Another day of liveblogging the media war; a sticky post, so keep coming back throughout the day. If you haven't already done so, Send A Soldier A Smile.
8:05 p.m. On Thursday (scroll down to 2:41 p.m), I took note of what I thought was a tactless CNN video. But other bloggers, including Professor Richard Landes, Little Green Footballs, and Powerline, took things further, questioning the video's veracity.
They touched a nerve: CNN's digging in its heels.
7:55 p.m. Just discovered I'm up to 300 followers on Twitter. Follow me here.
7:28 p.m. Nate Beeler and Steve Breen struck a chord with a few readers who saw these on Cagle Cartoons.
Darryl Cagle posted related cartoons by Bob Englehart, Rick McKee, Mike Lester, Ed Stein, Randy Bish, Chris Britt, and Dry Bones,
6:48 p.m. French authorities pulled the plug on Hamas's TV station, Al-Aqsa TV.
The decision by France's CSA, or broadcasting authority, requires Eutelsat, the country's leading satellite broadcaster and the world's third largest, to stop broadcasting Al-Aqsa TV. The channel started airing in 2007 and is modeled after Hezbollah's Al-Manar television channel, which has been designated a terrorist entity by the United States and was removed from Eutelsat in 2004 and 2005.
A few years ago, a Washington Times commentary clearly articulated why banning "Terror TV" doesn't contradict free speech.
6:35 p.m. Steve Emerson takes on the NY Times.
6:12 p.m. BBC Arabic's at it again.
Dr Kamal El-Helbawy, the founder of the Muslim Association of Britain, told a discussion program that, while he condemned the killing of civilians, he believed all Israeli children were "future soldiers".
He said: "A child born in Israel is raised on the belief that the Arabs are like contemptible sheep.
"In elementary school they pose the following math problem – 'In your village, there are 100 Arabs. If you killed 40, how many Arabs would be left for you to kill?'. This is taught in the Israeli curriculum."
I'm sure Trevor Asserson's not surprised.
6:01 p.m. New communique just went live online: Israel at War – Day 15.
5:29 p.m. An awful lot of people Digg this commentary in The Australian.
5:25 p.m. It never fails. An email purporting to feature graphic CNN footage from Gaza is really a phishing scam. CNet News explains:
When someone clicks on the video link on the fake CNN site, an error message pops up urging the visitor to download the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. Clicking on the download link installs an "SSL stealer" Trojan that captures financial and other sensitive information, RSA said in a blog.
More details at RSA blog.
5:07 p.m. The Israel-Gaza War, By the Numbers, via Daled Amos.
5:04 p.m. To the anger of the ruling mullahs, Israel ain't deterred against Iran's allies and proxies, says Meir Javedanfar.
4:57 p.m. Michael Gove wonders about coverage of Sri Lanka, Congo Gaza. Where's the missing context?
Whatever view one takes of Israel's actions, either in moral or military terms, no proper judgment of this conflict is possible without context. And that is what so many seem to miss. Hamas is not a national liberation movement, it is not a force dedicated to establishing a free and democratic Palestine. It is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist Islamist organisation which wants to unite the Islamic world in submission to its own, austere and totalitarian, view of Islam.
In all the reporting of events in Gaza how much attention has been paid to the ideology and history of Hamas, to the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood's founder Hassan al-Banna and the preaching of Hamas leaders such as the late Sheikh Yassin? How much space has been given to analysing the Hamas covenant with its proclamation that the Jews were behind the French revolution and its prediction that 'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them.
4:21 p.m. So far, HonestReporting has delivered 5,000 of your messages to Israeli soldiers; at last count, we have another 13,000 more to go. Did you Send a Soldier a Smile yet? OMedia (in Hebrew) picks up on our campaign.
4:12 p.m. Blame the Jooos. It's so easy . . .
4:06 p.m. Facing the prospect of a nuclear Iran, Israel and moderate Arab regimes like Egypt, Jordan and the Saudis have been increasingly aligned; however, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria takes note of a weakness which Iran is exploiting through the war in Gaza
This soft alliance has been encouraged and nurtured by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But its weak point is Arab public opinion, and Iran has always understood this. Tehran's strategy to undermine this alliance is to signal to the Arab public that it is the chief defender of the Palestinian cause and so cannot be an enemy of the Arab people. The real enemy, Tehran signals to the Arabs, is their own regimes.
Little by little, Iran is co-opting the Palestinian national movement. Where have you gone, Yasser Arafat?
3:44 p.m. Gaza psychiatrist Eyad El-Sarraj tries explaining the war to his 14-year-old stepdaughter:
I told her about my 2006 meeting with Elliot Abrams, a Bush administration official, who said that his administration would not accept the results of the Palestinians' democratic election that Hamas had won.
Then Hamas was ready to form a government with the secular Fatah party and was ready to join the political community. Hamas was willing to evolve, much like Sinn Fein had done in Ireland or the African National Congress in South Africa.
The Irish and South African models don't apply to Hamas; the blockade of Gaza began when the Islamic fundamentalists refused to agree to three Israeli demands: recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce violence or honor previous Israel-PA agreements.
2:34 p.m. Wired, via Kfir Pravda, updates on the latest from the from the social media and cyber frontlines.
