Wednesday, February 18, 2009

SPY vs SPY


The Melbourne Age today shifted its emphasis in the Middle East from the sublime to the ridiculous with an article sourced from the London Daily Telegraph based on unconfirmed pieces of intelligence suggesting that Israel has launched an "elaborate covert war including the use of hitmen, sabotage, front companies and double agents" as an alternative to direct strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities - Israel wages cloak-and-dagger war on Iran.

So the Age prefers dealing in the rumours and innuendo that operate within the murky world of Spy vs Spy to dealing in cold, hard facts. Readers might want to know what happened to give rise to the belief that Israel has issues with the Iranians but the Age isn't telling. There's no need to give such stories any context or inform of threats from the Iranian President to wipe the Jewish State off the face of the earth.

But why let facts get in the way of any good story anyway? The Age has yet to supply a single line discrediting its earlier beat ups about the Gaza school massacre which it gleefully ran last month when it was falsely alleged that Israel hit three United Nations-run schools in "attacks that killed up to 48 people" and then changed tack a day later to claim that three Israeli shells "exploded just outside the school grounds, causing pandemonium inside." When it turned out there was no pandemonium inside and that the only civilian deaths were three human shields of Hamas who died along with nine Hamas fighters, the Age went shtum.

And this silence extends to clear evidence of other Hamas atrocities, double-dealing and the repulsive treatment it metes out to its own citizens. Hush, we can't let our readers find out how Hamas treats its children and how its public broadcaster brainwashes them with nasties like Farfour the Mouse, Nahoul the Bee, Assud the Rabbit and now - Naasur the Bear . We must not inform them that Hamas steals humanitarian aid sent across border crossings from Israel and how the United Nations allows Hamas to guard unexploded Israeli ordinance from the Gaza War; weaponry that has suddenly and mysteriously gone missing - Explosives haul missing in Gaza.

These facts can only be found in the blank pages. You know where to go if you want to find unsubstantiated and suspect information, rumours and innuendo.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Surely, you expected nothing different?

Anonymous said...

The first casualty of war: Truth http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304799578&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Which is the greater factor in getting consumers of news to believe that "1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians" were killed during Operation Cast Lead? Intrinsic anti-Israel bias - or a high degree of gullibility to manipulative international media coverage?

Anas Naim, a nephew of Hamas Health Minister Bassem Naim, who was killed on Jan. 4 in Gaza City, was described in Palestinian reports as a 'medic.'

Put another way, do you have to be anti-Israel to believe Palestinian lies, or is Palestinian mendacity so well-constructed, so plausible, and so well disseminated by collaborative media outlets like Al Jazeera that even well-meaning people can't help but believe the worst of Israel?

These questions are prompted by some significant reporting in Monday's Jerusalem Post ("Int'l community was duped by Hamas's false civilian death toll figures, IDF claims").

Even well-regarded Palestinian pressure groups have been claiming that Israel killed 895 civilians in the Gaza fighting. Operating on the basis of such "data," coupled with a poisoned wellspring of antipathy against the Jewish state, Mahmoud Abbas has been making the case for indicting Israeli cabinet ministers and military officers for international war crimes.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners allege that two-thirds of the Arab fatalities were civilian. The IDF insists that no more than a third of the dead were civilians - and not a one was targeted intentionally. So instead of "1,300 killed, most of them civilians," we now have reason to believe, based on the IDF's methodical analysis of 1,200 of the Palestinian fatalities thus far identified by name, that 580 were combatants and 300 non-combatants.

Of these 300, two were female suicide bombers, and some others were related to terrorists such as Nizar Rayyan, a top Hamas gunman who insisted that his family join him in the hereafter.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth," said US senator Hiram Warren Johnson.

Take, for instance, Arab eyewitness accounts of the number killed at the Jabalya UN School on January 6 - some 40 dead, maybe 15 of them women and children. The IDF says the actual figure is 12 killed, nine of them Hamas operatives.

