Without passing judgment the NYT reported on the Hezbollah Shrine to Terrorist Suspect Enthralls Lebanese Children

The dead man being shown such veneration is Imad Mugniyah, the shadowy Hezbollah commander. Until his death in a car bombing in Syria in February he was virtually unknown here, his role in the militant Shiite group clothed in secrecy. But since then Hezbollah has hailed him as one of its great military leaders in the struggle against Israel.

Now, the group has opened an exhibit in this southern town in honor of Mr. Mugniyah, who is widely accused in the West of masterminding devastating bombings, kidnappings and hijackings in the 1980s and ’90s. His stern, bearded face towers over the transformed parking lot where the exhibit is taking place, along with banners exalting him as “the leader of the two victories” — the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and the 2006 summer war with Israel.

The presentation, which opened Aug. 15, is Hezbollah’s most ambitious multimedia exhibit to date, meant to dramatize the group’s bitter conflict with Israel on the second anniversary of their latest war. Schoolchildren pour in throughout the day, absorbing the carefully honed message of heroic resistance. At night, light and laser shows illuminate the weaponry and tanks, and overflow crowds have been keeping it open until after 1 a.m.

There are two points to note about the article.

It was conceived by the architect Ahmed Tirani and built in just three weeks by a staff of 290 working around the clock. In addition to an extraordinary array of weaponry and martyrs’ paraphernalia, it includes a large indoor room that was remodeled to resemble “what we believe the martyrs’ heaven is like,” according to one of the guides on duty.

“[W]eaponry and martyr’s paraphernalia?” Wouldn’t the word “terrorist” or, at least, “militant” be more appropriate? Or did this article have to pass muster with Hezbollah?

And the article ends with this positive note:

“I came here to teach my kids the culture of resistance,” said a visitor who gave his name only as Ahmed, as he stood with his wife and two children. “I want them to see what the enemy is doing to us, and what we can do to fight them, because this enemy is not merciful.”

Hezbollah’s unmerciful enemy just traded a child killer for the corpses of two soldiers who were kidnapped and killed in violation of international law. The child killer was celebrated by Hezbollah and its supporters. This fellow, whose views go unchallenged has a strange idea of mercy.

The short story:

Here’s what they’re teaching the kiddies in southern Lebanon: Revere terrorist masterminds.

Similarly Elder of Ziyon writes:

A society is truly twisted when it sends hundreds of children to venerate - and emulate - a bloodthirsty killer.

Israel Matzav adds:

Mugniyah was likely the pre-eminent terror tactician of his generation. I don’t know who killed him, but I’m happy he’s gone. For those who are interested, the Times has more pictures and a slide show at the link above. Personally, I found it sickening.

What’s also sickening is the casual way this museum is described without a trace of judgment or outrage. Hezbollah has threatened revenge against Israel and Jewish targets worldwide as revenge for the killing of Mughniyeh, something that needs to be taken seriously in light of yesterday’s arrests in Canada.

Hezbollah isn’t just a bunch of religious eccentrics who have a problem with Israel, but an international terrorist organization targeting Jews all around the world. This article served to distract from that reality.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The approach to threats against Israel is one of those things that is taken casually. Here’s Secretary Rice on the regular but (relatively) infrequent Qassams that still get fired into Israel despite the ceasefire with Hamas:

QUESTION: How does the ceasefire in Gaza help matters? Has it endured better than you imagined?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it has its ups and downs, obviously. But look, I - we said early on that if there - that calm in Gaza would be a useful thing because it - the Egyptians, who - with whom we worked, have managed to keep what is a very fragile situation at least stable, and that’s certainly a help to any process of trying to move forward on the peace process.

Ultimately, though, Gaza has to be resolved and it has to be resolved on the basis of the - Abu Mazen’s program for it, which is that legitimate Palestinian Authority institutions have to be reinstated. I think we want to continue to look at what can be done at the crossings for regularization of those ultimately along the lines of the November 2005 agreement. So this is not, I think, a metastable situation, but it’s a situation that for now has seemed to allow at least people to - you know, the levels of violence to stay low, and that’s welcome.

(h/t My Right Word)

Nothing about the threat from Hamas’s building of fortifications and re-arming. Somehow Abu Mazen (she’s using his nom de guerre, how reassuring) is going to impose his authority on Gaza.

And how’s that Abu Mazen thing going? Didn’t Israel just build his confidence? Why yes they did. The New York Times reports:

Israel released almost 200 Palestinian prisoners Monday in a good-will gesture aimed at reinvigorating the faltering peace process. Hours later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the country to make her own push for a deal between the two sides.

And what does this “good will gesture” entail?

Among those freed Monday were two men whom Israel says have “blood on their hands,” meaning they had been convicted in attacks that harmed Israelis. Said al-Atabeh, 57, who had been in custody since 1977, was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner.

“This is a great joy for our mothers and our people, but it remains a small step because we left behind us thousands of prisoners,” Mr. Atabeh said after his release, according to Reuters.

Mr. Atabeh had been convicted in bombings that killed one Israeli woman and wounded dozens of people.

A second long-serving prisoner was Mohammed Abu Ali, who had been jailed since 1980 for the murder of an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

However, most of those set free had been arrested for lesser crimes within the past two years.

“It’s not easy for Israel to release prisoners,” said a government spokesman, Mark Regev, according to The Associated Press. “But we understand the importance of the prisoner issue for Palestinian society.”

(h/t Boker Tov Boulder)

Note that “blood on their hands” is in quotes. Why not just write “who were convicted of murder in the commission of acts of terror?” (without the quotes, of course) Why is almost as much time spent describing the prisoners by the length of time served as by the crimes they committed?

By emphasizing the time served changes their status from terrorists to prisoners. Put another way Snapped Shot asks and answers a question about the coverage of the prisoner release:

How does our “impartial” press choose to represent them?

You guessed it: As heroes.

And as far as the release of prisoners being important for Palestinian society, Israelly Cool explains why it’s important.

These murderers are but two of the “prisoners” we freed today, as a “goodwill” gesture to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. And he reciprocated with a goodwill gesture of his own - a threat that unless all the “prisoners” are freed, there will be no peace.

Speaking of gestures, this one made by the released prisoners does not mean “peace.” It means “V for victory”, and is basically a promise that the terrorism will continue.

JoshuaPundit writes (regarding Condoleeza Rice but the general point holds) about what’s not important:

No mention of course on whether it might matter a lot to the Israelis to keep these killers behind bars.I doubt that matter penetrates her consciousness.

Nor does it matter to Mahmoud Abbas, who referred to the released terrorists as ‘heroes’ and made a point of saying that no peace agreement with Israel was possible until all of the terrorists are released.Nor did eithr he or Condaleeza Rice have the common decency to mention a single word about Gilad Shalit, who’s still being held incommunicado in the Gaza Strip.

And as noted before past experience shows that these prisoner releases will lead to more terror, not peace.

