Wednesday, January 7 2009

Posted at 04:05 PM
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My inbox is flooded with emails about our Send a Soldier a Smile campaign. 2,200 people have already clicked to send a message and cookies to Israeli soldiers. There's no cost to show your support. For those of you who already wrote, a) the cookies are kosher, and b) if you had technical problems submitting your message, our webmaster is working on the problem -- so click again if you tried before.

Come back to this post for updates throughout the day.

8:40 p.m. Out of time, out of coffee. Time to call it a day.

8:35 p.m. Just saw this Haaretz update. Will the Hamas "military wing" sign onto any cease fire its "politcal wing" agrees to? Could rocket fire become a purely administrative matter?

8:03 p.m. If rockets hit Tel Aviv, I wonder if the MSM will display any of the sympathy reserved for Gaza by nature of it's densely populated status. Worth asking because Mere Rhetoric via (Omri Ceren) notes that Tel Aviv's population density is actually higher than Gaza's.

Stephen Pollard knews this all along; will Seattle Post-Intelligencer op-ed editors take note?

7:27 p.m. Gaza's media war spreads into online games. Dion Nissenbaum discovered Raid Gaza, which he says "lacks the charm of Sock and Awe." A form of digital martrydom?

7:09 p.m. Blame Balfour!

7:00 p.m. The Age reprinted opposing commentaries by Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal and Israeli MK Shai Hermesh which were originally published in The Guardian yesterday.

Did Hermesh know he would be published alongside Meshaal?

6:52 p.m. While I'm at PJM, I see Bob Owens spanking Reuters over its sloppy captions, VDH debunking Hamas myths, and Robert Stacy McCain learning from The Godfather.

6:43 p.m. Mike McNally sheds no tears for the MSM's lack of access to Gaza:

Israel should no more allow the press unfettered access to Gaza than it should allow a brigade of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to fly into Gaza’s airport to reinforce their Hamas proteges. The last thing Israel needs is Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s resident apologist for radical Islam, wallowing in an emergency room full of wounded civilians, or BBC reporters weeping over the death of senior Hamas terrorists, as Barbara Plett wept for the dying Yasser Arafat.

And leaving aside issues of balance, the media has repeatedly shown itself to be susceptible to manipulation by the propaganda arms of terrorist organisations. Remember the Jenin “massacre” that wasn’t? Or the many examples of “fauxtography” and stage-managed incidents during the 2006 Lebanon war — a phenomenon that’s being repeated in Gaza? Hamas knows that while it has no chance of defeating Israel on the battlefield, it enjoys a distinct advantage in the arena of public opinion; combine a cynical opponent with a credulous media eager to believe the worst about Israel and you have the recipe for a public relations nightmare. 

6:35 p.m. Yet another echo of O'Brien as Evening Standard columnist Anne McElvoy writes:

6:10 p.m. This NY Daily News staff-ed about Hamas doesn't mince words.

Given no choice but to push in that direction, the Israeli military has done an extraordinary job of targeting Hamas fighters and arms in crowded environments - while holding down civilian casualties. It is up against demented enemies who sacrifice their own people.

No wonder it went viral on Digg.

5:57 p.m. Interesting fact from Brian of London: the equivalent of one million Israelis within range of rocket fire would be 42 million Americans -- Texas and Florida -- within rocket range.

5:51 p.m. Just heard from our webmaster that he identified and fixed the problem causing problems for some readers trying to Send a Soldier a Smile.

5:46 p.m. Describing his work in Gaza, photojournalist Scout Tufankjian ends this dispatch in Slate with a startling admission

If my kid were killed, I wouldn't want some grimy little snapper sticking her lens in my face, but I do that to people every day.

That's exactly the Gaza "pornography" Jeffrey Goldberg slammed.

5:28 p.m. There was another email asking media contact info. Time to head off these queries: Here's our Contact the Media Page.

5:24 p.m. Jeff Jacoby on the distinction between legitimate criticism and anti-Semitism:

5:15 p.m.  Jeffrey Goldberg, via Snapshots, pops some bulbs over staged photos in Gaza.

One more thing, speaking of pornography -- we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed.

