The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Groundhog Day

Every few years, the terror group and ruling party in Gaza feels compelled to use any provocation to launch missile attacks on population centers in Israel. These attacks, escalating each day, use increasingly long-range missiles that indiscrimately target CIVILIAN population centers—Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and points in between. The Israelis commit a cardinal sin—they defend themselves, targeting missile launch sites that are always hidden in civilian neighborhoods in Gaza (right next to schools, hospitals and apartments) in the hope that collateral damage from an Israeli attack will cause civilian injury that will be trumpeting by leftist media world-wide.

That's what's happening.

Barack Obama has asked for restraint from both side. Yeah, right.

Hundreds of rockets are raining down on Israel and the Israelis are supposed to do what, exactly?

In my view they should continue to do exactly what they're doing, Strike back, hard. Destroy weapons at evey chance. Kill terrorist leaders when they can. This is not a situation when "soft power" has any chance of success. I know that. So do the Israelis.

UPDATE (7/10/14):
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As the main stream media reports this story, we hear repeated references to the fact that the palestinian "response" (indescriminately firing rockets into Israeli population centers) was caused by the brutal murder of a Palestinian teenager. What they fail to mention or mention only as an afterthought is that Israeli leaders immediately condemned the murder, and much more important, found and arrested the people who committed it—all in less than a week.

Meanwhile, the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers is little mentioned and, of course, the Palestinian authorities have done nothing to bring the perpetrators to justice. David Harsanyi illustrates the blatant bias by citing a recent NYT article:
The New York Times issued a correction today to fix a demonstrably false editorial that claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went “days of near silence” before condemning the murder of Arab teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Netanyahu had, in fact, called the killing an “abominable murder,” and on the day of the killing issued a statement instructing minister for internal security to investigate the crime. Three Israeli suspects were arrested and have since confessed to the murder.

Even with a correction, the editorial in question was a mess from the top down. The New Republic has a good rundown of other egregious errors and misleading points that won’t be getting much-needed corrections. It’s likely that editorial page was simply relying on news side to feed its preconceived biases (though one story had already reported on Netanyahu’s comments), which is a mistake considering the NYT’s reporting exhibits absolutely no journalistic standards when it comes to the topic.
Actually, when it comes to any topic that might negatively impact it's dominant left-wing narrative.