Israel freed 400 Palestinian prisoners and five other prisoners in return for Elhanan Tannenbaum, who was held captive by Hizbullah, and for the bodies of three soldiers kidnapped on Mount Dov. According to Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Tzahi Hanegbi, from the date of the deal on January 29, 2004, until April 17, 2007, those freed in the deal had murdered 35 Israelis.

The Washington Post describes the issue of prisoner releases like this:

Israel has periodically released Palestinian prisoners, whose fate is among the most politically and emotionally compelling issues for the Palestinian public, to shore up Abbas’s government. Abbas favors negotiations with Israel to create an independent Palestinian state, while the rival Hamas movement has advocated destruction of the Jewish state. The releases, although modest, are designed to show that Abbas’s approach yields rewards.

“Modest?” “yields rewards?” No mention that there’s a very good chance that a portion of the terrorist released will likely return to terrorism. So who receives the “rewards” other than terrorists who have seen their terms reduced, is not clear. No mention that the fellow who “favors negotiations” considers resistance (i.e. terrorism) to be peace. There’s something really Orwellian here.

And as a Blog for All writes:

It’s supposed to help bolster Fatah in their internecine struggle with Hamas, but all it does is provide more fodder for the terrorists to hold out hope that they can beat Israel for control over all territory West of the Jordan River.

Despite the romantic terms used to describe the prisoner release, they present a real risk to Israel. When will the world demand that the Palestinians take similar risks for peace?

Crossposted on Yourish.

Never mind that Israel allows large quantities of goods into Gaza and the Palestinians themselves smuggle even more in via tunnels from Egypt. But a bunch of anti-Israel activists decided to make some PR and “run” Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza.

Two wooden boats carrying dozens of human rights activists reached the Gaza Strip on Saturday afternoon after the Israeli navy decided not to hinder the challenge to Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian enclave. Thousands of Palestinians turned out to welcome the group, which brought token humanitarian aid, including hearing aids and balloons.

The Post’s headline proclaims that the boats “broke” the blockade, but Israel let them pass unhindered.

(In some of the early publicity - it wasn’t news, it was unvarnished PR - it was noted that a Holocaust survivor was going to be on the boat. The Post’s PR release doesn’t mention her among the celebrities on the boat. Did she change her mind or was the Post just unaware of her presence.)

Meryl points out that since the ship of fools didn’t meet any resistance they charged that Israel jammed their instruments to prevent them from reaching Gaza.

However Backspin points out that the activists may not have such an easy time leaving Gaza as they did arriving.

And despite the crowds cheering their arrival, left unreported by many organizations was

once it turned out these boats contain too little food and mostly activists…some people left the beach disappointed.

(h/t Judeopundit - read the whole thing! )

Funny but there was a whole lot else going on in Gaza this weekend that somehow the Post’s Linda Gradstein failed to report:

Hamas stormed Al Azhar University in Gaza and the ensuing riots saw many injuries, including professors and a vice president of the university.

A teachers’ union in Gaza decided to go on strike to protest these sorts of attacks against teachers by Hamas. Hamas responded by abducting a Rafah school principal, one of the leaders of the union.

So a bunch of self promoting dweebs shilling for the Hamas government go sailing and that’s news. But when the government they’re supporting suppresses academic freedom that’s not news.

If the sailors wanted to do good, why couldn’t they go to the Sinai find some smuggling tunnels, stand in front of them and demand that the Palestinians not smuggle weapons into Gaza? Or at least insist that the Palestinians build tunnels that meet OSHA standards?

Crossposted on Yourish.

Someone didn’t get the New York Times editorial staff’s memo. The one that said:

A way must be found to help turn Hamas into a legitimate and acceptable negotiating partner.

Because here’s what the “negotiating partner” has to say about negotiations:

“Jerusalem will be retrieved to the Palestinians not through negotiations or by hugging and kissing the enemy, but by way of jihad, blood, shahids and resistance. With Allah’s help, Jerusalem will be returned,” he said.

And if that’s not enough for you, let me remind you that Ismail Haniyeh is the man elected by the Palestinians to represent them in negotiations. And he says he won’t accept negotiations:

Haniyeh said that “according to most all reports on secret peace talks or agreements, Israel is refusing to relinquish Jerusalem and the West Bank, refuses to accept the right of return of Palestinian refugees, refuses to dismantle the settlements and deems the Jordan Valley vital to its security.

“On behalf of the Palestinian nation and Muslims everywhere, I say that we will not accept any such agreements,” he said.

So, you think the folks who write the Times editorials are going to get a clue?

When hell freezes over, perhaps.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the world media and political elite ignore statements like this (which are repeated every few weeks, without fail) and insist that Hamas can be talked to, and brought into the negotiations process. Go and peruse my Hamas category to find statements like this over and over and over again. Hamas wants one thing, and only one thing: The destruction of the state of Israel, and its replacement with an Islamic caliphate. Anyone who tells you anything different is lying.

Reuters has a puff piece that pretends to be reporting about the “liberalization” of Saudi Arabian cities. Let’s take a look.

The Saudi government has a project to develop at least four “economic cities” where many expect the religious establishment will be kept at a distance from social life, the workplace and education.

Women will be able to drive in them and there may even be cinema houses.

There are already some spaces in the country of 25 million people where the religious police — charged with maintaining “public morals” — are nowhere to be seen.

Premise one: Saudis (and by extension, foreign nationals) will be able to live normal, mostly-Sharia-free lives in at least four places.
Premise two: Women will be able to drive.
Premise three: There may be movie theaters. (Hoo-boy, the Saudis are going to join the twentieth century!)
Premise four: Areas already exist where the religious police “are nowhere to be seen”.

Now let’s take apart these premises, using the rest of the Reuters piece.

Jeddah carries the slogan “Jeddah is different” and Riyadh residents spend summer holidays in the Red Sea city, where local women with uncovered faces swan through shopping malls or sit in late-night shisha-pipe dens.

“Uncovered faces” is not exactly able to drive, work, and relax in public without fear of the religious police beating them and hauling them off to jail. And we discover that the zealots are chomping at the bit to take down these dens of iniquity.

Islamists constantly fulminate against the situation in Jeddah as if it was Sodom and Gomorrah.

The religious police generally also avoid the diplomatic district in Riyadh and Dhahran in the Eastern Province that houses Aramco.

Residents of the Eastern Province say the vice squad generally also leaves the city of Khobar alone, but has a strong presence in the neighbouring city of Dammam.

Please note the words in bold. If the religious police “generally” avoid areas, that means that there is a presence, and that they are not “nowhere to be seen.” So these women are at risk of being arrested pretty much at any time.

Premises one, two, and four have all been disproven by the very words in the rest of the Reuters article. As for premise three, again, well, gee, movie theaters. That’s so 1900.

Way to shill for the Saudis, though. Yes, that liberalization of Saudi Arabia continues apace. How long before the new, and highly touted coed university is attacked by either terrorists or the religious police?

I don’t know about you, but I am feeling nostalgic about the years when there was some rich fisking material in the works of Fisk. When one could sink one’s teeth into some juicy fact-shuffling, ignorance or the usual passion for things un-Western (or, rather, anti-Western).