5:07 p.m. We just emailed today's HonestReporting communique to subscribers. No matter how I play with filters, I always wind up seeing auto-replies hit my inbox in real time.

5:01 p.m. Long after Pallywood propaganda went to town over the Gaza Beach affair, Haaretz reports this:

One of the girls in the family, Ilham Ghalia, who was hospitalized in Tel Aviv's Ichilov Hospital, told a story that was different from what Palestinian propaganda would have us believe: Her father caused the lethal explosion when he handled an unexploded ordnance left behind from a previous incident.

Decision makers in the government and IDF for some reason shelved her admission, which relieved Israel of blame.

As the world puts a spotlight on the shelling of a UN school, I hope Israeli spokesmen learn a lesson from this Gaza beach revelation. Less likely, however, is whether Palestinian sources or the MSM will too.

4:45 p.m. I like this Rosie a whole lot better than that other Rosie:

Since Palestinians made the fatal error of electing a radical Islamist organization over the corrupt devil that they knew, they doomed themselves to lives of crushing wretchedness. These are the consequences.

Yet another echo of O'Brien.

4:35 p.m. The possibility of rockets striking Tel-Aviv isn't far-fetched. The Australian writes:

Hamas is believed to be planning to fire whatever it has left just before a new ceasefire comes into effect to demonstrate that it is still in fighting condition when the closing bell sounds.

4:21 p.m. A Wall St. Journal commentary describes Hamas's links to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Here's a scary thought amidst the talk of franchising global jihad:

Through Hamas, Tehran can possibly reach the ultimate prize, the Egyptian faithful.

4:14 p.m. Just lost track of how many coffees I downed today.

4:06 p.m. HonestReporting's communique about the UN school tragedy just went live.

4:03 p.m. Israel's fight with Hamas is really a battle against Iran.

3:50 p.m. Just discovered that Ban Ki-moon condemned a rocket attack launched from UN school grounds last November.

3:44 p.m. The Canadian government blames Hamas for the UN school tragedy.

“We really don't have complete details yet, other than the fact that we know that Hamas has made a habit of using civilians and civilian infrastructure as shields for their terrorist activities, and that would seem to be the case again today,” he said in an interview.

He added: “In many ways, Hamas behaves as if they are trying to have more of their people killed to make a terrible terrorist point.”

3:37 p.m. France 2 TV apologized for airing this 2005 video in it's coverage of Gaza, saying

. . . the sequence was “intended to illustrate the war of images on the Internet. The people who put it together worked too fast”.

Turnaround time in the digital age is remarkably fast, almost instant. Too bad the fact-checking was left in a cloud of dust.

3:12 p.m. This Baltimore Sun staff-ed's heart goes out to the residents of a devastated Gaza. But how do the editors explain this non-sequitur?

It's an intolerable situation for them, and though devised by Hamas militants, Israel bears the brunt of the blame for a disproportionate use of force.

Oh really?

3:03 p.m. In the context of his overall commentary, I'm not sure my reaction is the point Etgar Keret intended. After reading this snippet, I understood why the debate over proportionate response muddies the water:

Thus, it appears that the proportionality debate presents objective criteria for a situation that is essentially subjective, in which two contradictory narratives clash and neither side is prepared to include the other and its suffering.

Is there anything in the proportionality principle that can rationally justify killing of any kind?

Rather than deny that Israel's response to Hamas's rockets is disproportionate, Richard Cohen and I  revel in it.

2:49 p.m. Nachman Shai tells the NY Times that Lebanon taught a powerful lesson about the restricted media access to Gaza today:

“This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon war against Hezbollah,” said Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel’s public diplomacy. “Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today, Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.”

The government-commissioned investigation into the war with Hezbollah reported that the army had found that when reporters were allowed on the battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing risks and asking questions.

Reporter Steve Erlanger later acknowledges the point:

But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the news media far away from the death.

2:36 p.m. Fisk's being Fisk again.

2:28 p.m. According to this staff-ed in The Guardian, the shelling of the UN school in Jabalya is

. . . a repetition of the bombing of the UN compound in Qana.

