Hi, Hamas? It's Hill

How come the Guardian found out the new administration is about to radically restructure the U.S. approach to the Middle East before anybody in the US media got it?

Certainly Newsweek, which this week ran a detailed piece on the Obama plans in the region, missed what the Guardian tells us today: The new president's ready to talk to Hamas. He's ready to negotiate with the adversary that Israel, the ally with whom we heretofore moved only in public lockstep, is trying to annihilate.

This is big. It is, of course, exactly what Obama said he'd do, talk to anybody. And yet, not just doing it, but saying he'll talk to Hamas just as Israel is trying to make sure Hamas has no voice to talk with, is a message with all kinds of savvy, subversive, game-changing subtexts.

So why should the Brits know this before we do?

Continue reading at newser.com

Comments

[nour2008]

230 childs and 92 women were killed until now.to every humen in this world what you will do if they are your childern to evey humen in this world DONOT BUY ANY ISREAL PRODUCTS WE CAN SAY NO FOR ISREAL BY PRACTICAL WAY

[AlButerol]

The Why is simple. The UK has a free press while the US has a self-censoring one which views its job as making sure Americans think what the right-wing government wants them to think. Europeans were aware of all the civilan and Allied deaths and torture taking place on a daily basis in Iraq while the Amercian public were spoon-fed a fantasy about the democratic society we were supposedly building there. That was certainly true until Abu Graib leaked. We believed that Saddam had WMDs while the rest of the world knew the intelligence was bullshit. I read about the Downing street memo in the London Times and Al-Jazeera two weeks before it even got a tiny blurb in American papers. Regardless, nobody in this country treated it like a significant news story for at least 6 months after the story broke in Europe. I can remember Watergate getting several full pages in the A section of the Washington Post several decades ago. Yet the President lying us into war or nine billion dollars in taxpayer cash vanishing in Iraq without a trace barely gets a few lines in back pages months after they occur. What has happened to our country? Have we all fallen asleep?

The preeminent investigative reporter of our age, Greg Palast, can't get a single Amercian newspaper or TV news outlet to carry any of his work. Yet he has a regular news show in the UK.

[RTIII]

The OBVIOUS answer is: Nobody in the U.S. does JOURNALISM any more, they are only reporters. There's certainly no INVESTIGATIVE journalism going on.

Reason? It's bad for advertising business to report on fascism - the merger of state and business interests. It's far better to keep us distracted and entertained than informed - this is, at least, clearly the "elite interest."
.

[Cheesemelt]

The Guardian prints anything that they can dream up. Every time I've ever seen a Drudge link to them, it's almost always turned about to be balderdash. Whimsical, yes? Reliable? Nyet.

UK papers are as reliable as Lucas electronics when it comes to their US political scene reportage.

[Freenation]

Yeah and tabloid papers like NYPOST are the go-to source for honest and courageous reporting, the papers opinion board is full of neocons, paid consultants etc...

So the juicier news is truth but the facts are making it up...nice logic...

[cgoodie]

Oh yeah, right! Hil gets to negotiate after Israel has softened them up!

[mountainweb]

Did you not hear that journalism died in the country! Just look at the NYT or the AJC (dropping 50% of their coverage area), Dan Rather was the tip of the iceberg and it has been melting rapidly ever since.

[ceemonster]

[So why should the Brits know this before we do?] they don't. i've read it somewhere within the last week, plus, as pointed out, we've all known it all all along. media melodramatics like this are sooooooo lame.

[paul-o]

I've been going to Guardian ever since the MSM in the US went into the tank over the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. I've found it more wide-ranging, interesting, and accurate about American life and politics than any other news source.

[indyleftist]

I wish it were true but it seems quite unfounded

Obama of course had a chance to speak with Hamas when he visited Israel last year.
Obama favored instigating a civil war in Palestine
He opposed democracy when it didn't go the way he wanted
He favored the blockades
He is unwilling to admit that Israel broke this latest ceasefire and says that Israel has the right to "defend" itself

Hopefully he has just been lying to everyone about his policy but I doubt it.

[1dogs2]

I think you have confused Bush with Obama.

[GZLives]

There's no negotiating with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i08L09V0_sg

[brisa]

FYI...MEMRI (the source of that video and others that are posted on youtube and being linked from mutiple blogs in the same manner as above) is a notorious pro-Israeli "new service" (read propaganda outlet), headed up by former Israeli intelligence personnel.

It is well known for offering wide distribution to some of the most inflamatory rhetoric that the Muslem world has to offer. It has also been caught providing mistranslations of Arabic to enhance the offensive nature of the presentation.

[alkamm]

The Irish IRA was just as adamant in their hatred of the Protestants, but a peace was finally established and both sides stopped shooting each other, bombing each other, if not nating each other.

Hate's a growth industry. Hamas and Hezbollah profit with huge subsidies they have to earn from their Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and other backers. Israel gets theirs from us. The fact that both sides drag their God into the equation is pretty funny when both religions are clear that despite many passages of antique animosities toward their respective "others," both religions have clear injunctions against harming innocents.

Hamas's rocket attacks would be pitiful if they weren't so self-defeating. Without launching a few rockets and killing Jews, they don't receive huge petrodollar paydays. They don't care about their own people or they'd realize instigating Israeli attacks isn't just a cute public relations game.

[Moder8]

Is this where you are hiding?? Why have you left the retort? You must go back and own up to your mistakes.

[almazza98]

Nelson Mandela was on the US list of terrorist in 2008, YES 2008.

[Hoelder]

Maybe, if you would or could listen to non English speaking media, you could find out some news that doesn't make it to BBC World report. Really no surprise to me.

[Baltotoast]

The British have always done a wonderful job writing about the middle east....it is when they actually do something that they screw up horribly (Balfour Declaration, etc)....

[Taxi]

Making a phone call is cheaper than making a bomb.

Bombs haven't worked and now we're broke.

[Karma7]

Israel is trying to make sure Hamas has no voice to talk with by contaminating Palestinians with lethal radio-active Depleted Uranium in Gaza.
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2009/01/05/depleted-uranium-found-in-gaza-victims/

The incoming Obama Administration should not be locked into an ill-informed and counter-productive policy that turns a blind eye to Bush’s failed attempt to provoked war in Gaza with the support of Britain, (June, 2007) http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200706/28/eng20070628_388298.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/05/israelandthepalestinians-egypt

Vanity Fair reported that “confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose revealed how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever. …. the secret plan backfired....,

…. David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007 - … accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” ….
Wurmser believes that Bush is a hypocrite. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” .... “It directly contradicts it.”
http://www.poligazette.com/2008/03/03/vanity-fair-bush-provoked-palestinian-civil-war/

[kimleehan]

I'm still trying to figure out who are the three people are with knowledge of discussions in the Obama camp, The guardian claimes it spoke to three people, but did'nt name them but covered their own butts by saying "there is no talk of Obama approving direct deplomatic negotiations with Hamas but only being urged by advisers to initiate low-level talks. Either someones lying or Obama has a leak in his administration or their just throwing something out there to see what happens?