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Playing Fast and Loose with the Facts When It Comes to Israel
[Independent-Ireland] Ian O'Doherty - The Guardian (UK) has been exposed as playing fast and loose with the facts when it comes to Israel. In last Thursday's edition, The Guardian's Seamus Milne wrote about Gaza and the suffering of the people there. That the citizens of Gaza are suffering is not under any doubt - the deprivations brought about by the civil war between Hamas and Fatah have wrought terrible consequences on the locals. But according to Milne: "This week the collective punishment of the people of Gaza reached a new level, as Israel began to choke off essential fuel supplies to its one and a half million people in retaliation for rockets fired by Palestinian resistance groups." Milne then went on to incorrectly state that: "Israel continues to control all access to the Gaza Strip," conveniently forgetting the Egyptian side of the border. Referring to the homophobic, misogynistic, murderous savages of Hamas as "resistance fighters" is particularly nauseating. As is the suggestion that Israelis should simply accept the rocket attacks on their towns and the mortar attacks on their roads and the shooting of their border patrols. What other country in the world would be expected to tolerate such hostile acts and not retaliate? The reason why enough humanitarian aid is not getting through to the locals is because their masters, Hamas, keep attacking the access routes into Gaza. Milne even goes so far as to say: "Unless Hamas recognized Israel, renounced violence and signed up to agreements it had always opposed, the Western powers insisted, the Palestinian electorate would be ignored. No such demands, needless to say, have been made of Israel." The Israelis have not been asked to renounce violence or embrace democracy because it is already a democracy which only uses violence to defend itself. To liken a group like Hamas, with their pavement executions and battering of women who don't wear sufficiently "modest" clothing, to the only democracy in the region is not just reckless, it is positively wicked.