I agree. Like Hezbollah, Hamas hides gunmen and weapons in civilian areas, creating clear culpability that The Guardian ignores -- as it did in this 2006 leader.

2:19 p.m. Daniel Finkelstein explains why Israel refuses to rely on international guarantees of peace.

2:04 p.m. Halifax columnist Paul Schneidereit addresses Hamas's apologists:

The notion that somehow it’s Israel’s desire, or in its long-term interest, to have 1.4 million hostile Gazans living across the border is nonsensical. In 2005, Israel pulled completely out of Gaza, hoping disengagement would eventually lead to peaceful co-existence. Critics point out that Israel has never completely relaxed its control over Gaza’s borders. Why would it, until it could be certain those organizations sworn to Israel’s destruction would not take advantage of the pullout to try to turn Gaza into an armed camp?

1:57 p.m. I'm afraid to ask if anyone could have published a nastier cartoon than what Michael Leunig penned for The Age.

1:51 p.m. This Memri blog post about Fatah and Hamas planning intifadas against each other has me wondering: If a Palestinian suicide bomber deliberately blows up other Palestinians, who gets the virgins?

1:34 p.m. The BBC lauds its two stringers in Gaza. I hope James Stephenson's assertion is true.

Hamas has not imposed any restrictions on their reporting and they have been a model of impeccable journalism, in terrible personal circumstances. Most of us go home when the story is over. Gaza is their home.

If I'm jaded, it's because we were already burnt by CNN.

1:22 p.m. Israel and the Mohammed al-Dura affair for a breakdown in Palestinian society. Gaza's mental health experts shared the latest psychobabble with The Guardian:

The image of Mohammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Gaza boy shot dead as his father vainly tried to protect him from Israeli gunfire at the beginning of the second intifada, is seared on the Palestinian consciousness. To many Palestinian adults it symbolises Israeli indifference to the lives of their children. But psychologists say that to many children its principal impact is to see a father who cannot protect his son.

With that - and humiliations such as Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian men in front of their children - has come a collapse in respect for the regular systems of authority.

The perpetual killing has also drawn many children into the cult of the "martyr" and led them to expect an early death.

It's so ironic that the effects of Pallywood are turning against the parents who encouraged hatred and martyrdom.

1:03 p.m. According to AP:

Two residents of the area who spoke with The Associated Press by telephone said they saw a small group of militants firing mortar rounds from a street near the school, where 350 people had gathered to get away from the shelling. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

12:45 p.m. Not pretty. Israeli tank shells destroyed a UN school. A few thoughts: It's part of Hamas's military doctorine to draw the the IDF into urban combat. We predicted on Monday that Hamas would put civilians in harm's way to capitalize on this kind of incident. They've been previously caught on film launching rockets from school grounds. 

If you didn't this background info, what would you think of Israel? And more importantly, is MSM coverage including this background info?

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Tuesday, January 6 2009

Another day of liveblogging the media war. Watch this post throughout the day as I'll be frequently updating if today is as intense as yesterday.

5:22 p.m. One of Israel's top Druze diplomats, Reda Mansour, wonders how long Gaza will put up with an Iranian puppet regime calling the shots, which brings me full circle back to another echo of Kevin O'Brien. An appropo time to break from liveblogging another day in the media war.

4:58 p.m. Following up on Philip Stone's assessment of Al-Jazeera, Journalim News notes that the network's coverage of the war features an awful lot of interactive bells and whistles. Check out how Al-Jazeera's using Microsoft Virtual Earth to plot the fighting.

4:32 p.m. Joel Pollak replied to my survey thoughtfully pointing out that Israel's success in the "media war" depends on how you define it. If the goal is to sway the opinions of the public or the elites, then Israel is doing poorly -- in some ways, even worse than the Second Lebanon War.

But if the goal of the “media war” is to provide the political cover Israel needs to achieve its military goals, it is indeed winning. The point is not only to win debates but to give those already inclined to support you good reasons for doing so. That means not only the U.S. government but also anti-jihad Arabs, Iranian dissidents, etc. In that regard, Israel’s performance is an improvement over the last war.

