, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on September 7, 2008:

Fathi Hammad: The approaching victory, about which we are talking, is not limited to Palestine. You are creating the ethos of victory for all Arabs and Muslims, and Allah willing, even on the global level. Why? Because Allah has chosen you to fight the people He hates most, the Jews. Allah said: “You shall find the worst enemies of the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists.” In other words, the Jews, who number 15 million all over the world, are equivalent to 4.5 billion infidels in their corruption and their struggle against the religion of Islam. Therefore, our heroic prisoners who were arrested for killing Jews should know that by the grace of Allah, killing a single Jew is the same as killing 30 million Jews. Therefore, the reward of our martyrs is great, and your reward is also great.

There are about 80 Muslims for each Jew in the world.

I guess Mr. Hammad has never read Meditation XVII by John Donne

any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

Negotiate away, Barack. Maybe you can hit ’em over the head with a teleprompter.

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Jul 31 2008

Challenge lies, or ignore them?

Category: Hamas,Hizbullah,Israel,media,middle east,terrorismharmonicminer @ 9:00 am

A writer in the Jerusalem Post observes that US newspapers constantly attack Israel in editorial pages and with slanted, distorted coverage and wonders what the appropriate response is. To defend, or to ignore? It’s hard to know what will be most effective:

Verbal attacks on Israel in US papers and other media outlets are ceaseless, and can be demoralizing. But how do we measure their impact on the average American? Should we simply assume that a pro-Hamas op-ed in The New York Times is far more damaging to Israel’s cause than a local activist’s letter in a minor paper? Perhaps we should assume that Times’ readers are less likely to fall for obvious spin because they are more sophisticated than local media consumers? It’s impossible to be sure.

My inclination, which the writer eventually seems to share, is that if you want to affect public opinion, you have to fight unfair assertions, every single time.

The Bush administration learned, too late, that when you don’t answer outrageous assertions, and those assertions are constantly repeated, they have a way of becoming received wisdom in the relatively uncritical public mind. By the time the Bush administration wised up a bit and began to try to counter the main stream media’s narrative that Bush had lied about weapons of mass destruction, and that the presence of those weapons was the only reason for going into Iraq, it was just too late to affect the public understanding with facts.

People in sympathy with Israel, and Israel itself, need to learn this lesson: absolutely no good comes from “taking the high road” and not responding to outrageous claims. Lies need to be countered, period.

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Jul 21 2008

Preparing for the unimaginable: Israeli parents consider their childrens’ kidnapping

Category: Hamas,Hizbullah,Islam,Israel,middle east,terrorism,tortureharmonicminer @ 9:00 am

A former Israeli special forces officer has hard advice for parents whose children in Israel are vulnerable to kidnapping by Islamic terrorists. It is quite unimaginable for most of us to consider such a thing in advance, and what we would do about it. Yet, this is the reality faced by parents in Israel, exacerbated by the recent trade of live terrorists from Israeli prisons for dead bodies of Israeli victims.

I am writing this as a parent that has 100% of my children, at high risk, of being victims of a kidnapping.

We must remember, Israel has never received any of our children back alive, from a kidnapping.

We must also face certain hard to face facts, our children if grabbed will be subject to torture and mutilation that would have made Mengele proud.

………..

….. think about the kidnapping of your child now, face the pain and make a plan that will keep your dignity.

You really need to read the whole thing to understand the realities.  There is truly not a moral equivalence between the Israelis and Hamas/Hizbullah, regardless of the pretensions and posturing of the Left.

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Jul 19 2008

Feminism, jihadi style, and children’s TV in Palestine

Category: Hamas,Islam,Israel,middle east,terrorismharmonicminer @ 1:31 pm

It seems that feminism is alive and well in Palestine. (video at the link: you may need to wait a moment for it to load)

transcript here

In case you think this some kind of aberration in Palestine, here is how children are taught about crime and punishment.

transcript here

Thanks to memritv.

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