Tag Archives: Civilian

If You Get All Your News From The Mainstream Media…

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CBN News posted a story today about an article written by Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman. After the war last summer between Hamas and Israel, Mr. Friedman wrote an article entitled, “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth.” The article is his account of how the press covered that war.

CBN News reports:

“I decided at the end of the summer to write an essay looking at what has gone wrong through the lens of my own experiences,” Friedman told CBN News. 
 
For seven years, Friedman reported for the Associated Press, a giant news organization that provides information to many other media outlets worldwide. He says the AP and the mainstream press suffer from two malfunctions. One, Israel gets a disproportionate amount of coverage and two, the press has taken sides.

“The mainstream press corps here [in Israel] has largely adopted an advocacy role. They’ve decided to play a political role in the conflict,” he explained. “They’ve decided to lobby for the side that they think is right and political decisions are disguised as journalistic decisions.”
 
Friedman says Hamas took advantage of the bias.    

Friedman described the strategy of Hamas as provoking Israel by attacking civilians with rockets and then using civilians to shield weapons and soldiers. Then Hamas would show the news media the civilian casualties without mentioning that they were being used as human shields. Unfortunately, the news media either did not see through the strategy or were taking sides.

The CBN News story concludes:

Friedman maintains the world is getting a skewed version of what’s actually happening here in Israel.

“The story is — if you read between the lines and through the lines of the stories themselves — is that Israel is faced with a clear moral choice and is making the wrong choice.  Israel could have peace but it chooses war. That story is false. But everything is done to maintain it. Even in the face of contradictory evidence.”

Meanwhile, Hamas is attempting to use the United Nations to establish a terrorist state right next to Israel. This is not a good time to be on the wrong side of history, particularly where Israel is concerned.

There Are Numbers And There Are Numbers

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This graph is from an article in Tuesday’s New York Times. It has to do with the reporting of civilian casualties in Gaza.

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The New York Times reminds us that all civilian casualties reported in Gaza are not civilians:

But the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the Israeli group that analyzed the first Palestinian deaths, accused the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry of “concealment and deception” in order “to create an ostensibly factual infrastructure for a political, propaganda and legal campaign against Israel.”

The Times analysis, looking at 1,431 names, shows that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.

We need to remember that Hamas soldiers do not always wear uniforms. Those infiltrating Israel through the tunnels wore IDF uniforms. As has been previously stated, Hamas routinely puts rocket launchers in heavily populated civilian areas. That is part of their strategy in the propaganda war. Now that the journalists are leaving Gaza, they are reporting rockets being fired from directly under their hotel rooms and in civilians areas. The world needs to understand the propaganda war being waged by Hamas and not fall prey to the misinformation that is being reported.

A website called Israellycool reports:

Tyler Hicks, the New York Times photographer, begins by telling us that Hamas fighters are hiding in civilian areas, embedded within the civilian population and firing rockets from residential neighborhoods:

I was stationed in Gaza, and covered the Palestinian side of the war where you saw most of the casualties.  One of the reasons for that is because the Hamas fighters are living among the civilian population. . . .  This is a situation where the fighters fire rockets from all over the Gaza Strip, from neighborhoods to cemeteries, from parking lots, from any number of places.

And no, the reason they do this is not because “Gaza is pretty small.”  Hicks next tells us that the fighters seek safety at the expense of the civilian population:

Hamas fighters are not able to expose themselves.  If they were to even step a foot on the street they would be spotted by an Israeli drone and immediately blown up.  We don’t see those fighters.  They are operating out of buildings and homes and at night.

Israel is fighting a terrorist neighbor. The world has a choice. They need to understand that this is a fight against terrorism and for democracy. They can choose to help Israel or they can ignore what is going on. The problem with ignoring what is going on is that the terrorists in Gaza are not a unique entity. They are linked (at least in philosophy) with Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, etc. We allow them to continue ruling Gaza at our own peril.