Friday, April 4, 2008
What gunmen? Oh, Palestinian gunmen, as we find when we read past the headline:
GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian gunmen blew up a monument in a British-run cemetery for foreign soldiers in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Thursday, witnesses and British diplomats said.
Witnesses said gunmen blew up the two-metre (6.5-foot) high stone monument in Britain's Gaza War Cemetery in central Gaza. No group claimed responsibility for the attack.
A statement issued by the British Consulate General in Jerusalem said the Gaza War Cemetery contains graves of British and other foreign soldiers who were killed in conflicts in the region from as early as World War One.
Many tombstones in the graveyard are marked with a cross or star of David, indicating that both Christians and Jews were buried there...
This was, of course, an intentional act without justification. There was certainly no battle going on there, no Israeli soldiers taking refuge in the cemetery with terrorists in hot pursuit -- just another cold, calculated act of destruction for political purposes.
Yet where is the outrage in the British press? Where are the headlines which clearly damn the perpetrators? When the IDF damaged some stones in the same cemetery a couple of years ago, a front page above the fold headline story by Tim Butcher screamed: Fury as Israelis damage war cemetery, and those memorials were damaged by IDF fire, probably at terrorists taking shelter there. There was outrage, there were photos, there were formal diplomatic responses....but today? Crickets.
This is the kind of subtle but pervasive and continuing bias that guides the British (and other) press. It's difficult to sort and scream about because it's not factually wrong -- there's no correction to ask for -- but the selective reporting and outrage, the choices of what to report, what weight to give it and how much emotive language to couple it with, tell you exactly what's wrong with the mainstream press.
Look at the facts reported in this story: Hamas hides heavy weapons under Gaza school
Residents of a Gaza town complained this week after Hamas forces constructing a weapons storage facility under the local schoolhouse severed a water main.
The Ramallah-based Palestine Press news agency reported that Hamas hoped to use the school to shield some of their heavy US and Iranian-made weapons from Israeli raids and air strikes....
In other Gaza news, Hamas gunmen on Thursday bombed a cemetery where British soldiers who helped liberate the area from Ottoman Turkish rule during World War I are buried.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights later reported that two of its workers and two accompanying Reuters correspondents were attacked by Hamas security forces when they arrived at the scene to interview cemetery guards. The Hamas police reportedly confiscated the reporters' camera memory cards and all video footage taken at the site.
Palestinians themselves (as individuals) are outraged, yet where is the British press? Too afraid of their access, too afraid of their own skins, too afraid to use emotive language when it isn't Jews in the dock. But when the IDF hits that school, you better believe it will make outraged headlines.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: 'Gunmen' Blow up British Cemetery Monument in Gaza.
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Adloyada picks up the issue of the Gaza cemetery that was recently damaged by terrorists and the London Jewish cemetery that was vandalized and notes that, for some odd reason, neither incident has merited much, if any, notice in the... Read More
The Telegraph's Tim Butcher is at it again. It's that story-line that's always good for column-space: The IDF, because, apparently, they had nothing better to do and no other targets, wantonly attacked British war graves in Gaza. And wuddayaknow? There... Read More
