Tag: Middle East

More on Gaza – and our lovely media

Goodies from LGF and the LA Times, today. Via LGF comes a followup story from the mother of an Israeli soldier about the school being used as a launch point, and what impact that would have on the people living and working there. Here are some choice excerpts:

Yesterday, mortars were fired FROM the school In Jebalya. This was a direct and intentional attack on Israel, on Israel’s soldiers and population. Mortars are explosions. They are loud. You can’t pretend you didn’t hear them…

Everyone in that building yesterday KNEW that the school was being used as a launching ground…and yet, apparently not one of those thought it would be a smart thing to leave. That seems strange to me, unnatural. I was once in Jerusalem, walking with my two daughters when something “exploded” ahead of me. Everyone around me stopped, as I did. It was a bus hitting something that went flying in the air and crashed loudly into something else. People began to move and yet I stood there, unsure what to do. It should be both human instinct and parental instinct to move away from danger…

I heard a father mourning the death of his son. He blames the Israeli government, and I blame him. “Are you insane?” I want to ask him. “How could you allow your son to be near mortars being fired? What did you think Israel was going to do?” Why didn’t you take your son? Why didn’t you behave responsibly?

Hard questions, but valid ones. And as our media seems totally unwilling to look at these, as well as the implications of why the UN never raised a finger in protest to Hamas using their schools as launching grounds for terrorism, we get this lovely piece from everyone’s favorite sham of a newspaper, the LA Times: “Hamas speaks: A Hamas official insists that a ‘legacy of suffering’ under Israel is what fuels Palestinian resistance.”

Yes, you read that right. They published an op-ed from a Hamas official. Namely Mousa Abu Marzook, who was deported from the United States in 1997 and is legally recognized as a terrorist, thus being blocked from entering the country. Apparently the LA Times has no issue with this, and has no problem letting him vomit his lies and hate on the pages of its once-reputable newspaper. Well, I have no issue with the LA Times going under, so I’d suggest passing the word along that they’re officially supporting known terrorists now and see if we can’t dent their subscriber base a bit. Barring that, there’s always the good old fashioned vitriolic letter to the editor.

But that’s just one newspaper, right? No way the broadcast media would touch this, right? Well, sort of. They didn’t invite Hamas to speak on the topic of Gaza, but a few of them invited a lunatic named Mads Gilbert on for a word or two. When I say “a few,” I mean the BBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, the Independent, Sky News, and the New York Times, among others. Who is Mads Gilbert? He’s a doctor from Norway and a member of a radical Marxist party who is on record as supporting the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. No, I’m not kidding. Here’s the quote, courtesy of LGF:

In an interview with the Norwegian daily, Dagbladet, shortly after the attacks, Gilbert stated:

“The attack on New York was not surprising, after the policy that has led the West in recent decades. I am upset over the terrorist attack, but am equally upset over the suffering which the United States has created. It is in this context that the 5000 dead people must be seen. If the U.S. government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, then there is also a moral right to attack the United States with the weapons they had to create. Dead civilians are the same whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.”

When asked by Dagbladet if he supported the terrorist attack on the U.S., he replied:

“Terror is a bad weapon, but the answer is yes, within the context I have mentioned.”

This is why I don’t watch TV anymore.

More courageous Hamas soldiers… oh, wait

More from Gaza:

At least thirty people were reportedly killed and 53 wounded in an explosion in a UN-run school in the town of Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip, according to Palestinians. The IDF issued a statement saying the school grounds were used by terrorists to fire mortar shells at the troops.

The infantrymen returned mortar shell fire into the school grounds, the army said. Defense officials told The Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school triggered the secondary explosions which killed scores of Palestinians on the site.

Notice that the source of the casualties was the booby traps set by Hamas, not the Israeli shells. LGF has video showing Hamas launching mortal attacks from the school. The school’s headmaster was also a notorious rocket-builder.

RAFAH, Gaza Strip, May 5 (Reuters) – By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The cowards stage their attacks from schools and hospitals in order to win a propaganda war, hoping that the media will ignore the fact that they were attacking from the schools first. And the media eats it right up. We hear comparisons of Israel to Germany under Hitler, but they ignore the fact that Hamas’ official charter calls for the death of all Jews everywhere! What a strange, sick world we live in.

