MEDIA CRITICISM
[A]lmost breathlessly both CBS News and Breitbart.com, an abject rightwing disinformation outfit operating deep within the parameters of the Republican noise machine, joined forces yesterday (6 August) to furnish “proof” of Hamas villainy. The clip (by an Indian TV crew) is obviously in support of one of Israel’s main propaganda themes during the current massacre in Gaza, that Hamas uses civilians (“cowardly and unfairly”) as human shields. Much has been made of this, although the Israelis routinely use Palestinian prisoners as shields in their police and military dragnets and while this is a war crime according to international human rights statutes, no one seems to notice or care. Palestinian life is cheap. Point is, what would the Israelis and their apologists have Hamas do? Gaza is one of the most densely populated enclaves in the world—no fault of the Palestinians, mind you—hence any point chosen by Hamas to mount any type of military retaliation, is liable to be near some human habitation. Obviously the Israelis would prefer Hamas militants to stand in the open, in the few square centimeters still not allocated to some function in that tortured land, so that they could be swiftly turned into a bug splat, courtesy of some advanced missile.
The other meme being peddled (an old one) is that Israel “has a perfect right to defend itself”, an argument tediously repeated by the entire American political and media class. In our view Israel’s vaunted “right to self defense” would pack some moral muscle if the Zionist state were in reality defending itself against an adversary of comparable military power; were the chief victim of these confrontations; and, most important, had not originated the decades-long conflict with the Palestinians by dint of their massive displacement from their native lands in the 1940s. Let’s face it, brutalization, high-handed land theft and institutionalized oppression are liable to be resisted at some point, by any means necessary, and Israel’s actions have given their foes plenty of grist for their revenge mills.
It is a long denied historical fact that the postwar Israeli settlers proceeded to push the Palestinians out of their ancestral homes literally at gunpoint in the 1940s, often through the systematic application of selective terror. The Palestinian-held territories have continually shrunk ever since as both liberal and rightwing Israeli politicians have relentlessly pursued an expansionist vision of a biblical “Greater Israel” with the backing of most of the population. Naturally, given the disinformation curtain obscuring basic facts about Israel and the Middle East in general, neither truth nor fairness ever enters the Middle East debate, with the ghastly consequences we witness at present. —PG
VIDEO: INDIAN TV CREW CATCHES HAMAS FIRING ROCKET FROM OUTSIDE THEIR HOTEL
An Indian television news crew from NDTV filmed a team of Hamas terrorists assembling and launching a rocket at Israel just moments before a 72-hour ceasefire took effect on Monday. It marked one of the few instances in which the foreign media have documented Hamas terrorism, since journalists in Gaza operate under Hamas restrictions and risk their access and their lives if they show what Hamas is actually doing.
The video, shot from the journalists’ hotel, shows how Hamas deliberately sets and fires up its rockets “bang in the middle of what is a residential area” in order to maximize the chances of civilian casualties should Israel target the rocket launcher. The journalists recorded Hamas erecting a blue tent to hide the rocket assembly from detection above, then launched the rocket towards Israel to kill civilians, if possible, before the ceasefire.
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