The recurring nightmare

I haven't had a Kirschen cartoon on recently and this is a timely one from the delightful Dry Bones Blog

No mea culpa but ...shock, horror

Age columnist Paul Sheahan wrote an op ed that appeared in the paper's online edition yesterday in which he deplores the Reprehensible portrayal of a murderer as a victim.

The piece doesn't exactly represent an admission on the part of the Age that reprehensible errors were made in an earlier piece from Guardian columnist Fiochra Gibbons published last week but it's amazing that the Age allowed Sheahan's views to be aired.

Amazing given that successive Middle East bureau chiefs at Fairfax have over the past decade done exactly this with the Israelis in their war with Palestinian terror:

A murderer of children becomes a victim.

The rank hypocrisy of the Age

Yesterday, the Melbourne Age published another article by its Middle East bureau person on Hana al-Shalabi, a suspected member of Islamic Jihad held under Israel's administrative detention laws. Ms. al-Shalabi is on a hunger strike in protest against being held in this manner and other Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strikes in sympathy with her. This follows another hunger strike by a Palestinian detainee Khader Adnan which was also reported in the Age and ended last month when Israeli authorities agreed to release him.

Another Palestinian detainee also commenced a hunger strike this week. Yousef al-Shayeb is a journalist held by the Palestine Authority after he wrote about corruption in the Palestinian diplomatic mission in France.

His story did not appear in today's edition of the Age.

Peace Now rejects UNHRC Mission

Even Peace Now rejects UNHRC Mission.

I think that just about says everything about the decision to conduct another kangaroo court assassination of Israel at a time when the world looks away from atrocities committed by serial civil rights abusers.

Perhaps this is why:

The Lesson of Tariq Ramadan

Professor Tariq Ramadan and the ABC.

What a great mix?

"Religion was not Mohamed Merah's problem - nor was his politics. A French citizen frustrated at being unable to find his place, to give his life dignity and meaning in his own country, he would find two political causes through which he could articulate his distress: Afghanistan and Palestine. He attacked symbols like the army, and killed Jews, Christians and Muslims without distinction."

Really?

Not according to the majority of those whose comments are published below the article.

Last week it was the editor of the Guardian. This week the ABC. Next week?

Tell the Truth

From the excellent blog This ongoing war, a question well worth asking.

Why are Jewish children killed? What does it tell us about Europe?

What does it tell us about the Guardian and the Age who publish Op Eds about the killing and cannot bring themselves to admit that the opinions expressed (in this case by one Fiachra Gibbons) were startling based on a false premise?


Why can't they face the antisemitism accepted in some western circles?

Jerusalem

One of most insidious aspects of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the PA leadership's attempt to whitewash the Jewish connection to the land and in particular to Jerusalem. It's not surprising since Mahmoud Abbas has been a long time pathological liar whose thesis was based on holocaust denial. It takes such a person to claim on one hand that he wants peace and a two state solution and on the other to conduct a viscous anti-Semitic campaign against the Jews even to deny their existence in their most holy city.

This is what Abbas and many of his followers and the apologists for the cause are lying about:

Palestinian hypocrisy over terror attacks on Jewish schools

So Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad have condemned the Toulouse massacre.

But, as elderofziyon has pointed out there have been several instances of Arab terrorists deliberately targeting Jewish schools with not the slightest regrets from official quarters:

1970:

The Avivim school bus massacre was a terrorist attack on an Israeli school bus on May 8, 1970 in which 12 Israeli civilians were killed, nine of them children, and 25 were wounded. Two bazooka shells were fired at the bus. Early in the morning, the bus departed from Avivim heading with its passengers to two local schools. This route had been scouted by the militants, believed to have infiltrated from Lebanon, and an ambush was set up. As the bus passed by, ten minutes after leaving Avivim, it was attacked by heavy gunfire from both sides of the road. The driver was amongst those hit in the initial barrage,[3] as were the two other adults on board. The three were killed as the bus crashed into an embankment as the attackers continued firing into the vehicle.

1974:

The first target of the Kiryat Shmona massacre was a school, which was luckily closed for Passover. The terrorists went for plan B, killing 18 people at a nearby building.

