Donald Johnson writes:
A Gaza story is on the front page of the cellulose edition of the New York Times, with the provocative title, “As Hamas Tunnels Back Into Israel, Palestinians Are Afraid, Too,” by Diaa Hadid and Majd Al Waheidi.
People living on the edges of Gaza border towns, like the Israelis a few miles away, complain of hearing surreptitious digging in the wee hours, and voice a parallel anxiety [to Israelis] about the tunnels being rapidly rebuilt near their homes becoming targets for Israeli strikes. They are raising unusually harsh — albeit anonymous, for fear of reprisal — criticism of Hamas, the militant Islamist group that rules Gaza, for putting people at risk. . . .
“Dear God — we will be torn apart,” said a 42-year-old woman in Khuzaa, a village near the fence.
Not that I approve of Hamas, but the New York Times has absolutely no hesitation writing a story that justifies Israel bombing civilian neighborhoods. They go out of their way to find Palestinians willing to risk Hamas’s wrath criticizing the tunnels. How hard did these reporters work to find Palestinians and Israelis criticizing Israeli atrocities? Remember that countless homes were destroyed in the last war and 500 children killed.
Ordinarily they never put stories on the front page about the conflict when no war is going on, but here they have an opportunity to give their blessing to past and future Israeli bombings of civilians, so — it goes on the front page.
I look at the headline again, and it makes me livid. “As Hamas Tunnels Back Into Israel, Palestinians Are Afraid, Too.” This is exactly what the Clintons said. Every single civilian that Israel kills is blamed on Hamas using civilians as human shields by the hasbara crowd. And again, to the extent that Hamas is responsible for such behavior, it should be written about, but the NYT should also point out all the cases where Israel clearly killed civilians with no excusable reason at all. When what the paper of record does is, write about individual incidents during the war, rarely taking a clear stand, and then bury or ignore the human rights reports showing countless civilian deaths when those are published, and as time passes write crap like this, where the very clear message is that civilians die solely because of Hamas. It makes me too angry to write about calmly.
The Times might as well write Clinton’s speeches on this subject. Clinton piping hasbara on April 14:
Even the most independent analyst will say the way that Hamas places its weapons, the way that it often has its fighters in civilian garb, it is terrible. . . Remember, Israel left Gaza. They took out all the Israelis. They turned the keys over to the Palestinian people. And what happened? Hamas took over Gaza.So instead of having a thriving economy with the kind of opportunities that the children of the Palestinians deserve, we have a terrorist haven that is getting more and more rockets shipped in from Iran and elsewhere.
I wouldn’t mind this if they were genuinely fair and wrote also hard hitting pieces about Israeli brutality, but they are incapable of doing that.
James North adds:
Consider the Times’s agenda in this article; the reporters looked for Palestinians who are living right near the tunnels. These people might be anxious, and understandably, but did the Times even attempt to talk to any of the other 1.8 million people in the Gaza open-air prison and ask what they think of resistance? The implication is that a small minority of people are putting Palestinians at risk. If so, go out and find out if it’s true.
But Palestinians voted for Hamas, the last time they voted; and if you read Max Blumenthal’s excellent book, The 51-Day War, it is obvious that there is broad support for armed resistance across Gaza. Or look at this video of an old man in the occupied West Bank fearlessly confronting Israeli gunfire at a demonstration during the Gaza war with a cardboard model of a rocket attached to his arm, the rocket painted green with Hamas’s colors. He clearly approves of resistance.
The Times front-pager is 2 percent of what the reporting should be. Even readers who support Israel are being ill-served by this distorted article. Pro Israelis should want to know what the opposition is in Gaza to the occupation. The Times’s implied narrative is that the opposition is restricted to a minority of militants who most of the public shuns or is afraid of. But what if the armed resistance has the overwhelming support of the Gazans?
Why did the Times place this misleading article right on the front page? The rest of the world’s press is concentrating on former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, and his strong warnings about worsening Israeli “extremism.” The Times today puts Ya’alon on page 5, and “extremism” isn’t in the headline.
The article has been happily tweeted by the Israeli army spokesperson:
The untold story of #Hamas attack tunnels, an entirely different perspective by @diaahadid https://t.co/T2uHsghwo5 pic.twitter.com/Vj0U5bEbtx
— LTC (R) Peter Lerner (@LTCPeterLerner) May 21, 2016
“And my big beef is: this is on the front page of the New York Times”
it makes perfect sense. it wasn’t just phil writing about i/p being a big deal at the convention and a thorn in clinton’s side yesterday. https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2016/05/divisive-democratic-platform/
wapo, nymag and haaretz also covered it. plus, bernie’s been saying as much on the campaign trail. so the nyt is probably getting ready for the showdown and softening the target.