I realize that it is over for a long time since that infamous beating. Whether it caused some neurons in that brain to go boing (or whatever the neurons do when knocked about) or the impact was more of psychological nature, I wouldn’t presume to guess. Still, one could only hope, even in vain, for the return of the good old Fisk.

So I confess freely to taking a shufti at the pages of Indy now and then to see whether there is some fisking to do on Fisk. Shame, I know, but old habits and all that. And of course, one couldn’t really fisk something like this:

Robert Fisk’s World: A region boiling with tales of kings, gangs and war

So, according to the anonymous editor of Indy’s online pages, there is already a whole world belonging to Fisk. It makes sense, actually, since the man has been cooking on another planet for quite a long time, and obviously by now it’s a fully populated world.

What is encouraging, however, that the Master is again sticking the word “Israel” into his texts. In this one it appears four times, even when the article is not about Israel as such - OK, here I am being wrong - in that world of Fisk Israel is over every table and under every bed, so there…

Let us dispose of the mentions of Israel first:

1. …American reporters are so fearful of being criticised by Israel that their work is bland to the point of incomprehension…
2. …David Petraeus, the US commander who has turned anarchic Iraq into a tourist paradise with just one surge and a lot of walls (or “fences” as we would have to call them if they were built in Israel).
3. Since 2006, the US has given about £170m in military assistance to Lebanon – Israel, of course, gets £1.5bn year – which includes Humvees, ammunition and lots of new blue police cars.
4. Yet still the Middle East debates whether Israel or the US will bomb Iran. Personally, I don’t believe this will happen…

I don’t see any special need to comment on the above, aside of that last one: I was quite sure that this wouldn’t happen till I read it. The man is a walking reverse prophet. Take his prophecy and bet all your money on the opposite - you can’t go wrong.

Well, so what is the article about after all? Here is my attempt to gather some points:

• Two groups from Moscow fought it out with Kalashnikovs amid Dubai’s architectural masterpieces.
• [news items are] bursting into the papers when I’m on holiday or flying back to Beirut from Los Angeles, or, most awful of all, when I’m marching into The Independent office in London for a rare visit.
• …journalists are often more interesting to talk to than to read.
• The Middle East is currently boiling with rumours about the state of the monarchy in Morocco.
• Engineers in Dubai have apparently noticed that the carriages on the largely overhead track will be so narrow that passengers will not be able to carry baggage on them.
• Petraeus saw Lebanon’s new President, Michel Sleiman, and the acting commander of Lebanon’s army, General Shawki el-Masri…
• Less than a week after Petraeus’s visit, Sleiman was to pay his first presidential visit to Damascus, Did the American general perhaps have a few requests to make of President Bashar al-Assad via Sleiman?
• Well, if America bombs Iran, the Islamic republic’s missiles are likely to come hissing towards US forces in Qatar [do you hear that zipper opening sound?]
• I received a letter last week from an old friend whose son has just returned from military duties in Iraq. And he’s been wandering the Pisgah mountains in the US with a group of schoolkids in an area where he noticed a lot of military training going on a year ago…And I looked carefully through my friend’s snapshots of rocky mountainsides and thick forests. And, darn me if they didn’t remind me of the Elborz mountain chain just outside Tehran.

This is it, more or less. Reach your own conclusions from the above. The man is not known for any outstanding acts of gratuitous violence, rather the opposite - he is always ready to be beaten, as long as the beating is administered by some anti-American element, if possible of agricultural persuasion. So there is no urgent need to see him off to a funny farm.

But no, nothing to fisk here… move on, people…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Dion Nissenbaum’s in high dudgeon because Israel is “punishing” Al Jazeera.

How’s that?

The Israeli government stopped helping Al Jazeera after the station aired a birthday celebration for Samir Kuntar, the Lebanese killer freed last month in a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah.

Danny Seaman, the head of Israel’s government press office, called the celebration “unfathomable” and said he would stop helping the station by providing press cards and work visas for its reporters.

Nissenbaum admits that Al Jazeera “apologized” for the celebration, but he doesn’t seem quite clear what Al Jazeera is. At the end of his post Nissenbaum quotes Danny Seaman with the definitive reason for Israel’s refusal to continue enabling Al Jazeera.

“This is a fundamental question as to where Al Jazeera stands,” Seaman told Reuters. “Does it stand with the extremists or is it a professional organization?”

Time and again it has demonstrated that it’s a propaganda organization. Did it escape Nissenbaum’s notice that David Marash quit as Al Jazeera’s anchor a few mohts ago? Or perhaps the classy way it’s going about recruiting conservative commentators?

Nissenbaum shouldn’t be standing up for Al Jazeera, or is it that he shares its worldview and is scared that the Israel government may stop abetting him from spreading propaganda. I don’t know what was filthier, Al Jazeera’s birthday party for Samir Kuntar, or Nissenbaum’s celebration of Kuntar’s release. Al Jazeera, of course, is a propaganda organization, Nissenbaum is supposedly a journalist. Though his treatment of Kuntar and his sympathy for Al Jazeera, makes me wonder.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Back in January 2007, Media Backspin observed that the number of news organizations with Israel (or Middle East) desks was decreasing, a trend that was likely to accelerate (and did).

He quoted an analyst who wrote:

Many news organizations rushed reporters from far-flung locales to the Middle East when fighting erupted between Israel and Hezbollah. But there’s no substitute for coverage by correspondents based in a region and knowledgeable about its history and culture.

I wasn’t much bothered by the trend as I wrote at the time:

The problem hasn’t been the reporting but the analysis that is so often added to or overwhelms the coverage. I don’t need a reporter to give me context; I need the reporter to give me facts. For too long reporters have felt it their job is to provide context that necessarily injects their own feelings into the report. It is that, more than anything else, that has led to the prevailing view that media is biased. And it is because of that, they have lost the trust of so much of the public.

The Jerusalem desk has been a plum assignment for budding editors and book authors. It affords the reporter many opportunities to demonstrate that the Arab-Israeli conflict is more complex than it appears at first.

But now we get another reason for the declining number of Jerusalem bureaus. Daled Amos suggests:

Maybe the answer has more to do with recognized failure of the media to cover the Iraqi War in an honest and balanced way–and how the latest Palestinian vs. Palestinian violence may indicate to the viewers that the media was not exactly accurate on how they were presenting the Israel-Palestinian conflict either.

He’s got a point. Consider that in recent months we’ve seen the NYT do the State Department’s bidding and embarrass the Israeli government into taking security risks. And as I noted, news organization too often uncritically copy the allegations of NGO’s who are out to slander Israel.

Elder of Ziyon followed up and noted that the reporting on the recent Physician for Human Rights report was marred by laziness. Information was available in the full reports that would have made any sentient being question the allegations, but no reporter was motivated enough to do anything more than accept the press release from the organization.

