Promoted by Steven D. Title says it all. We get all excited in our media when Saddam is captured or Zarqawi killed, or Abu Ghraib is exposed, but only for a brief moment, then we hit the snooze button. Rarely does our media highlight the underlying basis for why much of the Arab world despises us, and that has to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like it or not, Israel is seen as an American puppet (or we’re seen as an Israeli one) in the Arab street.
The least we can do is take notice of the stories that incite them against America. Our media likes to simplify the world for us: over here are the good guys (Israel) , and over here are the terrorists (Palestinians). So they only pay attention to the conflict when the good guys are attacked, not when the bad guys get blown up. The reality is, as you know, more complex than that, and we desperately need to understand both sides of this conflict.
GAZA (Reuters) – Islamic militant group Hamas called off a 16-month-old truce with Israel after attacks blamed on Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians, including children playing on a beach.
Israel’s army, which had been shelling northern Gaza to curb rocket fire by militants, said it was investigating the deaths.
…
Renewed violence could bury Western hopes of pressuring Hamas to soften its stand and raise questions over a referendum that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas planned on a statehood proposal implicitly recognizing Israel.
“The Israeli massacres represent a direct opening battle,” Hamas’s armed wing said in a statement echoed by its political leaders.
- “The earthquake in the Zionist cities will resume and the herds of occupiers have no choice but to prepare the coffins or the departing luggage.”
Palestinian officials said Israeli air strikes and artillery fire killed 10 Palestinians in Gaza, the highest Palestinian toll in a single day since 2004. Seven people, including five from the same family, were killed in what Palestinian officials said was Israeli shellfire from boats on to a crowded beach.
Among the dead were three children, aged 1, 3 and 10. Their sister, who had been swimming, survived. Twenty people were wounded. Covered in blood, children screamed as adults carried the wounded and dead from the sand.
Ten Palestinian civilians, including five children, died from shellfire as they were picnicking on a northern Gaza beach and 45 persons were wounded in the attack.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
No news here in Deutschland either, haven’t you heard, we just won the the opening of the world master! No news will penetrated until the soccer, er Fussball, games are over. It’s really amazing!
Thanks for bringing my attention to this story Oui.
Why is it that violence comes so easy and empathy comes so hard?
Boy that’s really the 64 dollar question isn’t it Kahli. If everyone was forced to have to find real empathy for the other side, I think you’d have a real breakthrough in any peace process. No matter what any rightwinger thinks working on and for peace is a hundred times harder than blowing the shit out of people and their property.
I heard a spokesperson for the Israeli govt. on BBC news introduce the idea that it may have been unexploded ordinance on the beach that blew up and killed these innocents. He took pains to not emphasize that angle, but the fact that he even brought it up is indicative of the cowardice that exists at the very core of all these murderous lunatics.
Whether it’s Bush or bin Laden, (the murder wing of)Hamas, Zarqawi or the Israeli Defense Forces, the destructive pathologies are so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable.
I didn’t see that BBC News report, but I saw the same mentality at work on MSNBC last Friday on the subject of Haditha.
It was an interview with the brother of Lance Cpl. Miguel Terraza, the Marine killed in Haditha on 19 November 2005, in response to whose death the Marines are alleged to have killed those 24 civilians. The first thing the interviewer asked about was some comments Miguel Terraza had made in a letter home to his brother, about how hard it was to spot the enemy in an insurgency because they didn’t wear uniforms but dressed like the rest of the population.
The interviewer didn’t come out and say that those 24 dead Iraqis – including children shot in their beds – were legitimate military targets, but that was certainly implicit in his line of questioning. It was a preemptive strike against any unfavourable outcome that might emerge from the inquiry into the behavior of the Marines at Haditha. It laid the groundwork for excusing the murder of children by telling us, implicitly, that it’s not really murder should U.S. Marines shoot Iraqi children; all those Hajis look alike you see, which makes all of them suspect. So really, killing them is self-defense. Even when we’re talking about three and four year olds.
We have an amazing ability to excuse whatever we do.
I saw that interview also. The brother was the perfect embodiment of “weaponized ignorance” in action.
It’s amazing how easily emotions like fear and anger can so easily overwhelm reason and provide cover for an atrocity-approving mindset.
Crusade, Jihad, Racism, religious war, all of these are ignorance based pathologies empowered by fear and rage, the two most effective weapons in the propagandists arsenal.
this tonight with wrenching video of the young girl calling for her father and then finding him dead on the beach, hit during their picnic outing. Then, there was the bit with the little girl in the hospital who could not keep her teeth from chattering.
Utterly wrenching.
And why has this sort of thing not been seen on US TV before this? Not since the father trying to shield his young son who was killed by, allegedly, Israeli military shots has the agony of Palestinian civilians been shown.
Why now?
Because of Haditha and the other possible misdeeds by US military? To show that we’re not the only military which ends of taking out innocent children and their parents?
Why now????
Good point. The emerging meme is bound to be something like; “It’s always a tragedy when these sorts of things happen, but war is hell and if the militant Palestinians, (or Iraqis or Al Qaeda) didn’t go on making trouble these things wouldn’t need to happen.”
Always blame the victim or the victim’s countrymen for the problem. Never accept blame upon yourself! This is the way of all cowardly aggressors and thugs from time immemorial. Stalin, BushCo, Pol Pot, Pinochet; all are cast from the same mold ultimately.
Israel’s army, which had been shelling northern Gaza to curb rocket fire by militants, said it was investigating the deaths.
Although I’m sure that these killings are accidental inasmuch as the IDF wasn’t aiming for these particular individuals, shelling civilian areas in northern Gaza is not an accident. Qassams are not very effective, but they are very difficult to stop militarily because they are so portable. So Israel hopes that if it can make the civilian population hurt badly enough, they will manage to stop the Qassams. (I don’t think that is very logical, but that does seem to be the rationale that the Israeli govt is operating under).
Arnon Soffer, a leading Israeli demographer who was a confidant of Ariel Sharon and supposedly influential in his decision to disengage from the Palestinians by fencing them in behind imposed borders, explained how Israel would enforce its unilateral solution:
The IDF cannot acknowledge that it is targeting civilians to make them compliant, because that’s a war crime, but in April (the day after 8-year-old Hadil Ghaber was killed by an Israeli shell landing on her house) Ha’aretz included this near the end of a report on her death:
So they’re technically firing near, rather than at, residential neighborhoods, but so near that it is inevitable they will hit civilians.
It is no secret in Israel that the real target of the shelling is actually Palestinian public opinion rather than actual military targets, e.g. Ynet ran an editorial on it in April (Some methods of dealing with rocket attacks simply not kosher), but I’m sure for the U.S. audience this event will be stripped of its context and will be written off as “collateral” damage from an errant shell.
pure and simple terrorism the same as a car bomb in a market, or a suicide bomb in an enetertainment venue. Just because the perpetrators wear uniforms, carry ranks and fire large artillery pieces does not legitimize the act. Just because high ranking government spokespeople who are allies of the west explain it away does not legitimize the act.
And all the State Dept. could say was….”We support Israel’s right to support herself”.
Made mention of your post on my blog, for whatever it’s worth.
I posted about this on my blog as well and noted how the NYT tries to link Hamas to al-queda.