21-Feb-09: Reality check - is this what mainstream media are saying?

Hamas announced on January 18 that it was entering into a ceasefire with Israel. To no one's particular surprise, there were some 10 mortar firings plus one Qassam rocket shot into Israel yesterday (20th February). Palestinian terror groups have fired more than 50 rockets into Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza since the Hamas "cease [and] fire" charade.

Despite the persistent attacks on Israeli civilian targets by the Gazans, Israel continues to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents. Since Israel ended its defensive operation there, more than 100,000 tons of aid and more than 2 million gallons (9 million liters) of fuel have entered Gaza. The aid reaches Gazans via several border crossings, including the Nahal Oz fuel depot, a site Palestinian terrorists have attacked repeatedly in the past.

With the December/January Gaza battle fading into the past, painstaking Israeli investigation reveals that fewer than a third of the Gazan casualties during Israel’s operation there were civilians. More than 1,200 Palestinians were killed during the three-week operation, according to the Israeli study. Two thirds of the deaths were of combatants, notwithstanding deliberately false reporting by Hamas that was swallowed up by most of the world's media.

11-Feb-09: Erasing the Line Between News and Opinion

An opinion piece written by one of this blog's two authors appears on the FrontPageMag.com website. It is cross-posted below.

Erasing the Line Between News and Opinion
By Frimet Roth
FrontPageMagazine.com | 2/11/2009

Israel's media terrain is overrun with guilt-ridden writers. Rain or shine, war or lull, they put pen to paper and beat our national chest.

Normally the results of their self-reproach are relegated to the opinion pages where they rightly belong. But two of Israel's harshest critics receive very different treatment.

Gideon Levy and Amira Hass write columns for Israel's leading Hebrew-language daily, Haaretz. The agenda they blare in their newspaper articles, interviews and lectures proves beyond a doubt that they are political activists. And yet in the pages of Haaretz this pair is consistently referred to as journalists, reporters or analysts. Moreover, their writings often appear as hard news and always enjoy prominence.

Hass' and Levy's articles focus on the suffering of the Palestinians in minute detail and are generally devoid of context. On the other hand, both writers thoroughly ignore the deaths and injuries of their fellow Israelis.

This is probably easier to do for Hass, who has resided in Gaza and Ramallah, detached and estranged from her people, for the past fifteen years. But Levy, a Tel Avivan, does a thorough job of it as well. Hass favors a dry style of writing; Levy tends to the melodramatic. Both rely primarily on anecdotal evidence gleaned from speaking with Palestinians. Those sources are often anonymous yet their accounts are deemed entirely credible by Hass and Levy. And by their editors. And, eventually by their trusting audiences throughout the world.

What is confounding is that Hass herself has written matter-of-factly about Hamas' brutality towards it own people. During the Gazan war, she reported

"Hamas has sought to suppress individuals it believes endanger the group's fight against Israel and its hold on power…since the operation began… Hamas operatives have executed several people it classified as collaborators… estimates… range from 40 to 80… Executions are carried out secretly… Hamas is continuing to arrest those it suspects of criminal activity or Fatah membership... No one knows where the detained are being held… common methods include confiscating cell-phones, beatings, house arrest and firing at a suspect's legs."

Such revelations are not surprising; Hamas' tyrannical rule over Gaza has been well documented.

Khaled Abu Toameh reported in the Jerusalem Post that Hamas tortured and executed other Palestinians in Gaza during and after Operation Cast Lead. He quotes a PA government minister confirming that nineteen victims were killed in cold blood. 60 others were shot in the legs.

Even a spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry in Gaza, Ihab Ghissin, has conceded that his men had arrested scores of "collaborators" with Israel during the war.

Der Speigel's correspondent, Ulrike Putz, wrote that one Gazan confided: "Many people are now against Hamas but that won't change anything. Because anyone who stands up to them is killed." Putz' source, who refused to give his name, added, "There will never be a rebellion against Hamas. It would be suicide."

In this environment of repression and fear, an obvious inference would be that Gazan sources do not speak freely. Yet both Hass and Levy routinely convey Gaza-sourced testimony as incontrovertible. And the Haaretz editors reinforce this when they present it in their news section.

Are they deluded into accepting this duo as objective professionals? They have no grounds for that belief.

In August 2001, Hass confessed to the Independent/UK: "There is a misconception that journalists can be objective… But being fair and being objective are not the same thing. What journalism is really about – it's to monitor power and the centers of power."