The most important thing Israel can do on the media front is to achieve its military goals. Again, the world respects power above all. So Israel must defeat Hamas thoroughly and humble it if possible . . . .

Israel's supporters should not simply use new media to win public debates (though it helps), but also to connect like-minded people to one another, so they can share information and quickly translate it into action . . .

Read the whole post.

4:09 p.m.Tim Marshall comments on the less-than-stellar comments posted at Sky News.

All media organizations receive such missives at these times. My colleagues at the  BBC - also known as the 'Lying Zionist puppet BBC/Lying Hamas puppet BBC (delete as appropriate) - will be getting the same treatment.

I suppose the positive thing is that some people think I’ve got lots of Palestinian and Arab friends, and others think I’ve got lots of Jewish and Israeli friends. Happily, they are both right, about this at least.

Salaam and Shalom.

Please, write right when commenting on other web sites. Do we really need to remind people of proper netiquette? Via MyCamp.

4:01 p.m. Kenneth Sikorski of Tundra Tabloid replied to my blogger survey, saying Finns are "either unconvinced by Hamas' excuses" or are "voicing support for Israel, which can be read from the many responses in the comment sections that accompany articles on many of the media's websites." Sikorski adds:

There again appears to be a gross lack of understanding on the part of the media concerning the use of force, what is justified and what is not. The mantra of the "disproportionate use of power" is widely seen in the editorials, which reflects that there has not been enough information disseminated to the media in regards to what force Israel is allowed to use under international law. The very idea that a Qassam rocket has no military use, being solely a weapon to terrorize a civilian population, and the use of such a weapon is a war crime, is lost on the public at large.

3:44 p.m. I wasn't able to participate in a conference call for bloggers organized by Israel's SF Consulate. After seeing Mere Rhetoric's reaction, I can understand the blogosphere's muted reaction.

3:25 p.m. Bret Stephens debunks the defeatist attitude that Operation Cast Lead is an exercise in futility. Word up to the NY Times . . .

3:13 p.m. Israel's ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem, fisks recent articles in the Sydney Morning Herald which "misrepresent and put a conspiratorial spin on Israeli efforts in Gaza."

2:50 p.m. Ex UN peacekeeping commander says it's time to deploy international peacekeeping forces along the Israel-Gaza border. Lewis MacKenzie means well, but I have doubts.

2:38 p.m. Random Thoughts is giving me a run for my money.

2:34 p.m. Elder of Ziyon responded to my blogger survey:

Israel's PR is now releasing relevant videos the same day, not weeks later; they are answering questions and refuting false allegations in real time and not after the falsehoods have had the chance to dominate for three or five news cycles . . .

The sheer number of rabidly anti-Israel news and Web 2.0 outlets and anti-Israel protests and letters to the editor - all parroting the same lies to their varied audiences - makes "winning" a most difficult proposition. A simple word search of the word "Zionist" in Google news unleashes a torrent of vitriol, anti-semitism and pure loathing. Nothing that Israel does can combat the sheer amount of hatred that exists.

How could Israel improve? Make the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website easier to navigate, create a database of info on rocket attacks ("I would also love to retire my rocket calendar"). Read EoZ's whole post.

2:12 p.m. Al-Jazeera coverage of Gaza in a nutshell: unrivaled logistics on the ground, but nutty reporters alienate mainstream viewers. So says Philip Stone, via Journalism News.

2:02 p.m. I don't normally link to Hebrew language pages, but I'm making an exception for Twit4Israel.

1:58 p.m. Checking in on liveblogging at Muqata and IsraellyCool.

1:52 p.m. Khaled Mashaal ain't the only Hamasnik getting a soapbox for terror today. The LA Times gave op-ed ink to Meshaal's deputy, Mousa Abu-Marzook. After cutting through the half-truths and hyperbole, one sentence stands alone with any grain of truth:

Our spirit to fight on is the legacy of collective suffering . . .

Read it as "Hamas' spirit to fight on is by imposing collective suffering."