The Ma'alot massacre was a terrorist attack which included a two-day hostage-taking of 115 people which ended in the deaths of over 25 hostages. It began when three armed Palestinian terrorists of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine[2] entered Israel from Lebanon. Soon afterwards they attacked a van, killing two Israeli Arab women and entered an apartment building in the town of Ma'alot, where they killed a couple and their four-year-old son.[3] From there, they headed for the Netiv Meir elementary school, where they took more than 115 people (including 105 children) hostage on 15 May 1974, in Ma'alot. The hostage-takers soon issued demands for the release of 23 Palestinian militants from Israeli prisons, or else they would kill the students. On the second day of the standoff, a unit of the Golani Brigade stormed the building. During the takeover, the hostage-takers killed the children with grenades and automatic weapons. Ultimately, 25 hostages, including 22 children, were killed and 68 more were injured.

1997:

The Island of Peace massacre was a mass murder attack that occurred at the Island of Peace site in Naharayim on March 13, 1997 in which a Jordanian soldier opened fire at a large group of Israeli schoolgirls from the AMIT Fuerst School in Beit Shemesh who were on a class field trip, killing seven of them and injuring six others. (Jordan's King Hussein did apologize for this massacre, begging for forgiveness in person from the victims' families. This is in stark contrast with all the Palestinian Arab attacks listed here.)

2002:

The Yeshivat Beit Yisrael massacre was a suicide bombing which occurred on 2 March 2002 at the entrance of the ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva "Beit Yisrael" located in downtown Jerusalem. Eleven Israeli civilians were killed in the attack, including two infants and three children. Fatah claimed responsibility.

May 28: Three high school students were killed and two others wounded in a school in Itamar when a Palestinian gunman opened fire, before he was shot dead by a security guard. Fatah claimed responsibility.
5 students were killed and 23 people were injured, four seriously, when a Palestinian gunman penetrated a highschool that combines religious studies and military training in the Gush Katif settlement of Atzmona on March 7. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

2008:

The Mercaz HaRav massacre, also called the Mercaz HaRav shooting, was an attack that occurred on 6 March 2008, in which a lone Palestinian gunman shot multiple students at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, a religious school in Jerusalem, Israel, after which the gunman himself was shot dead. Eight students and the perpetrator were killed. Eleven more were wounded, five of them placed in serious to critical condition. The massacre was praised by Hamas and, according to a subsequent poll, was supported by 84 percent of the Palestinian population.

Two terrorists entered the Mekor Hayim High School Yeshiva in Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem, and stabbed two students. The terrorists were killed by two of the counselors in the room. The Izaddin al-Kassam's Martyrs Brigades, the Hamas military wing, claimed responsibility for the attack.

2011:

The Hamas school bus attack was a 7 April 2011 incident in which Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a Kornet laser-guided anti-tank missile over the border at an Israeli school bus. Hamas militants claimed responsibility. The missile hit the bus after all but one of the children had been dropped off at the kibbutz where they lived, and the bus had traveled just 50 metres beyond its that last stop there. The only remaining passenger, a 16-year-old boy named Daniel Viflic, was critically injured with shrapnel wounds to the head and died from his injuries on 17 April.

And that's not even counting other attacks deliberately aimed at children (such as the Bat Mitzvah suicide bomb, or the attack on an ice cream shop in Petah Tikva) nor the many rockets that "happened" to hit schools (a 4 year old was killed in a 2004 Qassam attack that hit near a nursery.)

It's Football Time

Last night marked the opening of our football season in Australia.

For a change of tone, I thought I would bring in a wonderful story from a different kind of football -

The Forgotten Story of … Abraham Klein, the 'master of the whistle'




From the Guardian yet!

No apologies for the wet dreams of the Guardian and the Age

I've been reading the comments of Guardian readers on cif in reaction to an editorial on the Toulouse murders - Toulouse shootings: in the line of fire.

Incredibly, the Guardian has the gall to still refer to Merah's atrocities as "shootings" and not "murders" in much the same way as "terrorists" who fire missiles at school buses are elevated to the status of "militants" but that's another thing ... or perhaps not?

However, it was somewhat uplifting to read cif. Instead of the usual vitriol against Israel and the Jews that I have come to expect from cif, I found a substantial amount of anger among readers sickened by the failure of the Guardian and/or columnist Fiochra Gibbons to provide some mea culpa for the errors contained in last week's op ed in which Gibbons exculpated jihadism and antiSemitism as a motive in the Toulouse murders. The editorial itself also gets the treatment from its readers. 

I really enjoyed the post of finduskeepus but the general gist of what the readership is saying must be recognised by the Guardian.