There is a decline of the foreign media presence in Israel. Because of how poorly journalists have been plying their trade in the Middle East, I am still not convinced that’s a bad thing.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Yesterday I blogged about a Physicians for Human Rights report that accused Israel of pressuring Palestinians seeking medical treatment in Israel into becoming informers. Honest Reporting provided a link to Gerald Steinberg who questions the claims:

Similarly, in this publication, the “evidence” is entirely based on unverifiable claims, primarily from 11 interviewees from Gaza who allegedly asked Israel for permission to cross from the territory controlled by Hamas for medical care. Some of these Palestinians may have genuine medical needs, but others may be inventing stories that sell well in an environment that is inherently hostile to Israel. PHR-I has issued press releases declaring a Palestinian to be dead after Israel refused to allow him to cross the border, but he turned out to be alive. And in NGO reports on Palestinian suffering, Gazans who claimed to have been denied permission to study at universities in the United States were exposed as imposters. Unless the evidence can be checked be independently verified, it should be treated with the same skepticism used by professional journalists regarding other self-serving stories.

Steinberg describes this as the “halo effect,” where NGO’s are accorded a status of unimpeachable authorities even if their records are less that pristine. The media then takes the claims made by NGO’s at face value while doing precious little verification. After all, the NGO gave them the information they were looking for, indicting Israel for one crime or another.

The Augean Stables relates a relevant observation (h/t LGF):

A few friends of mine went to a party in Jerusalem that was primarily made up Anglophone reporters, people who work for NGOs and UN agencies. What amazed them was the pervasive sense of the people they met and spoke with that Israel was the greatest human rights violator in the world and that the dismantling of Israel would be a great step forward for global human rights.

Now the idiocy of this position, the suicidal nature of this strategy to advance human rights is nothing short of breathtaking. Take Israel out of the Middle East and the region becomes nothing but Hama rules… especially when the nastiest people — those who want to destroy Israel — would feel empowered by such a victory. But try and tell that to people who are smart enough to believe they can’t be wrong, and credulous enough to believe the demopaths who pull their chains on a daily basis. And as a result, they are prime targets for a hate campaign against Israel.

(emphasis mine)

One of LGF’s commenters wrote:

I wonder why they didn’t hold their little cocktail party in downtown Gaza? They could hold it in a place right next to their hotels or apartments, because they stay in Gaza, right? Surely they don’t stay in Israel? Surely they don’t feel safe in the “greatest human rights violator’s” territory?

It’s not just Pysicians for Human Rights, it’s the whole mess of NGO’s. (Remember Marc Garlasco?) The NGO’s despite their deeply held biases against Israel (after all they have to justify their existence) get uncritical reception from the media, while most other organizations would receive at least some perfunctory scrutiny.

It’s one of the engines that drives media bias against Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

How many Sudanese have been killed by Egyptian border guards? Fifty? One hundred? Two hundred?

I have no idea. It’s a body count that the AP isn’t interested in keeping. The wire services barely acknowledge that not a week goes by without another beating, shooting, or killing of a Sudanese refugee by Egyptian border guards. The IDF, as far as I know, has not shot a single Sudanese refugee. Which, of course, is the point: If Israelis were doing this, there would be UN resolutions condemning it. Egyptians are shooting a few Sudanese? So what? What are a few more added to the total murdered by the Janjaweed? Another Sudanese was killed today? Who cares?

And please take note of how the man was killed:

An Egyptian medical official says border guards have shot dead a Sudanese migrant who was trying to cross illegally into Israel.

Imad Kharboush, head of the Northern Sinai ambulance department, says that a 24-old Sudanese man from the war-torn Darfur region was shot with a bullet in the back of his head while trying to get across barbed wire on the Egypt-Israel border early Wednesday.

Disgusting. But it’s double standard that is in evidence throughout the media: If Israel or the U.S. were to do something like that, there would be thousands of stories and front-page headlines, an investigation into the man’s death, and calls for the arrest of the shooter. This? One story found on Google News. Two, counting the AP reprint in Ynet. And the AP boilerplate is missing something.

Many African migrants seeking jobs try to cross illegally into Israel from Egypt.

It’s missing the the rest of the story. The truth would be, “So far this year, Egyptian border guards have killed xxx unarmed Sudanese civilians trying to sneak across the border into Israel.”

Apparently, the AP only counts the results of American and IDF bullet strikes.

Israel opens its borders to allow thousands of Palestinians access to medical care in its hospitals. The only time you hear about this is when there’s a complaint. The Washington Post’s Linda Gradstein is all too anxious to report Gazans’ Access To Care Faulted

Israel’s domestic security service requires Gazans who wish to enter Israel for medical treatment to submit to detailed interviews about their knowledge of political and militant groups, according to Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, a nonprofit group based in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli security service “uses the weakness, the helplessness of the Palestinian patients in Gaza in trying to pressure them to be collaborators,” said Ruchama Marton, the group’s founder. In a report released Monday, the group documents 32 cases of Palestinians who said they were told that a permit to enter Israel for medical care was conditional on being willing to deliver information.

Israel, of course, denies the charges.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the charges in the report were “ludicrous.” He also criticized the report’s methodology, saying the group only interviewed Palestinians whose requests to enter Israel had been refused.

i.e. people with a grievance. Another spokesman explains:

Defense Ministry spokesman Peter Lerner said interrogations were not for the purpose of recruiting collaborators but to protect Israel’s security.

“We’re not talking about a friendly neighbor at the moment, and there are numerous cases of those who present security threats,” Lerner said. “The government has documented at least 20 cases of Palestinians who tried to abuse their medical access to carry out terrorist attacks.”

Lerner said that so far this year, 14,000 Palestinians, including patients and their escorts, have entered Israel from Gaza. In all of 2007, a total of 10,000 were allowed into Israel.

Israelly Cool! brings emphasizes the contrast:

How about the fact that Israel is providing medical treatment and humanitarian aid to palestinians at all, all the time while palestinian terrorists are targeting Israelis for death? And, in some cases, at risk to our soldiers.

Specifically, look at the record of Save a Child’s Heart. So far the organization has treated over 800 children from the PA, more than from any other area.

So whatever humanitarian efforts Israel extend to its enemies don’t get recognized until there’s a perceived reason to criticize Israel.

Israelly Cool sums up this phenomenon:

We are dealing with the mainstream media here. And they have a particular narrative in mind.

And that narrative serves to promote and prolong Palestinian grievances against Israel, rather than encouraging reconciliation.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Ethan Bronner reports Museum Offers Gray Gaza a View of Its Dazzling Past

It may sound like the indulgence of a well-fed man fleeing the misery around him. But when Jawdat N. Khoudary opens the first museum of archaeology in Gaza this summer it will be a form of Palestinian patriotism, showing how this increasingly poor and isolated coastal strip ruled by the Islamists of Hamas was once a thriving multicultural crossroad.

Bronner, of course, reports on how Khoudray perseveres and thrives against many obstacles, mostly Israeli.

History offers not only legitimacy, of course, but also a framework for coping with the present. Gaza is under an Israeli and international siege aimed at weakening Hamas, widely viewed in the West as a terrorist group. But this is not the first time Gazans have faced a squeeze.

“Gaza has suffered more than most cities,” Mr. Khoudary noted. “There was the siege of Alexander the Great and of the Persians and of the British. At the end of the day this siege will be a footnote.”