Just in case there was any doubt

The media loves to portray Israel as carrying out the slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians. Nevermind the fact that Hamas has been launching rockets and mortars indiscrimenently into civilian centers while Israel targets only confirmed weapon or supply stores, they have to find some way to spin it so that Israel is the evil aggressor. That’s why you’ll never hear about this multimillion dollar expenditure (h/t: Power Line) if you get your news from CNN:

First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there’s a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

This is a very non-trivial setup, and a very large expense of time and energy on the part of Israel.  In addition, by warning the people, you warn Hamas, which means they’re able to escape the bombing and live to try to kill you another day. But for Israel, it is worth the cost: they want the moral high ground, and they have it. The IDF may indeed be “the most moral army in the world.” It certainly shows the most restraint. Setting up such a system has only one purpose: to save Palestinian lives, even if it comes at the cost of making it harder for you to meet your objective or kill the enemy… even if those lives are the enemy. Unfortunately such a system only works properly if the “innocent civilians” don’t hate you and aren’t actively aiding Hamas (h/t The Jury).

In one recent incident, Israeli intelligence learned that a particular house was being used to manufacture and store rockets.  It was a clear military target since their rockets were being fired at Israeli civilians.  But the house was also being lived in by a family.  So the Israeli military phoned the house, informed the owner that it was a military target, and gave him thirty minutes to leave with his family.  The owner called Hamas, which immediately sent dozens of mothers carrying babies to stand on the roof of the house.  Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a house with civilians in it.  They also knew that if, by some fluke, the Israeli authorities did not learn that there were civilians in the house, and fired on it, Hamas would win a public relations victory by displaying the dead civilians to the media.  In this case, Israel did learn of the civilians and withheld its fire.  The rockets that were spared destruction by the human shields were then used against Israeli civilians.

The vast majority of these “innocent civilians” want to see Israel annihilated too. Many of them do not wish it to the extent that Hamas, Fatah, and the rest do, but they are actively aiding them anyway. This makes what Israel is doing much more impressive, and much more difficult. So just in case there was any doubt as to whether or not Israel hed a moral high ground miles above Hamas’ – now you know.

Gaza Update

Those guys are GOOD.

Second night in Gaza Strip: After IDF forces managed to reach their target destinations inside Gaza, soldiers have started searching the area for weapon caches, terrorist infrastructure and terrorists.

The incursion into Gaza, which was launched Saturday evening, has already claimed the life of one soldier, Staff-Sergeant Dvir Emanuelof of the Golani brigade. Some 40 soldiers were wounded in clashes, and over 50 Palestinian gunmen were killed in the first day of the fighting, according to the Israeli army.

The Israel Air Force struck some 30 targets in the Gaza Strip on Sunday night, including a mosque, a suspected antiaircraft machine gun and several tunnels on the Philadelphi Route. The Navy attacked posts belonging to Hamas’ naval force and a bunker where Grad missiles were being stored.

50 plus terrorists dead against a single IDF soldier – not a bad ratio. The loss of a good guy is always tough, but that they only did lose one is an incredible statistic, especially given the close-quarters environment these guys are fighting in.

Israel says describes its short-term plan for Gaza as a “root canal” – digging around for any sort of Hamas infrastructure or supply points and taking them out. So far they have captured the locations of 220 of the 300 rocket attacks made during the last week, which has led to a big reduction in rocket attacks on Southern Israel in the last couple days.

So yeah, I’d say so far they’re doing pretty well. Here’s to hoping they clean it up and stay safe. How about sending them a pizza as a congratulations on a successful start?

Let slip the dogs of war

Israel is on the offensive. Hamas said they wouldn’t have the guts to do it without the U.S. – I think they were just proved wrong.

Early reports indicate an initial move into Gaza of roughly 10,000 troops, supported by tanks and artillery, with tens of thousands of reservists being called up for possibility of further action. Israel states they are not attempting to reclaim Gaza at this point (though they would be well within their rights to do so), but rather seeking to cripple Hamas’ infrastructure in the area with the intent of rendering them unable to continue the constant mortar and rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian centers. Prior to the shelling, Israel allowed any Gaza residents who were foreigners, or had foreign passports, to leave the area via the Erez border crossing, something you probably won’t be hearing a lot about in the news. Continue reading Let slip the dogs of war