The damage they wreak on Israel's image cannot be over-stated. For instance, a Hass article entitled "Norwegian doctor: Israel used new type of weapon in Gaza", relays uncritically the allegations of two Norwegian doctors, Erik Fosse and Mads Gilbert who were in Gaza for 11 days during Operation Cast Lead. She quotes them saying "Some Palestinian casualties in the Gaza Strip were wounded by a new type of weapon that even doctors with previous experience in war zones do not recognize".

Hass writes that Fosse declared "if we hadn't been there to confirm their testimony, it would all have been presented as Hamas propaganda."

In truth his testimony is the propaganda, with Hass and her editors providing credibility and cover.

Hass rarely provides the identifying particulars of her sources. But in a letter to Haaretz, Yonatan Levi notes a September 2001 interview published in a Norwegian daily, in which Gilbert is asked whether he supports the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. His reply: "I am upset over the terrorist attack, but am equally upset over the suffering which the United States has created… Terror is a bad weapon, but the answer is yes, within the context I have mentioned."

Gilbert acknowledges that he cannot separate politics from his profession: "There is little in medicine that is not politics".

Thanks to Hass, Fosse's and Gilbert's allegations against the IDF are presented as news by Haaretz.

In the lexicon of Amira Hass, there is no terrorism. "I'm not sure I approve of the very term 'terror'" she said in an interview with Matthew Rothschild on the Progressive radio station in April 2008. "Let's talk about killing."

In that and in her many other appearances, Hass presents a creative chronology of events in this region. For instance, she claims that there were no suicide bombings until the killings carried out by Baruch Goldstein in the Machpelah sanctuary in 1994. Prior to that, she instructs, there were "a few" suicide bombings but they were all "only against soldiers and settlers".

When addressing foreign audiences, the anti-Zionist Hass likes to refer to Jews as a "diaspora nation". In 2005 she participated in a debate arranged by the Evening Standard, a London newspaper. She defended the claim that "Zionism is the worst enemy of the Jewish People"… and led her team to victory.

A recent addition to the cadre of anti-Israel radicals masquerading as reporters is the Swedish freelancer, Catrin Ormestad.

Ormestad has lived in Israel since 1993 but does not hold Israeli citizenship. Since 2006, when Israel restricted travel by Israelis into Gaza, Ormestad has visited Gaza frequently. Numerous accounts of her forays there have appeared in Haaretz. At times they are published under her byline. At others they are referred to by Levy in his own pieces. Her Swedish surname probably leads readers to presume she is an unaffiliated reporter.

In fact, Ormestad moonlights as what has been called "a militant Swedish journalist from the Swedish Palestine Solidarity Association". She edits that organization's newsletter, "Nu Palestine", and appears overseas at conferences, sometimes alongside her colleague, Gideon Levy.

In Savigliano, Italy, Ormestad, Levy and two other journalists lectured at a symposium entitled "Ethos and Religion: The Case of Israel". An Italian newspaper reported that in they "unambiguously and repeatedly described the State of Israel as 'racist', 'colonial', 'imperialist', 'Nazi' and of pursuing a policy of 'ethnic cleansing' and 'apartheid worse than originally practiced by South Africa'.

True to form, following the recent Gaza fighting, Ormestad wrote: "The head of the Burn and Plastic Surgery Department, Nafiz Abu Shaban, says he has no doubt that all these burns were caused by white phosphorus." Ormestad ignores the fact that Hamas leaders were and are hiding in the hospitals from which this and other doctors spoke to her.

At Haaretz, her reports are carried as unequivocal news. Nothing she has written has ever appeared as an op-ed.

Haaretz' embrace of these agenda-driven activists has far-reaching repercussions.

Several days ago a Croatian newspaper questioned the Israeli Ambassador to Croatia, Shmuel Meriom, about "an article by Gideon Levy [in the Israeli daily Haaretz] who thinks that after Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, it will be necessary to start a new trial in the Hague, this time against Israel."

Last week, Hass earned a half-page in Haaretz' news section for her piece "Life in Gaza Is Not 'Back to Normal'". There, she reports that journalists, volunteer doctors, architects who specialize in rehabilitation of disaster zones and jurists aiming for war crimes trials in international courts of justice are flooding the Strip. Hass relates that it is "emerging as patterns, phenomena that repeat themselves: bombing of buildings and enterprises that have no connection to the Hamas infrastructure – politically or militarily."

