Saturday, August 9, 2014

The Jewish New Year on September 24th could have been Israel's 9/11

“Hamas uses the Palestinian population as human shields. Hamas’s strategy is to intensify the suffering of Gazans, based on the belief that Israel is to be blamed.” Israeli official quoted in the Daily Telegraph

AN INTERESTING PIECE written by Con Coughlin in today's Daily Telegraph [1] suggests that Hamas was planning an attack on Israel settlements next month to capture as many Israeli civilians as they could and returning them through their system of tunnels back into Gaza.
            
            The date for the attack was to have been September 24, the Jewish New Year. The information was gathered by Israeli intelligence from those Hamas fighters it captured during its incursion into Gaza. Whether this story will make any headlines on the various UK news channels… I very much doubt. By any standards of objectivity the BBC, Sky, and Channel Four's coverage has been an absolute disgrace. No wonder the BBC refuses to release the Balen Report into the corporation's coverage of Israel…even to the extent of spending hundreds of thousands of viewers tax pounds on lawyers to help them bury it.
            
            Also in Mr Coughlin's piece he gives an insight into Hama's tunnels and the threat they presented to Israel: "when you examine the impressive scale of the network of tunnels, the location and the equipment stored in them, it is hard not to sympathise with Israel. For, far from being a conduit for smuggling bags of rice and medical supplies to needy Palestinians, it is clear that they have been constructed with a far more sinister purpose in mind."
            
            Mr Coughlin reports an Israeli officer comparing the system of tunnels baring a favourable comparison to the London Underground; some of them large enough to drive lorries through, and many of them extending beyond the Gazan border into Israel.
            
            In a Hamas manual recovered by the IDF on urban warfare; the manual, to quote Mr Coughlin, "extols the benefits of civilian deaths, arguing that 'the destruction of civilian homes increases the hatred of the citizens[2] towards the attackers'."

I HAVE NO DOUBT that (presumably) Mossad gathered the information about the September 24th attack, and therefore it will be dismissed by Hamas as being solicited under torture and therefore valueless…and the Western media will be in sympathy with Hamas's judgement, as they always seem to be.
            
            It makes me wonder what the latest crop of journalists were taught at our universities; many of whom have banned Israeli academics from speaking or debating on their resentful and ever more bigoted academic premises. We have to ask. Do any, or many television journalists have an inbuilt prejudice, gleaned while at a liberal university, toward Israel?
            
            One up and coming young journalist that Sky News sent into Gaza for the first two weeks of the conflict was a young lady called Sharene Tadros. This hyperactive and ambitious young journalist, ambulance chased all over Gaza in those first two weeks looking for bruised, bloodied, and dead children with little regard for journalistic impartiality. She was like a demented train spotter, but seeking suffering instead of steam. Her displays became almost pornographic.
            
            The more she could pin on the Israeli's the better. Only a cursory reference to Hamas pouring some 3,000 rockets into Israel passed her lips - a feeble attempt at impartiality? Her behaviour reminded me of that episode from Drop the Dead Donkey where a grim-faced television journalist stood before a pile of rubble buried under which were meant to be children; and to prove the point he had planted a teddy bear on top of the rubble, and the camera focused in on it as a final image to his piece.
           
             Gaza as far as UK television reporting is concerned emulates satire such as we saw in Drop the Dead Donkey. It is as if journalists from the various broadcasters were competing for an award…a BAFTA maybe? It is true that the media gain great kudos from such trinkets to boast about among their competitors. And perhaps this has allowed editors and producers of our 24-hour news service to create a kind of gold standard of suffering; of the type Ms Tadros was attempting to deliver, while ignoring in the process the journalists personal antipathies; which I believe Ms Tandros has by the bucket full regarding Israel.

HAMAS ARE leading the 24 hour UK news media by their collective nose. But those journalists working for the media seem to be the willing propagandists in the Palestinian cause; which is the very negation of the impartial values they signed up to when they joined the profession, and especially when they are sent forth to report on foreign soil.
            
            Hamas has brought its own people on the Gaza Strip to this sorry mess. How can you blame the Israelis' for defending themselves? But as far as the UK 24-hour media news is concerned… you can.
            
            The UK liberal media blames the Israelis for Iron Dome, and by doing so making it an unequal contest. If those 3,000 missiles sent from Gaza had not been intercepted, and untold hundreds or even thousands of Israelis had been killed by them; then the incursion would have been justified …this is liberal proportionality at work.
            
            This word proportionality, when related to a nation trying to defend itself from another that seeks to destroy it, is a contemptible concept but one which is being used by the liberalarti in all of the main political parties within the UK and the West generally.
            
             Israel is the one democratic nation fully prepared to protect its nationhood. It rightly refuses to bow to its Hamas nemeses, uninterested in any kind of a two-state solution, only in the herding of Jewish back into the Diaspora. Unlike the UK, which is all too willing to abandon its sovereignty and nationhood, to be part of a kind of Hitlerian or Napoleonic Greater Europe, the Israeli's prefer to hold on to their homeland, and not sell it cheaply, as we are prepared to do in the UK. The Jewish state will not go quietly into that last goodnight, as they did during the Holocaust. After 2,000 years of being kicked, and unable to kick back; they are now doing so - and they deserve all the support they can get
           
           
           
             


           

           
           



[1] The paper which has, up to now, provided the fairest coverage of the Gaza crises.
[2] Not only the hatred if the citizens, but the Western media. A fact that Hamas may add as an amendment  to the next edition.

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