After taking us through the problems with acquiring the necessary artifacts for the museum, Bronner reports on an irony.

Mr. Khoudary said he had visited the Israel Museum and hoped that one day some of the Gaza collection could come back here “after we have a qualified government and the capability to protect the heritage of Gaza.” He said Dr. Dothan “did us a favor because it would all be gone or destroyed today.”

Of course we know from Joseph’s tomb and the Temple Mount how good the Palestinians are at preserving antiquities. Still my suspicion that there are elements of Gaza’s history that Mr Khoudry won’t be publicizing.

The history of Jews in Gaza. (h/t Elder of Ziyon)

For example:

During the first ceasefire of the 1948 War, Egyptian forces regularly sniped at Kfar Darom. Two days before the ceasefire collapses altogether, David Ben Gurion orders Kfar Darom to be abandoned, due to an insufficient number of soldiers and arms, and so the kibbutz is destroyed by the Egyptian army without resistance. Map
The members of Kfar Darom found Bnei Darom, a new kibbutz East of Ashdod.

It serves an another reminder that the principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force is applied only when said acquisition is made by Israel, even in the course of defending itself.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Today Nicholas Kristof pleads for Tough love for Israel?
Before he gets to his conclusion though he writes:

Granted, not everybody sees things this way, and discussions of the Middle East usually involve each side offering up its strongest arguments to wrestle with the straw men of the other side. So let me try something different.

Then he proceeds to create a legion of straw men as he responds to the eminently sensible pro-Israel critics of a previous column. (Critics in italics; Kristof’s response in regular font.)

Jews lived in Hebron for 1,800 years continuously … until their community was murdered in 1929 by their Arab neighbors. The Jews in Hebron today — those “settlers” — have reclaimed Jewish property. So I don’t see what makes them illegitimate or illegal. (Irving)

True, Jews have deep ties to Hebron, just as Christians do to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but none of these bonds confer any right to live in these places or even visit them. If Israel were to bar American Christians from Jerusalem, that would not be grounds for the United States to send in paratroopers and establish settlements. And if Israel insists on controlling the West Bank, then it needs to give citizenship to Palestinians there so that they can vote just like the settlers.

Huh? But when the world accepts the notion that it is unacceptable to acquire land by force, isn’t it hypocritical to accept the forced Jewish exodus from Hebron and the Etzion Bloc? The only reason that Jews weren’t living in Hebron post 1935 and the Etzion Bloc post 1948 (until 1967) was because they were forced out by violence. So the Jewish absence from those areas is acceptable to Kristof, even if that absence occurred in a manner that would violates the standards he applies to Israel.

The paratroopers argument is just plain silly.

And Israel has ceded parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians. We’re not talking about occupation anymore but borders.

One side is a beautiful, literate, medically and scientifically and artistically an advanced society. The other side wants to throw bombs. Why shouldn’t there be a fence? (Mileway)

So, build a fence. But construct it on the 1967 borders, not Palestinian land — and especially not where it divides Palestinian farmers from their land.

Well why not demand that the farmers fight the terrorists? Israel does have to conform to court rulings that often compromise the effectiveness of the fence. What law do the terrorists follow?

While I do condemn this type of violence, it pales in contrast to Palestinian suicide bombers, rockets and other acts of terror against Jews. (Jay)

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports that a total of 123 Israeli minors have been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces.

This proves what? That Israeli is indiscriminate in its application of force? I’d suggest that it proves that the Palestinians sent teenagers out as fighters without uniforms in violation of international law in order to blur the distinction between combatant and non-combatant. This is an important distinction that B’Tselem doesn’t make. Additionally, how many of those 951 were targeted while doing nothing? Every single one of those 123 Israeli minors was targeted by a terrorist.

To withdraw from the West Bank without a partner on the Palestinian side will find Israel in the same fix it has once it withdrew from Gaza: a rain of daily rockets. Yes, the security barrier causes hardship, but terrorist attacks have almost disappeared. That means my kids can ride the bus, go to unguarded restaurants and not worry about being blown up on their way to school. Find another way to keep my kids safe, and I’ll happily tear down the barrier. (Laura)

This is the argument that I have the most trouble countering. Laura has a point: The barrier and checkpoints have reduced terrorism. But as presently implemented, they — and the settlements — also reduce the prospect of a long-term peace agreement that is the best hope for Laura’s children.

Well ignorance and bias didn’t stop Kristof from trying his hand with the other arguments, so why should it stop him now? No, it is the failure to accept Israel’s right to exist and consequently, the honor accorded the terrorists who kill Israelis by Palestinian society (and Arab society in general) that reduces the prospectgs of a “long term peace agreement.”

Kristof continues:

If Israel were to stop the settlements, ease the checkpoints, allow people in and out more freely, and negotiate more enthusiastically with Syria over the Golan Heights and with the Arab countries on the basis of the Saudi peace proposal, then peace might still elude the region. But Israel would at least be doing everything possible to secure its long-term future, rather than bolstering Hamas.

I’m sorry, but Israel got removed the occupation from one area: Gaza and that’s where Hamas is strongest. Israel also withdrew from southern Lebanon and that, in turn, strengthened Hezbollah. The Saudi peace proposal was a sham.

If there is no two-state solution, there will be a one-state solution — and given demographic trends, that will mean either the end of Israeli democracy or the end of the Jewish state. Zionists should be absolutely clamoring for a Palestinian state.

As I mentioned above. Israel’s withdrawn from a number of cities in Judea and Samaria, leaving them under control of the Palestinians. There is already a two state solution. The question is only what borders it will finally have. Kristof’s view seems to be that unless it conforms to the demands of the Palestinians, Israel’s concessions mean nothing.

Laura is right about the need for a sensible Palestinian partner, and the failures of Palestinian leadership have been legion. At the moment, though, Israel has its most reasonable partner ever — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — and it is undermining him with its checkpoints and new settlement construction.

As Eric Trager notes:

Well, here’s something that’s very much within Abbas’s control: his mouth. Today, as Israel received two black coffins in exchange for a notorious–and very much alive–murderer, Abbas took the opportunity to “offer congratulations to the family of Samir Kuntar, the chief of Arab prisoners.” With this remark, Abbas demonstrated that, far from being the Great Palestinian Hope, he is merely the latest Palestinian leader who sees glorifying terrorists–and reaching out to their families–as an acceptable, if not principled, political strategy.

Abbas is, at best, ineffective. At worst he is Arafat with a suit. This is a point that was generalized by Elder of Ziyon regarding Marwan Barghouti:

Here we have the Palestinian Arab story in a nutshell. Historically, they have been led by incompetent, corrupt and selfish leaders. Yet their most competent and least corrupt leaders are still unrepentant terrorists.

And it cannot be any other way. Since the Palestinian Arab psyche is so heavily invested in making murderers into heroes, it is impossible to imagine in this generation that an effective leader could emerge who is not a terrorist. Simply put, if you haven’t spent time in Israeli jails for murder, you have no street cred.