And by the Age which, needless to say, has yet to comment about the sheer stupidity of the Gibbons article. Gibbons was way off the mark so the silence of the Age is problematic. But then so is it's dismissal of the funerals of the Jewish victims and the disappearance of its Middle East Bureau chief at the very same time.

It seems to me that the Age might have cause to worry that, like the Guardian, not all of its readers are idiots.

Toulouse Serial Killer Mohammad Merah Dead

72 virgins now scampering in hell.

The greatest heartbreak

There's a very touching report in today's Australian by John Lyons on the funerals in Israel of the Jewish victims of the Toulouse antiSemitic attack from earlier in the week - Greatest heartbreak the smallest body.

Before the ceremony, a convoy of police cars and ambulances made their way through Jerusalem with the bodies. People stood watching. At 10.07am (7.07pm AEST) , the first of the bodies, 30-year-old Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, was brought from the ambulance covered in traditional Jewish cloth. Next came his son, Arieh, 5. But the next body was unbearably small -- it was on the smallest of stretchers, but did not even fill the length of it.

It was the body of Gabriel, 4, who like his brother and father was shot in the head at point-blank range as they turned up to the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse.

Meanwhile Al Age counters with a one-liner from AFP ...

"Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, five, and Gabriel, four, and seven-year-old Miriam Monsonego were buried on Wednesday in Givat Shaul cemetery on the western outskirts of Jerusalem."

The True Perpetrators of The Antisemitic Attacks in Toulouse and Throughout the World

The True Perpetrators of The Antisemitic Attacks in Toulouse and Throughout the World by Barry Rubin

Quote.... "Meanwhile, the EU and various governments dare not admit that the principal cause of antisemitic activity is radical Islam, and the principal inspiration for popular antisemitism is trendy leftist ideas that now dominate much of that continent and are spreading in North America."

What a tragic, evil joke. A drive-by shooter in the beautiful, almost magical, city of Toulouse, France, murders three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school. Various VIPs issue statements about how terrible is this deed, how unspeakable.

And yet at that very moment, the next round of murders, the next slanderous and inciting antisemitic lies are being perpetrated by respectable people and institutions. There is no real soul-searching, no true effort to do better, no serious examination about how the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hysteria is paving the way for murder and fueling dreams of genocide.

The street thugs, fanatics drunk on the interpretations of Islam they are being fed, and the mentally twisted may be pulling the trigger but the distinguished, the powerful, and the honored are providing the ammunition.

Here are three examples of such deeds in nominally democratic countries—not Iran, not Syria, not Pakistan, where such things are even more intense—but in supposedly rational places.

1. The Turkish editor

Meet Mahir Zeynalov, an editor at Today’s Zaman, a Turkish Islamic newspaper that is supposedly moderate. Meet the modern art of tweeting. Here is Zeynalov’s response to the murders:

“Mahir Zeynalov ‏ @MahirZeynalov: Gunmen attack Jewish school in France, vandals attack Jewish cemetery in Poland, Jews burn mosques and Quran in Tunisia. What’s wrong?”

There are two ways to read this tweet. The more outrageous is this: How can it be wrong for gunmen to murder Jewish children or vandals attack a Jewish cemetery in Poland if Jews are burning mosques and Qurans in Tunisia. One act balances the other.

The other interpretation is this: What a world in which there is so much hatred! Gunmen murder Jewish children, vandals attack a Jewish cemetery, and Jews desecrate mosques and Muslim holy books.

Yet the second interpretation is almost as inciting to violence as the first. We know from many experiences—including Afghanistan right now—that anyone who burns or does anything to a Koran would set off massive riots and bloody killings. And as for burning a mosque, such a deed might well result in the massacre of every Jew living in Tunisia.

Tunisian Jews today are a couple of thousand terrified people who would run in the other direction if they saw a Koran in front of them lest they be accused of looking at it funny. What Zeyanlov has done is called a “blood libel,” a lie that might lead to the murder of Jews.

Now if some Muslim were to take seriously Zeyanlov’s tweet he would feel justified in murdering Jews, say children standing in front of their school.

2. The Dutch cartoonist

De Volkskrant is one of Holland’s leading newspapers, favored by the intellectual elite. Here is a cartoon that has just run. It shows Geert Wilders, leader of the conservative party that is very critical of Islam, getting loads of cash from a hidden hand that is clearly referring to Jews or Israel. Yes, the cartoon was written with a Hebrew text balloon, helpfully translated into Dutch as Wilder saying, “Thank you very much.”

