Antirocket

The New York Times reports:

GAZA — Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall — with escalators imported from Israel — will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up. A Hamas-run farm where Jewish settlements once stood is producing enough fruit that Israeli imports are tapering off.

But according to a “report” that is so biased that it is laughable, the NYT uses progress in Gaza to further the meme that all Palestinian problems are due to Israeli transgressions. A few paragraphs into the “report,” the NYT's intrepid reporter (editorialist?) comments:

Thousands of homes that were destroyed in the Israeli antirocket invasion two and a half years ago have not been rebuilt. Hospitals have canceled elective surgery for lack of supplies. Electricity remains maddeningly irregular. The much-publicized opening of the Egyptian border has fizzled, so people remain trapped here. The number of residents living on less than $1.60 a day has tripled in four years. Three-quarters of the population rely on food aid.

“Israeli antirocket invasion?” I actually laughed out loud. In a 1200 word article that castigates Israel for its “blockade,” the NYT sees fit to mention the reason for the “blockade” with a single adjective—“antirocket.” Not a word of context or a description of magnitude, not a word about historical background or an explanation of Hamas’ murderous charter calling for the destruction of a sovereign state—nah, the Left wing editors of the NYT (not to mention its “reporter”) consider a single word—antirocket—to be sufficient.

Four thousand rockets fired randomly by the sainted Hamas at civilian targets in Israel? No worries. After all, the Left has adopted Hamas as its poster child for “the oppressed.” And the oppressed can be as murderous as they like.

More from the Times:

“We have 100 percent vaccination; no polio, measles, diphtheria or AIDS,” said Mahmoud Daher, a World Health Organization official here. “We’ve never had a cholera outbreak.”

The Israeli government and its defenders use such data to portray Gaza as doing just fine and Israeli policy as humane and appropriate: no flotillas need set sail.

Israel’s critics say the fact that the conditions in Gaza do not rival the problems in sub-Saharan Africa only makes the political and human rights crisis here all the more tragic — and solvable. Israel, they note, still controls access to sea, air and most land routes, and its security policies have consciously strangled development opportunities for an educated and potentially high-achieving population that is trapped with no horizon. Pressure needs to be maintained to end the siege entirely, they say, and talk of improvement is counterproductive.

The “reporter” for the NYT conveniently fails to mention why Israel “still controls access to sea, air and most land routes …” Again, those silly 4,000 rockets landing in Israeli towns, schools, and shopping districts, and Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist might have just a little something to do with it. Nah, not possible, implies the NYT “reporter.” After all, those steel bars, the cement, and the other 3,000 tons of construction supplies per day that are smuggled into Gaza are applied only for peaceful purposes. No chance, whatsoever, that some of the materials are siphoned off to build fortified rocket launching sites, After all, if that were the case, the NYT's intrepid “reporter” would have found evidence of it … right?

So from the NYT we learn that luxury hotels are being built in Gaza, medical care is better than most of the developing world, BMWs and Kias are becoming commonplace on the streets, restaurants are booming, but wait … “all of this belies the misery that lies beneath.” It looks like the Palestinians—the world's most vocal victims—aided and abetted by the blatant bias of the NYT, want us to believe that even when things improve, they really don’t. That’s standard practice for the Palestinians, and the blatant media bias? That’s standard practice for The New York Times.