An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth
Last edited Wed Aug 27, 2014, 02:02 AM - Edit history (1)
Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. A representative article from a recent issue of The New Yorker described the summer’s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazed génocidaires of ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.
When the hysteria abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as particularly important. People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including many unarmed innocents. I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths, or the deaths of Israel’s soldiers, will change something, that they mark a turning point. But they don’t. This round was not the first in the Arab wars with Israel and will not be the last. The Israeli campaign was little different in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a country’s own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid civilian deaths.
The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.
While global mania about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility—in this case, journalists and editors. The world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that profession—my profession—here in Israel.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/183033/israel-insider-guide?all=1
= new reply since forum marked as read
on hundreds of civilians in a UN school to get 1 or 2 hamas members with or with out rockets isn't just a moronic argument but a war crime.
You cannot "selectively" bomb babies and other children.
Of those, 222 were women and 418 were children.
This is from Washington Post Gaza counter.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/gaza-counter/
217 were armed Palestinian militants. Of those, 2 were children.
1396 were Palestinian civilians. Of those, 222 were women and 418 were children.
277 Palestinians had an unknown role.
The IDF does a very good job of killing civilians.
Then after that, you can say the cause of death was a mystery...
And then, maybe they didn't even die at all! More Pallywood!
No, Mosby, those innocent children died because Israel dropped bombs on them.