So we have here the stereotype of the Jewish money behind the scene conspiring, in this case against Islam and against Holland. And of course it is also designed to discredit Wilders. As with the Turkish editor’s tweet above this is based on a total falsehood. There is hardly any Jewish support for Wilders party, which is by the way a legitimate political force, and there has never been the slightest evidence—even rumor—of Jewish financing for him, or Israeli financing.

Holland is a country where two political leaders have been assassinated and Wilders needs round-the-clock protection against potential assassin.

What is the message here? That Jews and Israel are trying to destroy Islam—as in the Turkish tweet—and are nefarious plotters attacking innocent people. Isn’t it just, therefore, to murder Jews and Israelis in self-defense?

3. Europe’s Foreign Minister

Exhibit three is Catherine Ashton, whose career was originally built on running the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament which favored unilateral Western disarmament in the face off Soviet tyranny. She is now the EU’s foreign minister. In response to the Toulouse shooting she has issued a statement here that spends more time reciting the sufferings of children in the Gaza Strip than about antisemitism and the demonization of Jews and Israel.

Left out is the fact that Gaza is ruled by an organization Hamas that is openly antisemitic, openly preaches genocide, frequently has carried out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews, and then glorifies those who did the murders. Remember that the only reason Hamas can rule Gaza is that Israel voluntarily withdrew from the territory in a gesture intended to promote peace, something Ashton and much of the Western media and governmental elites usually don’t mention.

When Hamas maintains a war with Israel, firing rockets, missiles, and mortars, Israel defends itself. Hamas also deliberately sites military arsenals and weapons in residential areas. Thus, civilians and even children are accidentally killed by Israel in the fighting. This is precisely what happens in other wars, including those being waged now by EU countries.

Yet Ashton does not defend Israel or its right to defend itself. She does not take sides against the terrorists. At best we get spurious neutrality that is actually anti-Israel propaganda. Note that she even refers to Palestine as a currently existing country even though the EU recognizes no such country. So much for diplomatic responsibility. Her “apology” and “clarification” came after criticism but she meant exactly what she said and will do the same thing next time as she and other EU officials have done on previous occasions.

Indeed, while Palestinian children are killed during the fighting in Gaza let’s note the two most notoriously publicized examples of the last week:

–A photo sent around, in one case by a UN official, showing a little girl as being injured this week was in fact of a girl injured in an auto accident several years ago.

–The claim that Adham Abu Selmiya was killed by Israelis has now been shown to be false. He was killed by a bullet fired into the air by Palestinians during a funeral.

–And what of the recent photo widely published purporting to show an Israeli soldier menacing a child despite the fact that the man was not wearing a real Israeli army uniform and carrying an AK-47, showing that the photo was a phony.

–The downplaying or omission of the fact that Israel was defending itself from a barrage of missiles. In one case, a prominent Dutch newspaper published a photograph with the caption that showed a rocket being fired by Israel into Gaza, instead of the exact opposite.

In short, Ashton and many others are contributing to the demonization of Jews and Israel. If Israel is so horrible that it makes little children in Gaza suffer for no reason shouldn’t Israelis and the Jews who support them, be shunned, harassed, attacked, and murdered?

These three examples are only a small sample of what is pouring out in the Middle East and elsewhere. I could go on with dozens more and so, perhaps, could you. From Sweden’s largest newspaper claiming Israel murdered Palestinians to harvest their organs to a Harvard professor’s tales of Jewish-Zionist conspiracies to control U.S. foreign policy to the dozens of “academic” conferences on Western campuses that demonize Israel at the expense of the students’ tuition payments.

What is needed is not more hypocrisy or professions of innocence–or expensive conferences where long speeches are made about the evils of antisemitism by those who do nothing but get free plane tickets and nice hotel rooms– but a real change in the behavior of the mass media that pours out lies, the academics who slander and distort, and the governments that cannot even stand with a country and people beset by terrorism and once again by the world’s oldest hatred.

Oh, and one more thing is needed: the admission that the greatest threat of hatred, “racism,” dehumanization of the “other,” and threat of persecution today–as the statistics for Europe and North America show–is not “Islamophobia” but antisemitism.

