MALEVOLENT

A Palestinian boy distributes sweets and flowers to people in the southern Gaza Strip after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in southern Israel February 4, 2008. A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up and police shot dead his accomplice in an attack in a shopping centre in southern Israel on Monday that killed at least one Israeli, emergency services said.REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA)

It was not for nothing that media watchdog Honest Reporting awarded malevolent Melbourne Age Jerusalem Bureau chief Ed O’Loughlin its annual 2007 Dishonest Reporter award for his warped sense of moral equivalence in reporting the conflict between Israel and its neighbours.

Mr. Ed has been providing moral cover for terrorists in the region for years. He deceptively paints Hamas, an organisation that has a written charter advocating the destruction of Israel and genocide against Jews, as boy scouts. He shuns its grubby incitement to racist hatred even on children’s television programmes and its complicity in rocket attacks on civilian targets. He whitewashes terrorist activity against the Jewish state and at the same time, attempts to turn its efforts in countering those who would murder its citizens on their head by making them appear to be deliberate and calculated attempts to oppress a downtrodden and suffering people.

O’Loughlin is hung up on statistics. The conflicting and confusing casualty figures he used last week in his appaling coverage of the results of the Winograd Commission were an embarrasment to journalism and to his newspaper. His report in today's Age on the terrorist attack in Dimona - Israeli dies in Palestinian suicide attack is even worse. In it, he seeks to draw equivalence between the atrocity of the suicide bombers who were foiled in their attempt to cause much greater carnage by alert security against terrorist operations.

"The attack is the first suicide bombing in Israel since three men were killed in an attack on the Red Sea resort of Eilat just over a year ago.

"Since then six Israeli civilians, six soldiers and an Ecuadorean migrant labourer have been killed by Palestinians.

"At least 420 Palestinian civilians and militants were killed by Israeli action in the same period."

O'Loughlin makes no distinction whatsover between Palestinian actions which are mainly calculated to cause mass deaths among civilian populations and IDF actions where the targets are terrorists who as a matter of tactics and strategy deliberately embed themselves among their own civilian populations thereby putting their own people in harm's way.

Further, he makes no attempt to inform his readers of another statistic - the fact that in roughly the same period for which he supplies his casualty figures, more than 620 Palestinian civilians and militants (including almost 50 women and children) were killed by violent Palestinian actions.

And if there is any doubt that O'Loughlin is covering for the genocidal Hamas regime then consider the fact that while his report attributes the attack to a "splinter" group of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party (one of a few terrorist groups that claimed responsibility) he neglects to mention that the killers came from Gaza after Hamas smashed through its border fence with Egypt at Rafah. Nor does he attempt to inform readers where Hamas stands in relation to the attack. According to a report in Haaretz (which O'Loughlin has quoted from in the past when that paper is critical of Israel's actions), "(i)n Gaza, Hamas spokesman Ayman Taha said he did not know whether his group was involved, but said the attack was justified."

That's right - a representative of the elected Palestinian leadership Hamas said that a suicide attack was justified. Those boy scouts command so much respect from this journalist that he is unable or unwilling to tell the world that they really are nothing better than a bunch of murderous barbarians.