Back to Kristof:

Peace-making invariably involves exasperating and intransigent antagonists and unequal steps, just as it did in the decades in which Britain struggled to end terrorism emanating from Northern Ireland. But London never ordered air strikes on Sinn Fein or walled in Catholic neighborhoods. Over time, Britain’s extraordinary restraint slowly changed attitudes so as to make the eventual peace possible.

Well that’s just plain ignorant. There is a separation fence in Belfast that gets credit for reducing violence. And I don’t recall that Sinn Fein launched a military campaign on the level of Fatah and Hamas. Israeli restraint hasn’t brought a reduction in the will of its enemies to launch a war against it.

Furthermore, the peace in Ireland isn’t a function of British restraint; it’s a function of the terrorists’ goal. The IRA never wanted to destroy Britain, they just wanted their independence. Palestinian nationalism - despite wrapping itself in the mantle of “independence” - is predicated on the denial of the Jewish state.

Overall, reading the Kristof column I’m left wondering: when will there be “tough love” for the Palestinians, telling them that their continued support for terror makes peace impossible.

As for Palestinian apologists like Kristof, I wonder why is it that circumstances that would lead them to declare Israel illegitimate are perfectly acceptable for a Palestinian state founded on those very same circumstances. My Shrapnel (playing devil’s advocate) observed:

“Why should we have to? We have an Palestinian minority; why can’t a Palestinian state have a Jewish minority? The people living there could become citizens of the Palestinian state. Or we could do a land exchange”.

Israel has an Arab minority and gets criticized for discrimination. Palestine, whenever it is created will not have a Jewish minority, so such niceties as minority rights won’t need to be observed. (Whether other freedoms such as the press, religion or due process will be observed in Palestine is also a real question.)

Yet people like Kristof have no concerns about such matters. Israel must be a perfect democracy in their books or not deserve to exist, while they take it for granted that Palestine would deny its citizens the very rights they demand of Israel. More incredibly they believe that Israel’s legitimacy depends on creating the little tyranny of Palestine.

Kristof, for his talk of “tough love” for Israel, is silent on the talk of “tough love” for the Palesitnians. Kristof and his fellow travelers don’t tell the Palestinians that they need to give up terror, incitement and Israeli denial. They indulge the terror, making excuses for it. As such they are at least apologists if not accomplices in the bloodshed. And yes, their excuses rather than “tough love” prolong the conflict.

Israel has changed a lot in 20 years. What’s now mainstream in Israel regarding the Palesitnians was the leftist fringe in 1988. Where’s been the reciprocal movement? Until Kristof and his ilk start demanding it there will be none. Despite his posturing, Kristof hates Israel more than he loves the Palestinians.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

via memeorandum

Time Magazine reports on the Middle East expert who will be accompanying Sen. Obama to the Middle East next week Obama’s Conservative Mideast Pick: Dennis Ross.

Though he served under James Baker in the Bush 41 administration I’d hardly characterize Ross as conservative.

As a practical matter the article recommends Ross because:

In one way, the message is simple: Ross, a career foreign service officer, was lead negotiator on Israeli-Palestinian issues for Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he got the two sides as close as they’ve come to a peace deal before stepping down after the 2000 election.

And was the Middle East safer after the 2000 election? The Clinton administration’s failure to hold Arafat to any of his commitments was undoubtedly one of the factors that gave Arafat confidence that he could get away with launching an intifada after the Camp David talks collapsed.

“[C]lose as they’ve come…” simply means that Israel conceded a lot more territory and history at Camp David before Arafat - with the backing of even Arab “moderates” - rejected the offer.

The choice of Ross is being played as a sop to the Jewish (or pro-Israel) community and the reporter notes:

After he left government, the 59-year-old diplomat headed up a hawkish pro-Israel think tank in Washington, and signed on as a Fox News foreign affairs analyst. A former colleague, Dan Kurtzer (an Orthodox Jew and former U.S. ambassador to Israel who also supports Obama), published a think-tank monograph containing anonymous complaints from Arab and American negotiators saying Ross was seen as biased towards Israel and not “an honest broker”. Ross has been hawkish on Iran, but he agrees with Obama’s pledge to start talks. “We need to work hard to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear state,” Ross says, “but the Bush approach isn’t working.”

Not an honest broker because he was biased towards Israel? What baloney! Ross wasn’t pro-Israel. He is a peace processor, which means that he’s genetically disposed to believe that if Israeli cedes just enough territory he might get a Palestinian leader to say insincerely that he’ll accept the deal and stop the terror.

And yet he went to work for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy but not everyone there is “hawkish” (or realistic, in my view) and Ross is clearly on the “unrealistically dovish” end of the spectrum among those at the Washington Institute.

Still, it is somewhat surprising to see Ross emerge as an official member of Obama’s team. (Neither Ross nor the campaign would comment on his role in the still-unannounced trip, but several sources in the campaign confirmed details for TIME.). When Ross left the State department in 2000, he was so critical of Yasser Arafat that some friends thought he was considering working for George W. Bush, who cut ties with the late Palestinian leader. “At the beginning of the Administration he hadn’t excluded the possibility of working for a Republican again,” says one. Ross supported the Iraq war, though he opposed some of the Bush Administration’s policies for post-war reconstruction.

Ross was so critical of Arafat because he saw Arafat turn down an overly generous offer (though Ross probably didn’t consider Barak’s offer overly generous) from Israel and subsequently launch a terrorist campaign against Israel. In any case, Bush didn’t cut ties with Arafat until some time later, so this paragraph is more than a little misleading. In fact Bush’s first major pronouncement on the Middle East was that he supported the idea of a Palestinian state. So Ross’s aversion to Arafat, likely put him at odds at President Bush at the start of his term.

At the end Time’s reporter writes:

After all, the process orchestrated by Ross for the Clinton Administration failed

Well, duh. But did it fail for the lack of Ross’s efforts? Or because the premise that the Palestinians had changed to the point that they’d accept Israel’s right to exist is false.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

From the NYT:

Hero’s Welcome Expected in Lebanon for Captive of Israel
Perhaps Israel’s most reviled prisoner, Samir Kuntar, will return to a hero’s welcome when he crosses into Lebanon this week, 29 years after he left its shores in a rubber dinghy to kidnap Israelis from the coastal town of Nahariya.

That raid went horribly wrong, leaving five people dead, a community terrorized and a nation traumatized. Two Israeli children and their father were among those killed.

The Times then goes on to humanize Samir Kuntar pleading that he had a hard childhood. It also gives a rather abbreviated summary of the trial, quoting a doctor who testified that Einat was be

Point 1: Headline should read: Hero’s Welcome expected in Lebanon for Mass Murderer.
(See Elder of Ziyon)
Point 2: “Horribly wrong?” When armed terrorists infiltrate a country and attempt to take hostages it’s not surprising that people - often innocents - will die. The deaths of Danny Haran, his daughters and policeman Eliayhu Shachar were not unforeseen consequences of Samir Kuntar and his confederates. It’s not like he was driving to his prom, took his eyes off the road and plowed into a crowd of pedestrians. That would be something gone horribly wrong. The gang of terrorists entered Israel intent on committing acts of violence. They succeeded in committing violence, even if they had other plans in mind.

