Month: December 2008

Both Hamas and the Israeli government bear some of the blame, but the Israeli slaughter of civilians far exceeds that inflicted by the ragtag rockets fired from Gaza.

The craven response by the American political class to the use of American planes and weapons to slaughter civilians is what any reasonable cynic should have expected. Obama is maintaining his silence – perhaps because there is little hay to be made from victims outside of Darfur.

This conflict may be even more ludicrous than the typical Mideast carnage. The New York Times, in a front page story headlined, “Israel Reminds Foe It Has Teeth,” noted, “Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to expunge the ghost of its flawed 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and re-establish Israeli deterrence.”

“Teeth”?

Blasting the hell out of an overcrowded prison-like slab of land that has no anti-aircraft defenses? This is the New Macho??

Whom does Israel think that this will deter? Other groups of hungry and discontent convicts throughout Eurasia?

For Israel to “flaunt its strength” by using airstrikes against Gaza would be like the Bush administration seeking to regain its military swagger after Iraq by having the U.S. Air Force blast the hell out of a few Indian reservations in Arizona.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Andy David was just interviewed on CNN about the attacks on the Gaza Strip. At the end he was asked if Israel would abide by the UN Security Council’s calls for a ceasefire. Instead of answering simply and saying “no,” he got to his answer in a roundabout way, insisting that the Israeli military’s killings in the Gaza Strip (300 at last count) are really being done for the children, claiming that the children of Sderot haven’t slept in eight years (a remarkable testament to their endurance, to be sure) and that anyone who looks at their tired eyes cannot help but support the continuation of the attacks.

Isn’t the welfare of children usually a reason not to kill people as opposed to a reason to kill them? How well will these children sleep hearing from their government that their rest ostensibly came at the expense of scores of innocent lives? One would hope that in the future the Israeli government will take responsibility for their own killings, instead of trying to lay the blame for a humanitarian catastrophe on innocent children.

One of my duties at Antiwar.com is to find news links for our readers. As you can imagine, it can get pretty tedious reading the same basic story across the different news agencies, but occasionally I am rewarded with a real gem for my troubles. Yesterday, tucked away deep inside an article in The Jerusalem Post was a tiny mention that an estimated one-third of the dead in yesterday’s IAF air strikes were civilians.

Although I imagined there had to be great “collateral damage” during the assault, there were two things that struck me about the mention. First, it was in an article lauding the “year of intel” that went into the operation. Second, it was in The Jerusalem Post. Here was an article — in an Israeli newspaper — admitting there were great civilian losses during an operation that took a year to plan! I couldn’t believe the juxtaposition.

I made mention of it to a couple of co-workers and then changed our link headline to stress that information. It was so odd that I thought it must have just snuck past an editor during yesterday’s chaotic reporting. So on a whim this morning I decide to see if an editor had gotten around to “fixing” it. Sure enough, now the civilian casualties are down to only “15” deaths in the article. Thankfully, The Mercury News saw fit to quote Palestinian Health Ministry official, Moaiya Hassanain, on that same estimate and hasn’t “fixed” their article. At least, not yet.

That "emergency public relations" campaign Israel announced – just prior to Saturday’s attack on Gaza, which has killed over 200 so far – has been quite effective. Take, for example, the Huffington Post, which begins its "coverage" with this lede:

"Israeli warplanes retaliating for rocket fire from the Gaza Strip pounded dozens of security compounds across the Hamas-ruled territory in unprecedented waves of airstrikes Saturday, killing more than 200 people and wounding nearly 400 in the single bloodiest day of fighting in years."

It was all about "retaliation" – no mention of the Israeli blockade, which keeps vital medical and other supplies out of Gaza. The Palestinians, according to Huffpo, are getting their just desserts. And Fox News – the mouthpiece of the Bush administration and their neocon enablers, has an identical take on the situation:

"Israeli warplanes retaliating for rocket fire from the Gaza Strip pounded dozens of security compounds across the Hamas-ruled territory in unprecedented waves of airstrikes Saturday, killing more than 200 people and wounding nearly 400 in the single bloodiest day of fighting in years."

So do a lot of other media outlets, some of which "credit" this narrative to the Associated Press.

It’s not like there was no alternative to the AP story: after all, having just raised $25 million from rich Obama backers, you would think the HuffPuff would have the resources to re-write this particular narrative along more objective lines, but you’ll forgive me, I’m sure, for implying that perhaps this would impact their fundraising negatively.

They also don’t want to get ahead of their Dear Leader, Obama, who shows no signs of making so much as a comment many hours after the killing started – and isn’t expected to be any more even-handed than the Bush administration, in any event.