2:16 p.m. Your daily dose of moral equivalence, courtesy the Edmonton Sun.
2:14 p.m. A staff-ed in The Independent frets for the two-state solution:
But while the Israeli state might have succeeded in degrading Hamas' military capabilities in the past two weeks, it cannot plausibly argue that Operation Cast Lead has helped to bring a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians any closer. And such a settlement is, ultimately, the only way to deliver the true and lasting security that both peoples deserve.
Au contraire. A two-state solution is a non-starter as long as rejectionists like Hamas (backed by Iran) are entrenched in Gaza. Israel will never cut a peace deal with any Palestinian leader who rules the West Bank but not Gaza as well.
In fact, destroying (or at least crippling) a terror-group whose idea of a one state solution is an Islamic state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean (even the BBC decoded that) is a pre-requisite. Otherwise, Hamas and Iran are left in a position to block Israel-Palestinian reapprochment and moderates will remain cowed by the extremists. Which would leave us facing a three-state solution.
1:49 p.m. Speaking of humanitarian aid, Martin Peretz prompts our question of the day. After a UN worker delivering aid to Gaza was killed, the UN suspended deliveries. Why is it okay for the UN to suspend deliveries, while Israel, under constant barrages, is expected to continue deliveries?
1:29 p.m. Via Joel Pollak, someone tried to smuggle military uniforms in a humanitarian aid shipment.
12:58 p.m. NY Times reporter Taghreed El-Khodary gets a big, big thumbs-up for the following dialogue that took place in Shifa Hospital. He engages a Hamas gunman who ran in, demanding immediate medical treatment:
He was told that there were more serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.
“Why are you so happy?” this reporter asked. “Look around you.”
A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.
“Don’t you see that these people are hurting?” the militant was asked.
“But I am from the people, too,” he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”
12:39 p.m. Contradiction of the day: LA Times says the glass is half-empty. Charles Krauthammer says the cup's full and will overflow if Israel's careful.
12:36 p.m. Israeli reporter Ron Ben-Yishai spent a day embedded with the IDF.
12:31 p.m. The NY Times gets it. So does today's Sunday Times (actually, I meant this Times of London).
12:24 p.m. Alan Dershowitz outlines how Hamas uses civilian shields and the media to fight Israel. It's called The CNN Strategy:
The strategy is as simple as it is cynical: Provoke Israel by playing Russian roulette with its children, firing rockets at kindergartens, playgrounds and hospitals; hide behind its own civilians when firing at Israeli civilians; refuse to build bunkers for its own civilians; have TV cameras ready to transmit every image of dead Palestinians, especially children; exaggerate the number of civilians killed by including as "children" Hamas fighters who are 16 or 17 years old and as "women," female terrorists.
Hamas itself has a name for this. They call it "the CNN strategy" (this is not to criticize CNN or any other objective news source for doing its job; it is to criticize Hamas for exploiting the freedom of press which it forbids in Gaza). The CNN strategy is working because decent people all over the world are naturally sickened by images of dead and injured children. When they see such images repeatedly flashed across TV screens, they tend to react emotionally. Rather than asking why these children are dying and who is to blame for putting them in harm's way, average viewers, regardless of their political or ideological perspective, want to see the killing stopped.
In a separate LA Times commentary, Dershowitz notes that Hamas leaders know how to keep the CNN Strategy from boomeranging back on them.
The best proof of Hamas' media strategy of manipulating sympathy is the way it dealt with a rocket it fired the day before Israel's airstrikes began. The rocket fell short of its target in Israel and landed in Gaza, killing two young Palestinian girls. Hamas, which exercises total control of Gaza, censored any video coverage of those deaths. Although there were print reports, no one saw pictures of these two dead Palestinian children because they were killed by Palestinian rockets rather than by Israeli rockets. Hamas knows that pictures are more powerful than words.
Here's the video Hamas doesn't want Gaza to see.
12:18 p.m. Edward Luttwak says Hezbollah honcho Hassan Nasrallah left Hamas twisting in the wind:
Of course, none of this prevented the Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah from claiming that he had won a great victory for God. Had his victorious claims actually been true, Israel should have been deterred from attacking Hamas. And by his logic, Israel would have cowered in fear of thousands of more rockets from Hamas, and the even more powerful rockets that Hezbollah would launch in tandem. Nasrallah certainly encouraged Hamas to attack Israel in language that implied he would intervene if a war ensued — a credible promise had he really won a victory in 2006.
But as soon as the fighting started in Gaza, Nasrallah reversed the terms of his declarations — threatening Israel if it attacked Lebanon (which of course nobody in Israel would want to do). When three rockets were fired from inside Lebanon on Thursday, Hezbollah wasted no time assuring the Israelis that it had nothing to do with it, and that it did not even have that type of rocket in their inventory. This is a familiar trope of the Palestinian experience. There is always some extremist leader ready to instigate the Palestinians to fight, implicitly promising his valiant participation — until the fighting begins and the promises are forgotten in fear of Israeli retaliation.
Why do you think Hamas believed Hezbollah's over-hyped claims of "divine victory."
12:16 p.m. Aaaargh. Entire day's worth of posts just disappeared and I don't know what the heck happened. Here's a quick reconstruction.