The Times goes on to recount the unfortunate circumstances of Mr. Kuntar’s youth and then provides a skewed summary of Kuntar’s trial designed to raise doubts about his role in the murders of Danny and Einat Haran. (A more complete account of the trial is available at Israel’s MFA website. h/t Backspin.)

It doesn’t just take 30 years of hindsight to humanize a murderer Honest Reporting notes that news organizations were doing it immediately after the bulldozer attack in Israel two weeks ago.

There was no excuse for the story in the Times. The reporter consciously made every effort to minimize Samir Kuntar’s guilt and raises no serious questions about societies that lionize such monsters. It’s not like Kuntar is remorseful.

Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar, whom Israel has agreed to free as part of a possible prisoner swap deal with Hizbullah, has vowed to continue engaging in terror after his release.

(h/t Solomonia)

Something did go horribly wrong. When a newspaper loses all its moral bearings and effectively defends the indefensible it loses its moral authority.

Kuntar deserves no sympathy, just some lead.
UPDATE: Jeffrey Goldberg via memeorandum:

If the raiders had succeeded in kidnapping Israeli civilians without murdering children, in other words, would it have gone just fine, by Craig Smith’s standards?

Alternatively James Taranto asks:

What does the Times think would have happened if the “raid” had gone right?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The other day the Palestinians condemned two men to death for supposedly “collaborating” with Israel to target terrorists. These men weren’t convicted by Hamas, but by the “moderate” Fatah faction that is in charge of Jenin.

Reacting to this story, Elder of Ziyon observed:

It’s been about three years since a death penalty has been carried out
in the PA, and most of them have been for “collaboration with the enemy” (the list is here.)

In other words, the internationally recognized government of the PA, who is supposedly Israel’s peace partner, actively supports and defends known terrorists (”resistance fighters”) , and rather than punishing the actual terrorists, it punishes those who try to stop them.

To put it bluntly, the PA is the enemy and there is no distinction between the Palestinian Authority and the terrorists whom it actively supports and defends.

So if Israel needs to act against terror threats, who can it depend on? Apparently only itself.

Israeli troops arrested seven Hamas figures Tuesday, including two municipal council members, in a widening crackdown on the Islamic militant group in Nablus, residents said.

The Israeli military confirmed that it arrested seven Palestinians in the city but did not elaborate.

And apparently Tony Blair depends on Israeli security too.

Israel’s Shin Beth domestic intelligence agency warned Blair shortly before his arrival at the Gaza border that a “terror organisation” was planning to attack his motorcade, an agency official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

But the Islamist movement Hamas, which had welcomed the visit, said it had made the appropriate security preparations and accused Israel of pressuring Blair into cancelling the trip.

(h/t LGF)

(The headline of this “news” item gives credence to the Hamas claim by enclosing “threat” in scare quotes.)

Tony Blair (the guy pictured doing the Macarena) is someone who has regularly asked Israel to relax its security measures. It absolutely defies belief that he’d heed a warning that he didn’t think was serious. I have no doubt he is concerned about his own welfare; his concern for Israelis is somewhat less certain.

Still Hamas’s claim that Israel was somehow conniving to keep Blair from seeing the utter devastation visited upon Gaza by the Israeli blockade has some credibility with a particular gullible segment of the population: supposedly skeptical reporters.

Plus, we’re talking about Tony Blair here, who even braved untamed Iraq, presumably he doesn’t scare easily..

Noah Pollak comments:

Don’t you see? The Israelis, hoping to cover up their crimes, invented a “security threat” — they lied, in other words — to prevent Blair from going to Gaza and drawing attention to the “catastrophe” for which Israel is responsible. McGirk’s evidence of this? Literally none.

No evidence, but McGirk was parroting the words of Hamas.

“The Israeli occupation exerted great pressure to prevent Tony Blair from visiting the Gaza Strip because they did not want him to see the size of the disaster caused by the unjust blockade,” Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nunu said.

(McGirk’s credibility takes another hit for writing:

Abbas is already playing second banana to Hamas in Gaza and is sulking over the fact that Hamas in large part has managed to keep up its end of the bargain and stop militants from lobbing rockets into southern Israel –upping their credibility among Palestinians and Arab states.

- emphasis mine - Hamas has control of Gaza, other than this week’s ostentatious arrest of three Fatah affiliated rocket launchers, Hamas has taken no action to prevent attacks on southern Israel. Like Sunday.

Palestinians on Sunday fired two mortar shells into Israel from the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said, in another violation of the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas in the coastal territory.

The shells, which Israel Radio said landed near the security fence, caused neither casualties nor damage. There was no word if Israel would retaliate for the mortar strike.

h/t Rubicon3)

Of course if Gaza’s so badly off how can they afford to maintain horses for racing? What catastrophe is there for Tony Blair to see?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Newsbusters takes the NYT to task for ignoring the result of the Enderlein-Karsenty case. (Newsbusters acknowledged that the result was covered half-heartedly in the NYT’s blog.)
Newsbuster’s author Warner Todd Huston asks:

So what gives, New York Times? Why the reluctance to cover this new twist in the al-Dura story that you have used so many times in the past to support Palestinian terrorists? You have used this tale to beat the Israelis up for 8 years, now. But, we have final proof that this is a faked video. The Jews didn’t kill little Muhammad al-Dura.

( via memeorandum )

Instapundit answers (with a question):

Because it opens the door to suggestions that this wasn’t an aberration, but the norm in Mideast coverage?

It’s a topic I wrote to the Times’s public editor about two months ago. At the time I wrote:

As I’ve shown above the Times accepted a narrative that shaped a lot of its reporting at the time. One piece of that narrative was exposed quickly. In another case a Times reporter used a highly suspect statement of an interested party to support the narrative. Now another part of the narrative has been shown to be suspect. At least in the name of accuracy one would hope that the Times would look into the case and what it implies.

In addition to the immediate issue of the origins of the “Aqsa intifada”, the case calls into question the widespread use of local stringers who may be more interested in promoting an agenda than in accuracy. The Times’s lack of curiosity in this case reflects poorly on its commitment to getting the story correct.

I still have not received a response from Clark Hoyt. I don’t think that accuracy is the main goal of the NYT.

This failure doesn’t just apply to the NYT but to nearly every major media outlet in American.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Got a question for Israel’s foreign media adviser?

Go here and ask it.

Mine’s already been asked. I would word it a bit differently: Why the hell can’t Israel manage her own PR better? The Arabs have been winning the propaganda war for decades.When is Israel going to fight back?

Oh, hell. I’ll go submit it anyway.

Kassams continue to rain down on Israel daily. Closing the crossings just isn’t enough. What is Barak waiting for?

Two Qassam rockets were fired from northern Gaza towards Israel on Thursday afternoon, one of them landed near a kibbutz in the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council.

No injuries were reported and no damage was caused.

Shortly after 3:40 pm the Color Red rocket alert sirens blared throughout Sderot and neighboring communities in the western Negev, sending residents running to bomb shelters.