1:33 p.m. A pleasant surprise as the NY Times notes an Israeli study: Hamas Exploitation of Civilians as Human Shields. I'm quoting the Times now:

Hamas not only hides among the population, the study contends, but has made a main component of its combat strategy “channeling” the army into the most densely populated areas to fight — a model that is now playing out.

Shireen Shihab, 30, a resident of Gaza City, said Monday that she had seen Hamas fighters firing rockets toward Israel from a site two blocks away from her home. She said she and others could not express any opposition for fear of being labeled spies.

1:28 p.m. Richard Cohen: Anyone who ever visited Sderot would've seen this war coming.

1:07 p.m. Responding to my blogger survey, Yid With Lid doesn't think Israel is winning the media war, but is improving:

They need to throw the misleading reports right back in the reporter's faces.  When they go on CNN and other news outlets, they should be prepared with examples and ask, why do you mislead the world.  Its time to fight back, and Israel still isn't doing it. The Blogging community is standing up for Israel. Israel needs to stand up for Israel. 

12:59 p.m. I'm not in the habit of looking at the obituary sections. Now that The Guardian's death notice for Nizar Rayan has come to my attention, I may have to break the habit.

12:45 p.m. The Arab media's taking some licks over its Gaza coverage too, if this Omani cartoon flagged by Memri is indicative of anything.

12:41 p.m. Steve Magid of It's Almost Supernatural responds to my blogger survey, offering his view from South Africa:

Israel can never win the media war in SA. The Palestinians have the full sympathy of an extremely left-wing media in South Africa. In other Western countries you often have publications which balance each other out. Not so in South Africa . . . Actually, it’s probably more correct to describe it as an anti-Israel stance rather than Palestinian support because the Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times et al didn’t care too much when Hamas was busy throwing blind-folded Fatah activists off buildings in Gaza.

. . . I think it’s only natural that states adopt the use of social technologies to convey their messages. Blogs, twitter, YouTube etc are excellent ways of interacting socially with an audience. Yes, the audience tends to be the already converted, but it does arm those people with the knowledge to better engage influential people in the media, NGOs and government.

12:29 p.m. Is Jeffrey Goldberg cracking?

12:15 p.m. NBC News correspondent Martin Fletcher says Israel, Hamas, Egypt and the PA are all trying to "control the message" at the expense of press freedom. Do I smell a whiff of moral equivalence?

All we see broadcast in Israel are homes battered by Palestinian rockets, with their intrinsic message that the Israelis have no choice but to retaliate against Hamas in order to return "peace and serenity" to its people.

And from Gaza, all we are allowed to see are crushed homes, bleeding adults and dead children. Their message: look what they’re doing to us, the world must stop them.

The irony, of course, is that the message from both sides is right – that the violence should stop.  However, each side protests that only its violence is justified.

Israel and its supporters argue that there is no equivalence – they have been rocketed for years before their patience ran out. For Hamas, their charter states their goal – to destroy Israel.

For onlookers, images of destruction, each side’s key propaganda weapon, are confusing. Can anybody be right if all this is so wrong?

11:58 a.m. Judging from the comments posted by readers at the Daily Mail yesterday, Melanie Phillips now detects what she calls a "groundswell" against both Hamas and the British media. Why?

There is huge ignorance and bewilderment  about the most basic and fundamental facts about Israel and the Middle East impasse, and considerable anger that the media has either misled people about it all or left them in ignorance.

11:40 a.m. For curiousity, I emailed a few bloggers last night, asking if they think Israel's winning the media, and what they think Israel could do better. Pamela Atlas of Atlas Shrugs, was the first to reply:

The media is in the tank for Islamic jihad. The Jews are responsible for getting the truth out through other means of communication . . . [Israel should] reach out to alternative media - new media. Help us build a new information/news delivery system.

As I work my way through the inbox today, I'll post more blogger responses.

11:31 a.m. Fisk's being Fisk again.

