When it comes to the news media, modern-day journalists and news purveyors tend to dish out the most inane and bottom of the barrel variety of news instead of reporting journalistically sound and unbiased pieces. But they break all journalistic rules when reporting news about Israel's inhumane and brutal military excesses. They either turn a blind eye, or else report in a manner that is heavily skewed in Israel's favor. This glaring slant by intentional omission of the events taking place over the years and increasingly so now can make you think that the war in Gaza between Israelis and Palestinians is due to sheer aggression on Hamas' part. But the recent tragic death of Israeli teenagers was just a pretext to this all-out assault on Gaza -- Israel pretended to investigate the fate of the teenagers, but it came out later that they already knew their fate, and used the disingenuous investigation to harass West Bank residents and escalated it further.
If one doesn't have the facts, the cagey and deceptive news media can persuade one to false conclusions: they make it sound as if two equal military adversaries are exchanging fire: the reality and devastation on the ground in Gaza dispels all such dubious insinuations.
Thus far Israel has carried several thousand air attacks, destroyed thousands of homes, killed more than 570 innocent civilians (including children), injured over 2,000, and displaced over 95,000 thousands civilians: far more than the 2012 Gaza offensive. On the other side, the 1,500 or so Hamas rockets have claimed the lives of two Israeli citizens and 27 Israeli soldiers in gun fire exchange since the ground offensive. Little damage in terms of home devastation has occurred on the Israeli side. I am not justifying any death or violence from either side: to me even one death is too many. But claims of Hamas' effectiveness in this conflict are vastly exaggerated.
The completely lopsided imbalance of destruction, death, and mayhem is no surprise, given Israel's fire power is thousands of folds superior to the laughable capability of Hamas rockets: the degree of violence is so ridiculously one sided, you cannot even call it a war --- it is one side methodically butchering the other side with hardly any opposition: civilians are sitting ducks for the Israeli army. Israel may be the fifth largest military power in the world, as it is not only a clearing house for arms from the United States but also a test venue for its new war technologies in action: the U.S. has invested nearly one billion dollars and has supplied parts and expertise in helping Israel develop the Iron Dome Defense system. The U.S. has also provided patriot interceptor missiles, planes, ammunition, advance missiles with powerful payloads etc.: all this not counting the three billion dollars (officially) of our tax money we give Israel every year, with no strings attached.
Last week I watched a few rather simplistic and scholastic YouTube videos that displayed utter disregard for the history behind this conflict by notable American Jewish talking heads. There was no mention of Irgun, Haganah, and Lehi terror groups or the UN resolutions. There is no mention of Israel not having declared its border since 1947, despite international calls for this for the last 66 years. These sorts of propagandist pieces -- either by design to deceive an unsuspecting audience or simple cases of sheer ignorance -- serve only to fuel the fire to this decades old convoluted debate. Zionist public relations chicanery has pulled the wool over the eyes of most Americans and the rest of the world by intimidating journalists, harassing opponents of the occupation, and attacking the messengers, yet the fact remains that Israel has been an occupying force: it has violated and continues to violate several UN resolutions and the sovereignty of the Palestinians. Furthermore, it keeps stealing lands from the Palestinian territories by bulldozing Palestinian homes and building illegal settlements. It continues to do so unabated -- without any retribution from the international body.
But what most Americans Zionists -- who send their monies to the motherland and support it unequivocally, without ever questioning what the mother country regime has been up to -- don't know is that the Gazans and West Bank inhabitants are constantly harassed, berated, and demoralized by IDF and the settlers, or that Gaza is one of the most densely populated pieces of land in the world and is effectively a prison, with all borders sealed (even the Egyptian crossing). The airport was bombed to smithereens by IDF over a decade ago; IDF gunboats patrol the seaside and the ports are closed. Israel controls all passage of goods, food, water, and merchandise; there are checkpoints everywhere and Gazans are not allowed to travel. Whatever little infrastructure and agriculture there is, it gets periodically bombed into oblivion to keep Gaza's morale down and food supply scarce, by these offensives with catchy names.
When IDF says it does everything to prevent civilian casualties, it's a bald-faced lie, borne out by past sentiments that Netanyahu professed to then secretary of state Clinton. I don't care how high-tech these warheads are, it is logistically impossible to launch missiles into Gaza or drop bombs and not kill civilians, and hence the death toll. There are instances where mindless killings could have been avoided: case in point the killing of the boys playing by the beach. The decision to launch a missile at them was a deliberate decision. When Wolf Blitzer asked the Israeli spokesman why the rocket was fired at them at the beach, the person replied, "Hamas is butchering their own children." Really?!?
No other country that is part of the international community would be allowed to commit such barbaric war crimes, unabated without consequence. Even Russia faced severe international rebuke, economic sanctions, and got kicked out of the G8 for annexing Crimea: further international retribution is in offing after the downing of the Malaysian Airline plane: which is proportionally getting more airtime. Yet while the world watches the Gazan tragedy unfold, the one country that is able to do something about these horrendous atrocities is shamefully acquiescing to the massacre -- cowardly politicians like McCain, Graham, Rand Paul, Chris Murphy, Obama, and others just stand there, regurgitating patent lines fed by their puppet masters. After 12 days of carnage and more than 570 civilian casualties, our president says the rising civilian deaths are a concern??
I try to believe that it's the Israeli regime and the politicians who are the problem but the people are basically decent. Yet the sentiments of some people give me pause. A Jewish client I work with asked me what I thought of the Gaza offensive, and then said "They are bombing the shit out of these fuck-heads." Said another, "I love what Israel is doing." Video of Israeli citizens watching the bombing while sipping coffee from the Sderot hills on lawn chairs and cheering each time a missile hit Gaza was a heinous revelation. When the Danish reporter asked one young spectator if the bombing makes the whole situation worse, she disagreed and suggested that the IDF should clear out the whole city, all of it, into the ground, sending chills down my spine. She very wryly finished with the revelation that she was a little fascist.
The practice of attacking and assassinating the character of anyone who speaks against Zionist dogma by calling a deuce a deuce has been honed to an art form by their spokespersons and leaders. After tarring and feathering such stalwart public figures as Jimmy Carter and Richard Goldstone, no doubt others will be muzzled in similar fashion. Ex-Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren from New Jersey has already fired the first salvo against the media, bewailing that the international media is biased against Israel: that is an amusing piece of op-ed.
One tragic fact told by Jewish American David Harris-Gershon gives much insight into why a faction like Hamas even exists (a democratically elected representative body of Gaza: an election both Israel and the United States wanted),"I've learned that -- and this is just one example of many -- a Palestinian child has tragically been killed every three days for the past 14 years. That bears repeating, since such deaths are rarely, if ever, given any attention in America: Palestinian parents have had to bury a child (lost to violence) every three days for the past 14 years."