The AP has decided it can’t keep ignoring the rocket barrages landing on Israeli civilians, but it can equate them with the IDF taking out terrorists.
Hamas and Israel Trade Fire Over Gaza
Note the headline. Hamas is “trading fire,” even though Hamas is sending rockets into houses, and the IDF is sending rockets into cars driven by terrorist leaders or cars filled with terrorists on their way to or from launching attacks on Israel.
And now the lede, the first three to five paragraphs of which is published in the “World News” section of your local paper:
Militants in Hamas-ruled Gaza bombarded southern Israel with rockets Thursday and Israel pounded back with air and ground fire, the latest spate of violence that has pushed peace efforts to the sidelines.
Israeli leaders made clear they had no intention of pulling back until the rocket assaults on Israeli border communities halt.
Twenty-three Palestinians were killed in fierce clashes in the seaside territory on Tuesday and Wednesday, including the son of Gaza’s Hamas strongman, Mahmoud Zahar, and a 12-year-old boy who died along with his father and uncle in a bungled Israeli airstrike. A foreign volunteer on an Israeli border farm was killed by a Hamas sniper.
Note how the AP does not give you a true head count. Nineteen of those Palestinian deaths were terrorists. All Israeli casualties are civilian.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’ bitter rival and Israel’s moderate partner in newly resumed peace talks, denounced what he called the Israeli “massacre” in Gaza.
Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rejects Israel’s right to exist, has intensified its direct involvement in the assaults on Israel as a result of the escalating violence. The group, which had let other militant factions take the lead in attacking Israel since it wrested control of Gaza in June, claimed it fired 24 rockets early Thursday, after launching 79 rockets and mortars on Wednesday.
The “escalating violence” is the IDF trying to stop terrorists firing rockets from Gaza that land in Israel and harm and kill Israeli civilians. The democratically elected government of the Palestinians has authorized war on Israel, but the news media refuse to call a war a war. And of course, they minimize the danger of the kassam rockets.
Militants have launched some 4,000 of the crude rockets and mortar rounds at southern Israel since Israel evacuated Gaza in the summer of 2005 after a 38-year occupation. The rockets have killed 12 people since 2001 and sown panic in border areas, where people are frequently forced to rush to take cover when sirens alert them to incoming projectiles.
Militants have been extending their reach as well, with one Iranian-made rocket recently traveling some 10 miles inside Israel’s borders.
Yeah, I’m thinking that a missile carrying explosives and ball-bearings that will be sent out with the force of a bullet may be something that induces panic. I still can’t get over how cavalier the media are over rockets raining on Sderot. I’d like to see the reporters stay in Sderot for a week and then write about how the missiles “sow panic.”
But then, just in case you haven’t missed the bias in their articles, you have the bias in their photo captions.
Israeli youths take cover in a concrete shelter after a red alert alarm was sounded for possible incoming rockets from inside Gaza in the southern Israeli city of Sderot, Wednesday Jan. 16, 2008. Islamic militants, enraged by the deaths of 19 Palestinians a day earlier, barraged southern Israel with rocket and mortar fire. In border communities in southern Israel, the siren warning of rocket attacks rang repeatedly as 21 rockets and mortars were fired, the Israeli military said. No serious injuries or damage were reported. Residents of Sderot, a town of 20,000 that is a frequent target, stayed off the streets as sirens blared.
No context. The implication is that Israel simply killed 19 Palestinians when in fact, most of them were terrorists. The civilians were killed because, well, the terrorists hide, train, and live among civilians—a violation of the Geneva protocols, but that’s never mentioned either. Not that I expect them to be fair. And if a missile should hit an Israeli and kill him or her? Well, we won’t hear about that until after we’ve heard about how Hamas was only shooting them in “revenge” for the “deaths” of however many Palestinians the editors decide to put in the article. They’re fond of adding days, adding the phrase “the worst incident since XXXX,” and other modifiers to make the Israeli death count for less.
We’re rather used to it by now.
*shrug* What would be the equivalent of killing reporter and editors who propagate this kind of morally bankrupt garbage?