And none of those things are going to happen because the liars, haters, apologists, and enablers will not acknowledge their own behavior while those who are supposed to supervise them will not act. Hating and lying about Israel and the Jewish people is too useful politically and too entwined with the version of left-wing ideology, not to mention Islamism and the dominant interpretation of Islam, currently so powerful in the world.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Europe is no longer a safe place for Jews to live. Yet it is accurate to say that it is becoming an unsafe place for Jews to live, and certainly for those who wish to express mainstream Jewish views and to practice their religion openly. Meanwhile, the EU and various governments dare not admit that the principal cause of antisemitic activity is radical Islam, and the principal inspiration for popular antisemitism is trendy leftist ideas that now dominate much of that continent and are spreading in North America.

Thus, Jewish children are deliberately murdered by a terrorist in the midst of France. In response come get the formal statements and the crocodile tears. Yet at the exact same time as the bullets are entering the children’s bodies, as the victims fall to the ground, as the ambulance sirens sound, the incitement and the lies and the slanders continue, laying the groundwork for more hatred and more murder.

* Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are Israel:An Introduction (Yale University Press); The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go to http://www.gloria-center.org. You can read and subscribe to his blog at http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com.

WHAT THE FIACHRA?

Talk about going early.

Today, the Age offers up an opinion piece from a Guardian writer named Fiachra Gibbons - French right caught up in the storm it helped create

"Police are a long way from understanding what was going through the head of someone who could catch a little girl by the hair so he wouldn't have to waste a second bullet on her. But some things are already becoming clear. He shouted no jihadist or anti-Semitic slogans, going about his grisly business in the cold, military manner oddly similar to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian gunman who massacred 77 people last northern summer."

So now it turns out that Gibbon is the one who has rushed to judgement. The killer is a jihadist and an antiSemite but the extreme right and the extreme left are no different in this case - nor are their apologists.

My guess is the we won't be reading much more from this Gibbon person in the future.

Hail Shale

I can hear the gnashing of teeth from the BDS crowd.

Oil shale reserves can turn Israel into major world producer

Hamas: Kill Christians and Jews "to the last one"

Wacked

The ABC trotted out John Mearsheimer at the weekend.

Michael Rubin whacks him in Commentary - Mearsheimer conspiracy theories wackier than Israel.

I like his suggestion that this American Israel basher is part of the Hamas lobby.

Truth, honesty and the credibility gap of the age

Palestinian children among terrorists - from the gallery of pictures the Age won't show you and stories it won't write about.

Last week's confrontation between the IDF and Palestinian terrorists firing missiles at civilian targets has demonstrated a great deal about truth and honesty in the coverage of the conflict.

I have already mentioned the case of disgraced United Nations official Khulood Badawi who took a photograph of a bloodied girl from an accident that took place in 2006 and then dishonestly attempted to pass it off on Twitter as evidence that the IDF was targeting civilians in the then current round of fighting.

Apologists for Palestinian terror had been in damage control since early in the proceedings when the Associated Press confirmed that all 15 of those killed in Israeli strikes were "militants".

We knew that the "militant" groups have sympathetic friends in the media. So when the narrative was panning out in a manner not to their liking, something had to be done to deflect attention away from the war criminals on the Palestinian side who were targeting a civilian population of up to one million people in Israel's south.

Some sought to minimise the size and impact of the weapons being used including an increasing number of sophisticated Grad missiles which have come into Gaza now that a more friendly regime rules in neighbouring Egypt.

Others published claims from Palestinian "sources" that "several" victims were civilians, some children, without reporting that at least three young Palestinians died as a result of gunfire from their own people at funerals (one of these deaths was initially falsely attributed to Israel) or that children are often placed in harm's way by those operating nearby in heavily populated areas (see the above photograph as an example of what I mean).

What the apologists don't realise is how badly they are damaging their own credibility.

Take Jeff Halper, of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions who roams the world bad mouthing Israel with questionable campaigns against the state. This is what he says of moves to have Badawi dismissed from the UN because of her deceptive conduct:

"We firmly hold that Khulood has a manifested right to exercise her freedom of expression on her personal Facebook page. Calls to dismiss Khulood Badawi are nothing but a political witch hunt, and trust they will be summarily and authoritatively rejected."
(from Honest Reporting)

When "freedom of expression" amounts to freedom to conduct blood libels against the Jewish State and the Jewish people then it says a lot about the sick pathology of those who promote and accept such drivel.

What Apartheid Week is really all about

From Latma:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGeW-gsaldk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

belittled

There was once a sniff of nobility and even romance about coming to the aid of oppressed people but when it comes to helping Palestinians, some are discovering that the oppression is not so much external but comes from within - Israeli leftist activists: We are being sexually harassed in the West Bank.