That assertion, central to the global media attacks on Israel, is sandwiched between Hass' descriptions of Gazan loss and destruction. But she offers no proof for the claim which has been repeatedly and categorically denied by the IDF.

In the same article, Hass writes that many Gazan families boast that their dead relatives were Hamas militants when, in fact, they died in their homes and "did not even know how to shoot a rifle. This and similar dubious anecdotes appear as pure fact on page 4 of the clearly-designated News Section of the weekend edition.

Haaretz' presentation of such shoddy reportage as reputable journalism is inexcusable. Many people subsist on a strict diet of Middle East reporting based on Hass' and Levy's version of events. Those readers are key players in the massive global media attack confronting Israel in the wake of the Gazan war. And the role of Haaretz' editors, as Hass' and Levy's enablers, cannot be overlooked.

----

Frimet Roth, a freelance writer, lives in Jerusalem. She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation in their daughter's memory. Malki Roth was murdered at the age of fifteen in the Sbarro Jerusalem restaurant massacre in 2001. The foundation in her name provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths who care at home for a special-needs child.

9-Feb-09: On freeing murderers

Extracted from an editorial in today's Jerusalem Post

We all want Gilad Shalit back home. The question is one of price and consequence. Is it truly in keeping with Jewish compassion to purchase the freedom of one beloved captive at the almost certain cost of unleashing fresh acts of terrorism on our buses, in our cafes and malls, and on our roads - violence that would send many more innocents to their deaths?

At right: the aftermath of the massacre at the Sbarro restaurant, central Jerusalem, 9th August 2001

6-Feb-09: Clear-talking sense from an Irishman

"There's a bigger picture here, something which Israelis have been trying to broadcast to the world, but which, thanks to their spectacular inability to accurately and sympathetically portray their point of view, has not been properly transmitted. It's this -- Israel is the front line of the war between democracy and Islamic fascism... Israel is actually acting with a ridiculous degree of restraint."

Please read on.

Why the Israeli people have finally had enough
By Ian O'Doherty
Monday January 05 2009

So, it's genocide now, is it? Or is it actually another holocaust, something which one typically restrained Palestinian analyst described as "worse than Hitler's war against the Jews"?

Are we watching the ethnic cleansing of an entire people? Are we witnessing the deliberate eradication of a race?

Well, no actually, we're not.

Yet the conventional dinner party wisdom which we've had to put up with in the media, both here in Ireland and generally across Britain, is that somehow Israel is the aggressor in the rapidly worsening situation in Gaza.

Footage of air strikes with the ensuing photogenic explosions and dramatic plumes of smoke, quickly followed by clips of collapsed buildings and enraged mourners, makes far better copy than actually looking at the reasons why Israel has done what it's done.

Anyone who devotes only a cursory glance at the news, both print and television, would be forgiven for thinking that, out of spite, might and malice, Israel has decided to destroy the Palestinian people.

The problem with that conclusion -- and it's not something you're going to learn from the BBC and most other outlets -- is that, contrary to the currently popular belief, Israel is actually acting with a ridiculous degree of restraint.

Over the last couple of years, thousands of rockets have been landing on Israeli soil and, finally, they have had enough.

But behind that statistic there is a human dimension which tends to be rather ignored.

I know many people in the southern Israeli town of Sderot and what is remarkable about their stories is not the number or make of rockets which have fallen on them on a daily basis for years, but the psychological carnage this wreaked upon them.

One woman freely admitted to me that she hasn't had a proper night's sleep in more than two years as she and her family now basically live in their bomb shelter and it's hard to tell who she hates more -- the Muslim terrorists of Hamas or the Israeli government which she thinks has abandoned them.

It's a common feeling amongst residents of southern Israeli towns who have been the silent victims of a long campaign of violence, intimidation and murder carried out by Hamas. And now, finally, that the Israelis have said that enough is enough, they are somehow meant to be the aggressors?

There are people of good conscience on both sides of this argument, but one of the main problems in this debate lies in the cowardly tendency of the Western media to apply equivalence to both sides.

Thus, Hamas is seen to be as legitimate a government as the Israelis, and its rocket attacks across the border from Gaza are seen as being part of a yet another, intractable, interminable Middle Eastern dispute.

There's just one problem with that approach -- it's completely wrong.

Hamas is a fundamentalist Islamic organisation intent on the eradication of the state of Israel and all its citizens; a violent fascist regime that allows honour killings and the execution of homosexuals to continue in its sphere of influence. Bankrolled by Iran, it manages to make even Hezbollah look like a moderate organisation.

