What Passes for Balance in the Press
Today's front page of the Washington Post features a heart-wrenching story of Palestinian civilians killed and maimed by an Israeli heavy tank. The story is "balanced" insofar as it tells of a military operation that was first fired upon by Palestinians, and they returned the fire. The result was civilian casualties, which was the focus for this story.
A few extracts from the story give away its attempt to provide balance at the expense of both truth and clarity. First, the alleged fact that "In the majority of military operations, it is not the combatants -- neither the Israeli soldiers nor the Palestinian gunmen -- who die".
Well, it is unclear what "military operations" are mounted by the Arabs; they don't tend to fare well in straight-up military confrontations, being 0-4 in the "let's drive the Jews into the sea" olympiad. The Arabs routinely target only those who are unarmed, mostly civilians. Their attacks against armed soldiers tend to be snipings from a safe distance. Armed attacks against tanks tend to come only, it seems, to entice the tanks to fire upon civilian quarters. Then, because their terror cells are located in and among the civilian populace, when Israel counterstrikes in order to protect its citizens, Arab civilians become casualties.
The author of this story must be more dense than the normal reporter, for she writes "[A]s was the case in many of the incidents, it is unclear how Thursday's bloodshed on the southern edge of the overcrowded, impoverished Rafah camp began." Note the heartstring tugs of the emotive words "overcrowded" and "impoverished". She then goes on to a recasting of events within the past several days. What is missing from this article is any sense of how things actually "began". The Arab terrorists are Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel. They did not even participate in the Oslo accords, which would have resulted in a stable two-state solution had the Palestinians not been inclined to continue their jihad against the existence of any state of Israel.
This article is sickening because it does not ask the basic question that must be asked of any people: Why in God's name would you allow terrorists to operate freely among you? Why are you so stupid as to not see that it is the terrorists among you that result in your pain?
Today's front page of the Washington Post features a heart-wrenching story of Palestinian civilians killed and maimed by an Israeli heavy tank. The story is "balanced" insofar as it tells of a military operation that was first fired upon by Palestinians, and they returned the fire. The result was civilian casualties, which was the focus for this story.
A few extracts from the story give away its attempt to provide balance at the expense of both truth and clarity. First, the alleged fact that "In the majority of military operations, it is not the combatants -- neither the Israeli soldiers nor the Palestinian gunmen -- who die".
Well, it is unclear what "military operations" are mounted by the Arabs; they don't tend to fare well in straight-up military confrontations, being 0-4 in the "let's drive the Jews into the sea" olympiad. The Arabs routinely target only those who are unarmed, mostly civilians. Their attacks against armed soldiers tend to be snipings from a safe distance. Armed attacks against tanks tend to come only, it seems, to entice the tanks to fire upon civilian quarters. Then, because their terror cells are located in and among the civilian populace, when Israel counterstrikes in order to protect its citizens, Arab civilians become casualties.
The author of this story must be more dense than the normal reporter, for she writes "[A]s was the case in many of the incidents, it is unclear how Thursday's bloodshed on the southern edge of the overcrowded, impoverished Rafah camp began." Note the heartstring tugs of the emotive words "overcrowded" and "impoverished". She then goes on to a recasting of events within the past several days. What is missing from this article is any sense of how things actually "began". The Arab terrorists are Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel. They did not even participate in the Oslo accords, which would have resulted in a stable two-state solution had the Palestinians not been inclined to continue their jihad against the existence of any state of Israel.
This article is sickening because it does not ask the basic question that must be asked of any people: Why in God's name would you allow terrorists to operate freely among you? Why are you so stupid as to not see that it is the terrorists among you that result in your pain?
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