The Media is the Messenger, Condemnations From Israel's Detractors and 'Friends'

"At the end of 2008 I was a desk editor, a local hire in The Associated Press’s Jerusalem bureau, during the first serious round of violence in Gaza after Hamas took it over the year before. That conflict was grimly similar to the American campaign in Iraq, in which a modern military fought in crowded urban confines against fighters concealed among civilians. Hamas understood early that the civilian death toll was driving international outrage at Israel, and that this, not I.E.D.s or ambushes, was the most important weapon in its arsenal."
"Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good choices. They can warn people off with tear gas or rubber bullets, which are often inaccurate and ineffective, and if that doesn’t work, they can use live fire. Or they can hold their fire to spare lives and allow a breach, in which case thousands of people will surge into Israel, some of whom — the soldiers won’t know which — will be armed fighters. [On Wednesday a Hamas leader, Salah Bardawil, told a Hamas TV station that 50 of the dead were Hamas members. The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed three others.] If such a breach occurs, the death toll will be higher. And Hamas’s tactic, having proved itself, would likely be repeated by Israel’s enemies on its borders with Syria and Lebanon.
Matti Friedman, Journalist, New York Times Opinion Section

Sheikh Ismaeil Haneiya of Hamas flashed the victory sign on Tuesday near the border with Israel in the east of the Gaza Strip. Scores of demonstrators had been killed by Israeli soldiers the day before.     Credit Mohammed Saber/European Press photo Agency, via Shutterstock

It is incomprehensible that mainstream media that so prides itself on the credible reliability of its reportage and journalism ethics will pick up exculpatory statements from an acknowledged terrorist group like Hamas which is skilled in staging events that show, on a strictly superficial level, that Palestinians are victimized by a brutal military occupation that will stop at nothing, and recognizes no humanitarian barriers to violently suppress helpless citizens and children of Gaza. It has been well documented that Hamas urges non-military Palestinians to defy Israeli pleas for them to evacuate areas it means to bomb.

It has been revealed that videos that Hamas releases to the West showing Palestinian children in dangerously compromised situations and sometimes purportedly killed by Israeli soldiers, are nothing but dramas engineered for the express purpose of slandering and delegitimizing Israel. They play well in the international press. That Hamas bombards Israel with rockets from within crowded urban centers, that it stockpiles weapons in UNRWA-operated schools, that it deliberately tries to provoke Israel's military to respond when it bombards Israel over the border, so that any responses will succeed in killing civilians, to provide Hamas with a public relations tool to discredit Israel redounding to the credit of claims of Israeli brutality suits Hamas perfectly.

Despite all of this, despite that Western news agency are unable to report accurately what occurs and in so doing implicate Hamas as a provocateur and inciter to violence in line with its charter dedicated to the destruction of Israel, mainstream media treat statements issued by the Hamas media center as legitimate and truthful. International politicians pick up what the media report and regard those reports as fodder for censure of Israel for 'disproportionate' responses to 'peaceful' demonstrations. The sanctimonious statements of censure issued by those like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada betray among politicians a too-eager willingness to hold not the perpetrator of violence to account, but a country forced by circumstances beyond its control to respond, to enable it to protect its population.

Palestinian rioters set fire to the Gaza Strip’s Kerem Shalom Crossing on May 14, 2018. (Israel Defense Forces)

Enemies of the Jewish state, like Turkey, take enormous pleasure in setting the agenda for an international response by cutting off diplomatic relations in retaliation for Israel's reaction to a violent attempt at incursion by terrorists into its territory threatening the safety and security of its border communities reliant on the IDF to keep them from harm. Belgium and Ireland feel entitled to express their displeasure with Israel's reaction to the threat of border invasion and with it the fears that its people will be targeted for death, as has occurred all too often in the past. Belgium and Ireland, needless to say, don't have to live with a terrorist group next door to their borders.

Among the tens of thousands of Gazans persuaded by Hamas to gather at the border with Israel with the hope their numbers would succeed in overwhelming the capacity of the IDF to restrain their entrance into Israel, a significant proportion of those gathering do so with violent intentions, far from the 'peaceful' demonstrations that the world looking in from the outside is informed of. France, which regularly suffers terrorist attacks from within their own burgeoning and dysfunctional Muslim population decries the Israeli military response as "unacceptable", while the U.K. with its runaway Muslim immigrant problems speak of the IDF's actions as "shocking".

An admission from a top Hamas functionary that of the 60 Palestinian Gazans who have lost their lives in the violent melees on the Gazan-Israeli border, that of the total killed 50 of their number were Hamas terrorists puts things in perspective, but it's a perspective the international community appears not to appreciate, truth though it is. The Hamas-member martyrdom celebrated by Hamas and censured by the world community can only be interpreted as that community feeling that Hamas's aspirations to destroy Israel has their sympathy, and certainly not efforts by Israel to persuade Palestinians that Israel will defend its border at any cost.

The video 'proofs' as pitiable little dramas such as staging grieving women around a dead 8-month-old child, claiming that Israeli tear gas was responsible for her death, was heart-wrenching but proved to be yet another canard, when a doctor at the Gaza hospital gave her cause of death as natural, that the child had a pre-existing condition and she simply died. "She is not the first martyr for Palestine and she won't be the last. Her sacrifice is for Jerusalem and for the homeland", stated her grieving father, Anwar al-Ghandor, in his staged part of the little melodrama, evidently happy to lend his acting role to Hamas's manipulative public relations efforts to wrack the hearts of the international community.

There really is little difference between the Islamic State staged videos widely distributed during their heyday of the caliphate when their brutal atrocities of the various imaginative ways hearking back to the Medieval era that lives can be taken in horrendous ways to cause excruciating pain and terror to those slated for execution, and the videos produced by Hamas to smear Israel. Islamic State produced their videos to proudly lay claim to their lack of humanity and shock the world in the process. Hamas's purpose is to saddle Israel with a veneer lacking humanity while presenting themselves as the 'peaceful' victims of Israeli brutality.

The special UN envoy to the region, Nickolay Mladenov, informed the Security Council that hospitals in Gaza were "reporting an unfolding crisis of essential medical supplies, drugs and equipment needed to treat the injured". Israel, responded by opening one of the border crossings [which Palestinian infiltrators had on several occasions fire-bombed] to allow eight trucks carrying medical supplies through to Gaza. Two of those trucks, crammed with hospital beds, thousands of units of IV fluid, hospital gowns, IV fluid stands, thousands of bandages and thousands of units of antiseptic chemicals were sent by the Israel Defense Forces’ Technological and Logistics Directorate. Hamas refused entry to the two IDF truckloads, accepting the UNICEF and PA trucks.

The Israeli army prepares a shipment of medical supplies for the Gaza Strip on May 15, 2018. The Hamas terrorist group, which rules the coastal enclave, later refused to accept the equipment and sent it back. Israeli Defence Foces

"There is no justification for the killing, there is no excuse", said Mr. Mladenov, insisting Israel's responsibility was to calibrate its use of force, while adding, "messages by Hamas indicate the intention to use mass protests to infiltrate into Israel and attack Israelis", two directly contradictory statements; the latter effectively negating the former statement. Israel's responsibility is to prevent infiltration to ensure that Hamas terrorists don't have the opportunity to attack Israelis, justifying their use of the force that the international community is so sanctimoniously condemning.