But Hamas is clever.

As a friend of mine from Sderot pointed out, one of its favourite tactics is to launch Qassams from Palestinian schoolyards -- while the schools are still in session.

Hamas does this, you see, knowing that the IDF can't immediately strike back (they can vector a rocket launch site within 90 seconds) because the last thing the Israelis need is footage of a devastated Palestinian school with dead kids.

And, over the last week, we have seen carefully manipulated footage of dead civilians, with the fact that they were effectively used as human shields conveniently ignored. When Israel pulled out of Gaza -- ironically, the last battalion of IDF troops to leave Gaza contained some people from Sderot -- they were acceding to international and internal pressure. The doves on the Left said it was to prove to Palestinians that they wanted to give Palestinians independence, the hawks on the Right -- and there are some truly scary right-wingers in Israel, even as ardent a supporter of the country as I am will freely admit that -- prophesied that it would lead to carnage.

And, lo and behold, virtually as soon as the last jeep left Gaza the rockets started. And then the blockade began, and the whole damn mess started all over again.

But there's a bigger picture here, something which Israelis have been trying to broadcast to the world, but which, thanks to their spectacular inability to accurately and sympathetically portray their point of view, has not been properly transmitted. It's this -- Israel is the front line of the war between democracy and Islamic fascism.

Would you rather live in a society with a free press, equal rights for women -- and anyone who knows an Israeli woman will know that they're not easily suppressed, anyway -- equal rights for gay people and a proud and stubborn belief in the right of the individual to lead their life in the way that they see fit or would you rather exist in a society where women who dare to speak their mind are executed, where gay people are not just shunned but murdered and where having a dissenting thought marks you out for death?

The civilian deaths in Gaza are to be mourned, and anyone who says otherwise is reprehensible. But in a sick and twisted irony, they are mourned more by Israelis than by Hamas, who know that every dead Palestinian kid is worth another piece of propaganda.

Here in the West, where we share the same values as Israel, we need to start standing shoulder with this tiny oasis of democracy in a vast desert of savagery.

To do otherwise is moral cowardice of the most repugnant kind.

iodoherty@independent.ie

3-Feb-09: Simply a Miracle

If this is a ceasefire, Israelis might not be able to endure it much longer.

This morning, around 7am when kids are generally starting to head off for school, a reminder of the barbarism that infects Palestinian Arab Gaza crashed violently into the residential heart of Israel's largest southern city, Ashkelon. Not a mortar, this time. Not even a Qassam, as deadly as that can be. But a massive Grad rocket - flung into the air by terrorists operating under the Hamas regime, aimed at any possible Jewish target in range.

Several civilians suffered from shock; a number of cars were damaged and windows were shattered throughout the city.

YNet quotes Rafi Zvi, a bus driver: "The siren sounded as I left the station and began driving. I screamed to the passengers to get out immediately. There are sometimes those who are very confident and just stay there, but this time I had a bad feeling and I virtually pushed the passengers out... We ran towards the Israel Electric building, and as we escaped we saw the missile above our heads and heard a loud explosion. The back part of the bus where quite a few passengers had been sitting was shattered. [See picture above] We were really lucky, it was simply a miracle."

Jewish tradition forbids relying on miracles. Even when there's a ceasefire.

1-Feb-09: Fifteen rockets into Israel today. What's a proportionate response?

Several Israelis were injured by shrapnel during the day today (Sunday) from mortar shells fired by Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip. Their mortars were directed into Israel's Sha'ar Hanegev region in the western Negev.

The Jerusalem Post says some 15 Qassam rockets and mortar shells struck Israel during today. One landed about half way between two kindergartens in the Eshkol region; one struck the beleagured southern city of Sderot; two more hit open areas nearby; a fourth landed in the Sedot Negev region.

All of these are inhabited areas. None of them is a military zone. The weaponry of the Palestinian terrorists, as always, is pointed in the direction of civilians, and preferably at children. No Israeli victims are "caught in the crossfire". They are the target. It has always been this way.

Interesting to note that Fatah - which answers to the 'moderate' Mahmoud Abbas - took credit for at least one of today's attacks.

According to television's Channel 10, the IDF sent messages by phone to Palestinian Gazans living in Khan Yunis and Rafah late this afternoon and evening warning them to evacuate their houses "immediately."