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Source: https://www.thejc.com/opinion/the-rocket-attacks-that-the-world-chooses-to-ignore-q6j8aqcl
The World Chooses to Ignore Hizbullah's Rocket Attacks on Israel
(Jewish Chronicle-UK) Yaakov Katz - More than 6,000 rockets and drones have been fired into Israel in the two months since Hizbullah began its latest round of attacks on March 2. In the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona there have been 180 rocket sirens and 87 drone alerts. That comes out to more than four sirens a day - every day. Yet, if you follow much of the international media coverage of Lebanon, you wouldn't know any of this. Instead, the stories run according to the familiar script: Israel is once again striking its northern neighbor. There is little mention of the relentless rocket fire, the daily drone incursions, or the inability of the Lebanese government to rein in Hizbullah. Israel is cast, almost exclusively, as the aggressor. This is the same storyline we saw 2 1/2 years ago when after the initial shock of the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion faded, coverage of the war in Gaza shifted almost entirely to the suffering of Palestinians, making it seem like there was only one side to the war and as if Israel's actions existed in a vacuum, disconnected from the massacre that had triggered the conflict. In Lebanon, the fact that Hizbullah - a designated terrorist organization - is actively firing thousands of rockets and drones at Israeli communities and Israel is acting in self-defense like any country that wishes to survive would do, does not fit into that narrative, and so it is sidelined. The way the media cover wars is by reducing them to a scoreboard - how many people have been killed on each side. The result creates a distorted moral equivalence, where a sovereign state defending its citizens is seen in the same way as a terrorist organization whose stated goal is destruction. But Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7. Hizbullah opened a second front from Lebanon. Israel did not choose these wars; it was forced into them. Do people expect Israel to simply evacuate again an entire swath of the country? Should it tolerate a situation where communities live under constant threat of rockets and drones? Should it simply concede the territory? We know that this would only embolden Hizbullah and send a dangerous message across the region - that sustained attacks on civilians provide results. Moral clarity is needed when media ignores who initiated the war and why it continues. The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.