Saturday, May 19, 2007
Odd (OK, not really) headline in the Globe today (from the Washington Post, actually): Israeli aircraft pound northern Gaza. Of course, Israeli aircraft have attacked a few targets in Gaza, but most of the article is about the civil war (they don't call it that) currently under way between Hamas and "relatively moderate" (haha) Fatah. Here's one of several jaw-droppers:
Oh, just panicked...oh, well what are they making such a big deal about...
Well, the Arabs have been barraging the town of Sderot for years with rockets, and you can go over much of what's been happening there at the excellent site, Sderot Media -- schools and homes hit, people killed, wounded, traumatized. No one should be under any obligation to sit and let their neighbors lob high explosives at random into their town.
Meryl has a bunch of good recent posts on Sderot, here, here, here, and here.
You can buy stuff to support Sderot.
Thank you for posting this, Sol. The media coverage is appalling. It is so biased as to be outright inaccurate.
The Erlanger piece in the NY Times Saturday, AP, AFP and of course the BEEB and who knows what other outlets, ALL highlighted Israeli airstrikes with only a few dismissive words about the rockets in Sderot.
They've been ignoring this or dismissing its seriousness for years. When it is mentioned the rockets are shrugged off as though they are these little pop bottle things that sort of make a noise and are generally harmless.
That is completely false and the people of Sderot have been suffering for years. Recently the rockets seem to have been getting more powerful and more accurate. Israeli police are preparing for attacks on Ashkelon, which could be disastrous.
Of course as a friend of mine says, if Palestinian rockets hit the power plant there Israel will be blamed for shutting off the electricity to Gaza.
I have written some angry letters to NT Times and also begged my Senator to help if he can. No other nation in the world is expected to allow its citizens to be attacked by rockets. Their lives are just being ruined and any attempts to stop the rockets, even as relatively non-violent and benign as sonic booms, result in charges of "war crimes" and "collective punishment" being leveled against Israel. Once again the impression given in the media is that Israel is a recklessly aggressive, brutal rogue state.
Only people who actually study Middle Eastern events have any idea how serious this situation is - and in fact Israel is supposed to exercise "restraint" - any defensive action whatsoever is presented at an "attack", a "pounding" of entire regions no matter how careful and selective and defensive the targeting.
Well I think it's a crime - an inexcusable crime - it is terrorism - to deliberately and repeatedly attack helpless civilians with rockets. It's a crime for the Western media to present the situation in this light: that the nation defending its citizens is the attacker.
PLEASE write to your local papers about this. One again Jews are being hurt, their homes and businesses ruined, driven out of their town, hiding in inadequate shelters - and defending them is represented as a crime.
Not to mention determined assassins infiltrating from Gaza under cover of humanitarian aide organizations--a story which garnered only a handful of MSM mentions outside Israel. Nah, according to the MSM, Israel is always the bad boy. Any other story doesn't fit with the template.