Fatah’s military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, claimed responsibility for the fire. The organization said this was in response to the killing to Talal Abad near Jenin on Wednesday.

That would be this killing, of a Palestinian who refused to stop even after shots were being fired in the air.

Earlier on Thursday a Palestinian man was killed by IDF fire near the Kissufim crossing. The army said that at around 4:00 am soldiers manning an observation post spotted a suspicious figure advancing towards the security fence near the Kissufim crossing on the Gaza border. Infantry troops who were alerted to the scene called for the man to halt and fired warning shots in the air.

However the man continued to advance towards the Israeli side of the border, at which point the soldiers fired in the air once more and then aimed at the suspect’s lower body; when he did not stop the soldiers resumed their fire and killed him.

The AP spins it, of course. Read the article and see how they manage to blame Israel for the rocket attack in the lead. Notice also how many ways they paint the 18-year-old as a “teenager” or “youth”.

Israeli troops shot and killed a teenage Palestinian militant along the country’s border with Gaza Thursday in the first deadly incident since the two sides reached a cease-fire last month.

A faction of the militant group Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades said the 18-year-old killed in Gaza belonged to its ranks. It vowed revenge and claimed responsibility for two rockets fired at southern Israel after the shooting.

“We will not let this crime pass silently,” the group said in a text message to reporters.

Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which had previously violated the June 19 truce by firing rockets at Israel, did not say what the militant was doing along the border.

Gee. Planting bombs? Scouting for terrorist attacks? Setting up rocket launchers? Who knows?

The AP also managed to present Hamas as the voice of moderation—for not “vowing revenge” over the killing of a terrorist.

Hamas, the Islamic militant group which rules Gaza, said it considered the pre-dawn shooting a violation of the cease-fire, but did not vow revenge.

Gee, Hamas. Thanks for not promising to murder civilians because soldiers killed a terrorist who refused to stop coming towards them. And it’s not like the terror groups are denying he was one of theirs. Not that it makes a difference to AP.

Israeli troops fired on the youth after he did not respond to warning shots and calls to stop, a military spokesman said. The soldiers thought he was armed but, after inspecting the body, found that he was not, the spokesman said.

And again… an Israeli spokesman is contacted and spoken to, but not identified. Israeli spokesmen are almost never identified. There are three direct quotes from identified Palestinians, including a member of Hamas.

Your objective media, hard at work.

Given the sympathy that the Washington Post once showed for Samir Kuntar in a news story, the editorial An Unwelcome Hero was welcome, if flawed.

If anyone ever deserved the title “baby-killer,” it is Samir Kuntar. Yet his freedom has been a popular demand in Lebanon and the cause of Lebanon-based gunslingers for almost three decades. Abbas’s gang hijacked the Achille Lauro in 1985 in a failed effort to win Mr. Kuntar’s release. After Abbas faded into semi-retirement in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, Hezbollah took up the Kuntar cause, attempting to get Israel to swap him for bodies of Israelis killed in Hezbollah raids.

That’s correct, however, I’m a bit troubled by the conclusion:

Great changes must take place across the Middle East before a lasting peace can be achieved. Israel must make territorial compromises and foster a dignified future for the Palestinians. But attitudes among Israel’s enemies must be transformed as well. A good place to start would be to declare that people such as Samir Kuntar deserve to rot in prison, no matter what the religion or nationality of the children they kill.

I’m not bothered by their wish that Kuntar rot in jail instead of seeing him executed; the Post’s editors don’t believe in the death penalty. It’s the mantra about great changes and how Israel must make “territorial compromises” and “foster a dignified future,” these are both programs that Israel has been engaged in for the past 15 years. For the Post’s correct complaint about Lebanon and Hezbollah it ignores the bigger problem: Kuntar and terrorists like him are heroes even to the so-called Palestinian “moderates.” For there to be peace in the Middle East great changes are necessary, but the greatest change is the acceptance by the Arabs generally, and the Palestinians specifically, of the Israel’s right to exist. Fifteen years of peace processing and Israeli concessions have not changed that fundamental problem.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Last week, Cheat Seeking Missiles went after Seymour Hersh for an recently written “expose” in the New Yorker. What troubled me is that CSM took everything Hersh wrote at face value. Hersh cherry picks some stuff, confuses some stuff, makes some stuff up and exaggerates the rest. It’s hard to know exactly what’s true in a Seymore Hersh story.

Max Boot read the same article and concluded that there’s probably a nugget of truth in the article but the rest is speculation.

For my part I am skeptical that there are a lot of Special Operations raids occurring in Iran. It’s probable that there are small penetrations of Iranian territory by CIA and Special Operations teams as part of the covert destabilization program to meet with Iranian “assets.” There may even have been a few operations carried out against the Quds Force, but, given the risk-averse culture of the U.S. government, I doubt that it amounts to very much.

I find David Ignatius’s analysis plausible. He writes:

In the new cold war between America and Iran, the U.S. appears to be running some limited covert operations across the Iranian border. But according to knowledgeable sources, this effort shares the defect of broader U.S. policy toward Iran–it is tentative and ill coordinated, and undermines diplomacy without bringing serious pressure on the regime.

He quotes “one Arab official familiar with the covert program” as saying, “There are attempts to cause mischief inside Iran and go after the Quds Force. Some things are being done, but not with the seriousness that’s needed.”

Boot adds:

He also perpetuates a myth that there is a major policy divide between the White House which supposedly favors a “military strike” on Iran and the armed forces which supposedly oppose such a move. It would be more accurate to say that there are some political appointees in the administration who favor a strike on Iran because they don’t think that any other action will stop or even significantly slow its nuclear program. But there are also political appointees who oppose such a move. A similar division exists in the military, but you would never know it from Hersh who paints a crude caricature of hawkish civilians and dovish soldiers. No doubt he is partly a victim of his anti-Bush worldview and partly a victim of his sources: Since it’s pretty obvious that no one who is reasonably hawkish or conservative will speak to a journalist with Hersh’s reputation, he must be reliant on those who favor a softer line.

Boot also attacks a major premise of Hersh:

The biggest misunderstanding, or outright deception, in the entire article is its very premise: that the covert action program that Hersh describes is a prelude to a larger military action against Iran—that it is, as the headline has it, “Preparing the Battlefield.” Actually it’s far more likely that such a program, if it exists, is designed to be a substitute for military action.

Hersh unfortunately isn’t the only writers engaging in such speculation. Tim Shipman of the Telegraph writes (via memeorandum):

American commanders worry that Israel will feel compelled to act within the next 12 months with no guarantee that they can do more than slow Iran’s development of a weapon capable of destroying the Jewish state.

Gaps in the intelligence on the precise location and vulnerabilities of Iran’s facilities emerged during recent talks between Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Israeli generals, according to an official familiar with the discussions who has briefed Iran experts in Washington and London.

The assessment emerged as Iran in effect thumbed its nose at proposals by the West to freeze its uranium enrichment programme in exchange for easing economic sanctions. In its reply, sent to the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, Iran said it was prepared to negotiate but only from a position of equality – and made no reference to the spe