Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Ramzy Baroud: Pay no attention to the Kassam launchers behind the curtain!

From Arab News:
The June 25 Palestinian fighters’ raid on an Israeli military post near the Gaza-Egypt border has sent Israel “scrambling to defend itself,” the voice of a BBC news reporter declared on the evening news.

The report was followed by an unchallenging interview with a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, then another with an Israeli daily newspaper reporter in Washington. No Palestinian voice was heard for days. The two Israelis communicated the same, tired, albeit ominous discourse based on the misguided assumption that only Israeli lives matter.
Sorry, self-preservation is not an equal-opportunity instinct.
There was hardly any international news source in English — including those originating from Arab countries — that accepted the Palestinian predawn attack on the Israeli military base as a clear act of retaliation and a dignified one at that . . .
Gasp! The media did not report on the dignity of the operation!
Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz justified the wanton killing of civilians, along with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as an unintended mistake, vowing to continue to fight “terrorists” who fire homemade rockets against the neighboring Israeli town of Sderot. In the same period in which 90 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more maimed and wounded, Israeli Army radio reported one injury resulting from rocket fire. No other source has confirmed the lone injury claim.

However, Western media, including the BBC, is incessantly determined to equate blowing up Palestinian families with Israeli allegations of Palestinian rocket attacks: It’s a tit for tat, or so it seems. It’s equally valid, according to ignorant media dictates, to starve a nation because their government’s refuses to recognize its military occupier.
Hamas can have whatever opinion it likes of Israel's legitimacy--it's the military operations that go with the opinion that drive all the calls for "recognition" of Israel.

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