Thursday, January 24, 2008

TRUE CONFESSIONS - THE RESULTS OF THE SCAM

No Kidding. This sort of behaviour should not be taken lightly and usually comes back to bite you on the bum.

Thankfully, we no longer need to endure the babble from the dupes in the Hamasphere about Gaza being under siege by Israel. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has "proved to the world that his country is perfectly capable of caring for the Palestinians when it comes to food and medical care".

Good luck Hosni!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The BBC coverage of the Gaza scam has become an embarrassment to the journalistic profession.

I watched BBC World on Foxtel last night and the midnight bulletin went live to the Gaza/Egypt border to cover what one of its commentators described as the "Israeli blockade" of the Gaza border with Egypt. I'm not sure how that works but I would have thought that if there's a blockade on the border between Gaza and Egypt it would be either a Gazan or an Egyptian blockade - even if the Israelis, the Americans or the Martians are putting pressure on the blockading party.

Then the BBC talking head said something to the effect that Hamas was assisting the Egyptians in their attempt to seal the border but minutes later a Caterpillar bulldozer appeared to be smashing over another part of the border fence. We then learned a Hamas person was operating it. A Caterpillar in Gaza - I thought the Palestinians were boycotting them for turning terrorist enablers into pancakes!

If you want to project a picture of Hamas being co-operative with the sealing of the border you say so. If you want Hamas to be pictured as doing something heroic for the poor suffering people then you say that too. Say anything but don't let the truth get in the way of a good story, don't have camera crews at Sderot or the latest murderous Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jews.

As for those poor suffering Palestinians ... well golly gee! Not one of them looked undernourished or underfed like real suffering people in world crisis points (i.e. the ones in Darfur which the BBC avoids for fear of offending the people who run Arab militias or the ones at Belsen but that's another story isn't it?). Luckily for the commentators, the cameras quickly panned off the Palestinians carrying necessities for the starving throngs like TV's, VCR's computers and giant boxes of Marlboro's. Those things would have been handy in Rwanda when there was real humiliation and murder and when the BBC crews stayed comfortably away.

[Andrew - Geelong]

Anonymous said...

Five Out Takes You Might Have Missed from Honest Reporting (http://backspin.typepad.com/backspin/2008/01/five-out-takes.html)

With all the coverage of the Gaza border, these five out-takes deserve closer attention:

Washington Post on one family's reunion:

Along one teeming road in the Egyptian part of Rafah, a Hamas security official who had been stranded on Egypt's side of the border since June -- fearing arrest by Israel during a crossing if he tried to return -- met his mother and sisters in the surging crowd. "Eight months I haven't seen him!" his mother exclaimed after a flurry of hugging and kissing.

The man excused himself for not talking. "I'm on the wanted list," he explained.

Noah Pollak on Egypt’s role:

Egypt has been hoisted with its own petard, and it is really quite enjoyable to see from a strategic perspective. Hamas probably blew up the border fence with explosives that Egypt allowed it to smuggle into Gaza. Heh.
Daily Telegraph reporter Tim Butcher gets too curious about one man's shopping spree:

Fertiliser, broken down into half bags for lugging through the many tunnels that arms smugglers normally use for delivery into Gaza, was to be seen as it was manhandled overland.

It was white, oily, crystalline and a dab on the tongue left a sharp, burning sensation.

In most countries fertiliser has a perfectly innocent function but in Gaza militants use it to make explosive.

"Hey, hey, hey," shouted a man as I took a photograph of a pile of fertiliser half bags.

His aggressive tone jarred with the mood the crowd as he grabbed my camera lens firmly.

Christian Science Monitor on Gaza hunger:

While starvation has not been a problem there – most of the strip's residents receive food aid from the UN – it's proved a powerful idea in the propaganda war over Gaza's fate.

Deborah Orr on collective punishment:

Those Palestinians unfortunate enough to live in camps in Lebanon, for example, are not utterly deprived of rights, and dependent on UN aid, because of Israeli policy alone. Pan-Arab policy also dictates that the Palestinians should live in absolute hardship, lest they decide to play into the hands of Israel, by abandoning the struggle and quietly assimilating and getting on with their lives. . . .
[Hamas] sees the suffering of Gazans as a tool in the fight for international attention, and a necessary component of the only war it can really afford to wage – the propaganda war.

Anonymous said...

According to this Associated Press Article Gazans have spent $130 million in less than two days in Egypt http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hqoubqRMH_wjv_FdBMRuvU9mrg-QD8UCP2C00.

Now, if half a million crossed into Egypt, they spent an average of $260.00 each over in Egypt. That's not bad for what is allegedly one of the most impoverished regions on earth. Perhaps they're not so impoverished anyway - after all I haven't seen a single anorexic Palestinian on my tv screen since the Gaza scam started.

Little wonder the Egyptians aren't in too much of a hurry to close the border. This has been a boom for its economy although I'm surprised that the stores on the other side of the border haven't run out of merchandise. I'm also surprised that CNN haven't had their crews filming their empty shelves for they must be empty by now with that unexpected influx of sales.

While Hamas is gloating, shouldn't they be worried that the exodus of hard currency is going to further damage their fragile economy? No, on second thoughts, their economy couldn't be too badly off if they can import enough explosive material to manufacture kassam rockets in the thousands.

[Andrew - Geelong]