With time, perhaps, the names and true identities of each and every one of the Gaza dead - including the 320 as yet unclassified - will be determined.

One point is indisputable: Despite the best efforts of both sides, the IDF wound up killing more Palestinians unintentionally than the Palestinians killed Israeli civilians on purpose. This is known as "disproportionality."

Israeli officials, given bitter experiences such as Jenin in 2002, when a grossly false narrative of massacre and massed killing was disseminated by Palestinian officials, should have long since internalized the imperative to try to ascertain the number and nature of Palestinian dead in real time.

But while the figure "1,300 Palestinians killed, most/many of them civilians" is now embedded in the public consciousness, it is emphatically not too late to try to set the record straight.

Atrocity stories are nothing new. The British have been charged with using them to create popular outrage during the Boer War. The allies used them against Germany during World War I - which, incidentally, allowed the real Nazi atrocities during WWII to be dismissed long into the Holocaust.

Nowadays, it matters what masses of uninformed or ill-informed people far removed from the Arab-Israel conflict think. Dry statistics released so belatedly will win Israel no PR credit in a world of 24/7 satellite news channels and real-time blogging. Nevertheless, the fact that an Israeli narrative is finally out there is significant. Perhaps responsible news outlets will want to reexamine some of their original reporting, along with the assumption that "most" of the dead were non-combatants.

Palestinian propaganda is insidious because those being manipulated are oblivious to what is happening. Chaotic images of casualties being hurried to hospitals, gut-wrenching funerals and swaths of shattered buildings create an overarching "reality." Against this, Israel's pleadings that the Palestinians are culpable for the destruction, and that the above images lack context, scarcely resonate.

Despite six decades of intransigence and a virtual copyright on airline hijackings and suicide bombings, the Palestinians have created a popular "brand" for themselves by parlaying their self-inflicted victimization into a battering ram against Israel.

Disseminators of news should have learned better than to take Palestinian death-toll claims at face value, least of all when sourced directly or indirectly from the Hamas-run government of Gaza.

Anonymous said...

I HOPE THE STORY IS TRUE & THE ISRAELIS KNOCK OFF ALL THOSE INVOLVED IN DEVELOPING THE NUKES,ITS CERTAINLY BETTER THAN A FULL OUT WAR.
ISRAEL IS NOW OUT ON ITS OWN , AMERICA HAS ITS HANDS FULL AND IT APPEARS OBAMAA WANTS TO GO THE WAY OF THE BRITT'S AND OTHER EUROPEANS AND APPEASE THE MUSLIMS .
TELL ME ONE GOOD REASON AMADINAJAD AND HIS MAD MULLAHS WOULDN'T GO AHEAD WITH THEIR THREATS TO DESTROY ISRAEL ONCE THEY GET UP AND RUNNING.
WHAT IS ISRAEL SUPPOSED TO DO WAIT UNTIL A NUKE LANDS IN TEL AVIV THEN ONLY RESPOND? A BIT LATE I WOULD THINK..
AFTER ALL IRAN STAGED A WAR WITH IRAQ IN THE 80'S OVER ONE MILLION IRANIANS/IRAQIS WERE KILLED THEY OBVIOUSLY DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH DEATH.

AMERICA SHOULD TAKE NOTE AND KNOCK OFF THE PAKI SCIENTISTS AND OTHER PAKISTANIS WORKING ON THEIR NUKE PROGRAM AFTER ALL THEY HAVE JUST GIVEN PART OF THEIR TERRITORY OVER TO THE TALIBAN, PAKISTAN IS OUT OF CONTROL IF AMERICA DOESN'T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT ,IT IS THEY WHO WILL BE ATTACKED BY THE MUSLIMS BUT THIS TIME WITH A NUKE..

Wilbur Post said...

Anonymous. I'd be very surprised if even 5% of the story has any resemblance to the truth.