Nicky Larkin: I used to hate Israel

Nicky Larkin is an Irish artist who visited the Israel and the West Bank to film a documentary about the conflict between the people there and returned a different person to the one who once consumed the diet of Israel bashing and Jew hatred prevalent among the elitists at home - Nicky Larkin: Israel is a refuge, but a refuge under siege.

Strangely, it began with my anger at Israel's incursion into Gaza in December 2008 which left over 1,200 Palestinians dead, compared to only 13 Israelis. I was so angered by this massacre I posed in the striped scarf of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation for an art show catalogue.
...

But the more I felt the martyrs watching me, the more confused I became. After all, the Palestinian mantra was one of "non-violent resistance". It was their motto, repeated over and over like responses at a Catholic mass.

Yet when I interviewed Hind Khoury, a former Palestinian government member, she sat forward angrily in her chair as she refused to condemn the actions of the suicide bombers. She was all aggression.

This aggression continued in Hebron, where I witnessed swastikas on a wall. As I set up my camera, an Israeli soldier shouted down from his rooftop position. A few months previously I might have ignored him as my political enemy. But now I stopped to talk. He only talked about Taybeh, the local Palestinian beer.

Back in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011, I began to listen more closely to the Israeli side.

...

Israel is a refuge -- but a refuge under siege, a refuge where rockets rain death from the skies. And as I made the effort to empathise, to look at the world through their eyes. I began a new intellectual journey. One that would not be welcome back home.

Photograph of Palestinian civilians released

Haaretz opinion writer Bradley Burston reserves his special place in hell for leftists who have no problems with those who fire rockets at Israeli civilians - see here

Even more deserving of that special place in hell are those in the media who shill for Palestinian terrorists by accepting the lies of the spokespeople like the one who falsely claimed that "several" Palestinian civilians, including three children, were among those killed in the Israeli strikes.

Thanks to Israellycool and Challah hu akbar we've managed to identify some of those civilians (see photo below)

PALESTINIANS KILL 8-YEAR-OLD PALESTINIAN BOY

What happens when Palestinians kill and 8-year-old Palestiniain boy?

They try to blame it on Israel.

Palestinians: Gaza boy dies of wounds

"A Palestinian boy accidentally struck by a bullet when militants fired in the air during a funeral died of his injuries Wednesday, family members and witnesses said.

"Palestinian health official Adham Abu Salmia initially said that 8-year-old Barka al-Mugrahbi died of wounds sustained in an Israeli airstrike on Monday.

"However, Israel's military said it did not carry out a strike in the area at the time.

"The boy's relatives and witnesses later said the boy was marching in the funeral procession for a Gaza militant Monday when he was struck in the head by an errant bullet.

"At the time, gunmen were firing in the air, they said."

Over to you Ruth Pollard.

WHAT DOES SEVERAL MEAN?

The troubled Fairfax group scraped the bottom of the barrel when it turned to Ruth Pollard to be its Middle East (read "Palestine") Bureau person. There was a time when journalists would sift through the various narratives in a story and elimninate that which is preposterous but this no longer seems the case when it comes to reporting or reasoned discussion on the Middle East.

Take Pollard's offering today (Israelis wary of Gaza ceasefire)on the fragile ceasefire in the region brokered after Palestinian terrorists ("militants" in Agespeak) rained more than 200 missiles on Israeli civilian targets while the IDF, as confirmed by an Age article earlier in the week targeted only the "militants" - AGE ADMITS ISRAELI AIRSTRIKES TARGET TERROR. At that stage the total Palestinian dead in Israeli strikes was 15 of which Palestinan sources conceded that 100% of those were "militants". Further reports of casualties have confirmed more "militant casualties" including Islamic Jihad operatives and Pollard states that "at least 25 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli air strike".

Now here comes Pollard.

"Most of those killed in Gaza were militants, but several civilians, including three children, also died, Palestinian sources say."

If most of those killed were in fact "militants", the rest of them must have been in the minority and based on the fact that all of those killed on earlier statistics were "militants" then to accept the use of the word "several" from Palestinain sources is ridiculous in the extreme.

So how reliable are Pollard's "Palestinian sources"?

Perhaps they's as reliable as this the fraudulent tweet by UN employee Khulood Badawi

The big lie Palestinian style

Read about it here because you won't learn about this aspect of Palestinian propaganda from the Age - EXPOSED: UN Media Official Responsible for False Photo Tweet