Yes and I thought Eric Levitz article in NY Magazine was very fair. Goes to show that when this issue is allowed to get into the mainstream, journalists will make US more evenhanded whether they want to or not. Like Wolf Blitzer formerly of AIPAC being evenhanded.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/bernie-sanderss-surprising-platform-priority.html
“Not that I approve of Hamas” then don’t vote for them.
isn’t this a non-sequitur given the subject under discussion, are you not genuflecting towards precisely the prejudice you purport to be attacking.
as a writer its not really what you approve of that is of interest, especially when you fail to elaborate, but what you understand and can explain
you might find this interesting perhaps even informative,
from: Hamas Gaza and the Blockade by Jamie Allinson
“The rise of Hamas is the latest episode in this history. The exhaustion of Fatah and the Palestinian left in the early 1980s arose from their detachment of the struggle for Palestinian liberation from “internal” struggles against the surrounding Arab regimes, in particular from the potential power of the Egyptian working class. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), under Fatah’s leadership, followed a strategy of establishing bases in neighbouring Arab states while avoiding any challenge to the ruling regimes.35 The regimes themselves observed no such restraint. Thus the PLO were driven from even the weakest frontline Arab states—Jordan in 1970 and (in the midst of civil war and Israeli invasion) Lebanon in 1982. The Palestinian left in the more left-wing “fronts” did recognise that revolution in the Arab states was a precondition for the liberation of Palestine but their idea of this revolution was Mao Zedong’s “protracted people’s war” or Che Guevara’s guerrilla focos.36 Although the revolutionary and proto-revolutionary movements inspired by the Palestinian left did reach the non-Palestinian populations, any attempt to establish liberated areas in the refugee camps was doomed: Israel, the local Arab ruling class or both would intervene to crush such areas—precisely what happened in Jordan and Lebanon.”
and
“The charter of the new movement insisted upon the Palestinians’ claim to all their homeland, including that part which became Israel in 1948. It also included an ample share of what Lenin called the “prejudices” of the petty bourgeoisie.41 So, for example, the charter considers Judaism a kindred monotheism to be protected by Islamic rule but also repeats anti-Semitic claptrap found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.42 These ideas have been abandoned by Hamas leaders and their original authors have long passed out of influence. Such passages—repugnant and counterproductive in equal measure—persist not because of any ingrained Arab or Islamic anti-Semitism but rather as a symptom of dangerous political confusion among those Palestinians who have only encountered Jews as agents of an oppressive colonial project.43 This confusion can only be effectively challenged from a standpoint that supports resistance to that oppression. To do otherwise is to permit or encourage the identification of opposition to anti-Semitism with Zionism.
Hamas’s primary appeal lay not in its charter, whatever the contents of that document. Rather Palestinians were drawn to Hamas’s rejection of the PLO’s proposed compromise with Israel on a two-state solution. The PLO’s Tangiers Declaration of 1988 and Jordan’s renunciation of any claim to the West Bank offered recognition to Israel in return for ending the intifada.44 That compromise was particularly unpalatable to the Gazan population, the majority of them refugees who would be denied any prospect of return to their homes under a two-state deal with Israel. Hamas refused to join the PLO during the intifada but carried out essentially the same acts of resistance”
http://isj.org.uk/hamas-gaza-and-the-blockade/
She cannot be that naive about the history. Its obvious why she is keeping her job at the nyt. Lying for filthy lucre.
How does building tunnels inside Gaza justify bombing civilian neighborhoods again?
I know the contorted-beyond-all-recognition logic that asserts that it does, but does it actually?
This acceptance of the completely psychopathic Israeli killing mentality as a normal/immutable/driving condition of life in Gaza is ultumately going to come to be known as “Gaza Syndrome. “Don’t build tunnels near me!” is not a criticism of Hamas, it’s a simple [generational?] survival mode based on past experience with Israel’s Golda Meir-ish glee at slaughtering Palestinian children by the hundreds for no reason whatsoever – and repeatedly watching the world say that psychopathy just fine and dandy (or alternately, watching the blood drip from George Stephanopoulos’ smiling mouth as he calls slaughtering children, “Mowing the Grass.)
At some point all that environmental psychopathy-as-normal has got to shift your priority from what’s right to what’s survivable.
Sadly in the case of Gaza it doesn’t matter. Israel doesn’t need a reason (or can create one instantly) to slaughter children in Gaza. There is no stopping it, nor is there a way for residents to position themselves away from harm.
Has the world ever seen a concentration camp population of millions of people subjected to this treatment for years and years? Don’t think so.
Yup. Gaza Syndrome.