The brutal Palestinian infighting and Hamas takeover of Gaza does not fit comfortably into the all-too popular and one-sided conception that Palestinians bear no responsibility for their own actions. Taking a look at the BBC, Melanie Phillips notes:
According to its ineffable Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, the barbarism meted out by the Palestinians of Gaza upon each other is All Israel’s Fault:
The institutions, and the hopes behind them, have already taken a severe battering from Israel’s military actions over the last seven years and, more recently, by the punishing financial sanctions imposed by Israel and other countries after Hamas won a free election at the beginning of last year… What has happened also shows the failure of the decision of the world’s big powers to isolate Hamas. The financial sanctions they imposed, which caused severe hardship and helped fuel the violence in Gaza by making people even more desperate, were designed to either force Hamas to recognise Israel or to push it out of power. The policy has achieved neither objective.
No mention that aid to Gaza has at the very least doubled since these ‘punishing financial sanctions’ were imposed. No acknowledgement that it was Hamas’s genocidal attacks on Israel that caused these sanctions to be imposed. No awareness of the absurdity of blaming the violence on the ‘desperation’ caused by sanctions when a) it is plainly a power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, b) the Palestinians were given the opportunity to turn Gaza into a flourishing society two years ago, but within hours showed how ‘desperate’ they were not to achieve this by destroying millions of dollars’ worth of greenhouses that the Israelis had left for them to make money from, and c) Hamas is demonstrably not despairing at all but exultant that it can now tyrannise the inhabitants of Gaza all the way back to the 7th century.
Comments to the BBC – http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
BAD KARMA
The BBC is not the only media outlet to engage in this syndrome. Writing in The Guardian, Karma Nabulsi is also determined to sanitise the Palestinian situation by blaming everyone but the Palestinians. On top of this, in a skewed rewriting of history, Nabulsi conveniently forgets the surge of Palestinian terrorism that prompted an Israeli military response, claiming: “the Palestinians began to resist this form of external control. Israel then invaded the West Bank cities again and put President Yasser Arafat’s compound under a two-year siege, which ended with his death.”
Nabulsi continues to treat terror with kid gloves: “Arafat had followed the strategy of all successful liberation movements: a combination of resistance and negotiation until the conclusion of a comprehensive peace treaty.”
Comments to The Guardian – [email protected]
MISLEADING STATISTICS, MISGUIDED APPROACH
Johann Hari, writing in The Independent, fully acknowledges the extremism and anti-Semitism of Hamas, yet still reaches some odd conclusions. Hari refers to Palestinian protestors in the street “waving Palestinian flags and singing “Give Peace A Chance””, jumping to the assumption that these women and children are wishing for peace with Israel rather than between their own people in Gaza.
Drawing upon a poll that “63 per cent [of Palestinians] supported full recognition of Israel in return for a proper Palestinian state“, Hari misleadingly claims that “This means there is actually a bigger pro-peace constituency in Palestine than in Israel, where Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharanot polling just found that 58 per cent of Israelis now reject the idea of trading land for peace, because they think the Palestinians are irrevocably committed to destroying them.”
The vast majority of Israelis support peace and a two-state solution, which is also the stated policy of the elected Israeli government. The desire for peace, however, is not incompatible with scepticism on the part of Israelis, who have traded land and received not peace, but missiles from Gaza and continued threats of terrorism. To claim that there is a “bigger pro-peace constituency in Palestine than in Israel” is simply absurd and also, yet again, absolves Palestinian responsibility for electing a Hamas government that made no secret of its rejectionist approach towards Israel.
Hari, however, claims:
Instead, they [Hamas] observed the unilateral truce with Israel. They offered a hudna (ceasefire) that would last a generation. They gave up staging suicide-murders against Israeli civilians. They even said they would respect all previous agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority – a de facto concession that they would recognise Israel.
Subscribers are invited to remind Hari of the kidnap of Gilad Shalit, the continuous barrage of Qassam missiles aimed at Sderot and surrounding Israeli towns and villages, the weapons smuggling through the Egyptian-Gaza border and other such acts that contradict Hari’s misguided views – [email protected].
to media bias.
