9 Aug 2005 @ 00:58, by Bruce Kodish
In the August 8, 2005 NY Times, an article by Dina Kraft,
Coping With Adult Conflict in Gaza Can Be Child's Play, disgustingly demonstrates the Times policy of equating the Palestinian terror culture with that of the beleagered Israelis.
The attitude of moral equivalency expressed in this article truly frightens me.
On one hand some Arab children pretend to be suicide bombers or decorate their walls with pictures of rocket launchers and automatic weapons (aimed at Israelis of course).
On the other hand, some Israeli children play games about civil disobedience to cope with the soon anticipated expulsion from their homes. Or they put on their artificial limbs, their own legs having been shot off by rocket launchers or roadside bombs set off by fedayeen idolized by the Palestinian children above.
Inference becomes fact to the NY Times reporter. A blinded Palestinian girl and her family say she was hit by an Israeli bullet and the caption of her picture in the print version states this as a fact.
Given the number of weapons openly carried, and the irresponsible shooting done by fedayeen in Gaza, and the Israeli military codes regarding restraint of fire and the documented unreliability of Palestinian witnesses that is, the well-known tendency of Palestinian Arabs to blame all injuries of Palestinians to Israelis, it seems much more likely to me that the unfortunate little girl was blinded by a Palestinian bullet.
However, at this point, who's to know. Yet the reporter and caption writer (in the print version and in the on-line photo essay) basically takes the Arab family's inference, which they appear to believe wholeheartedly,as a fact. WHICH IT DEFINITELY IS NOT! The term for this in journalism: "lousy reporting."
At the same time, the reporter writes that "An Israeli missile apparently aimed at Sheik Salah Shehade, a founder of Hamas's military wing, had hit a nearby apartment building. Sheik Shehade, his wife and 13 others were killed, nine of them children. "
The missle we know, from Israeli accounts, was definitely aimed at Shehada, the civilian deaths were not intended and definitely regretted by the Israeli army.
By putting in the qualifier "apparently" in the account, the reporter places doubt on Israeli motives.
This whole piece shows the NY Times template for equating the beleagered Israelis with the Nazified Palestinian Arabs, whose children are definitely victims, but victims of their own hate-soaked anti-semitic culture.
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