11:30 a.m. Palestinian journalist Fares Akram indicates that O'Brien might be on to something about popular anger against Hamas. A day after his father was killed in an airstrike, Akram and his nine-months-pregnant wife are fleeing the fighting. Despite everything, he managed to file this dispatch:

And the overwhelming feeling I get is that ordinary people who find themselves locked in this conflict are angry with Hamas. Hamas is supposed to be the government; they have been provoking the Israelis with their rockets and putting people at risk, yet now their leaders have vanished from sight leaving no plans to provide food, medicines or any kind of security for us. Of course Hamas still has its supporters whose minds will never be changed. But more and more, that is what I'm hearing. The senior commanders of Hamas have gone underground and left their people behind.

11:20 a.m.  Sick. Al-Guardian gives op-ed space to Hamas boss himself, Khaled Mashaal, whose Grad-model Katyushas with a range of 40 km are neither modest nor home-made:

Our modest, home-made rockets are our cry of protest to the world.

I don't think the editors are off the hook just because another commentary by Israeli Knesset member Shai Hermesh "balances out" Meshaal. Providing a soapbox (and links) to terror only give Hamas undeserved legitimacy.

10:50 a.m. Time's assessment concurs with O'Brien, who I posted a few minutes ago.

Hamas leaders believe their key weapon in this confrontation is the mounting pile of civilian casualties and the inevitable humanitarian crisis that accompanies military action in a densely populated urban setting. The longer the military operation endures, Hamas believes, the more it damages the Israelis' political goal of isolating and weakening the radical movement. A cease-fire that ends rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel won't necessarily be a setback for Hamas; the organization has, in fact, demanded such a truce all along, on the condition that Israel and Egypt open the border crossings that would allow a resumption of normal economic life in Gaza.

The very Gazan voters who swept Hamas into power are now Islamist cannon fodder. Pathetic.

10:34 a.m. Great tip in my in-box. Cleveland Plain-Dealer columnist Kevin O'Brien calls on Gaza to wake up:

Throughout the rest of the Arab world -- "the Arab street," as we in the West have come to refer to the mobs that screech and keen and tote their anti-Israel and anti-American signs around whenever the cameras are nearby -- support for Hamas' indiscriminate rain of rockets and shells on Israel is strong.

Which means "the street" is counting on you to stay weak.

Only if you continue to be a doormat for the murderous likes of Hamas, only if the bodies of your women and children can be paraded through the streets after the carnage Hamas has begged for, only if your deaths can be converted to undying propaganda are you, hapless residents of the Gaza Strip, of any use whatsoever.

You are nothing but props on Hamas' stage, and of far more value to your tormentors dead than alive.

The whole thing -- the whole bloody, horrible drama -- really is like a play, in that we in the audience have sat for 60 years, watching the same act over and over and over again and still are somehow capable of suspending disbelief.

10:12 a.m. Starting with alerts in my inbox. New Zealand Herald columnist Matt McCarten compares Israel to apartheid and the Nazis. No single snippet does justice to this ugly 855-words-long piece.

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Monday, January 5 2009

Posted at 04:50 PM
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Now that the ground campaign is underway, the media war's heating up. After seeing IsraellyCool liveblog the war and The Lede liveblog Mumbai, it's time to try my hand.

The difference is that I'm tracking media reaction, commentary and spin games more than raw news. Check this post for updates throughout the day.

6:59 p.m. Time to break after a day of liveblogging. I've developed a little tan after sitting bathed in the glow of my monitor all day. I might just do this again tomorrow. Ciao for now.

6:57 p.m. The Facebook group, I Support the Israel Defense Forces In Preventing Terror Attacks From Gaza has a whopping 48,877 members. Are you one of them?

6:52 p.m. Reading this Reuters dispatch from Gaza, it occured to me that Palestinian stringers like Nidal Al-Mughrabi would lose a lot more than their press credentials if they noted how Hamas rocket squads operate in civilian areas.

6:34 p.m.

 Anyone understand Andrew Sullivan's take on proportional response?

As for his data points (if I understand his point correctly) thank heaven Qassams haven't succeeded in evening out the casualty rate "proportional" to what's going on in Gaza now.

6:26 p.m. Jerusalem Post picked up on QassamCount.

6:13 p.m. Australian journalist Jason Koutsoukis has close call with Qassam. Was he hanging out with Oakland Ross or any other journos?

6:04 p.m. Whether you love or hate this CNN headline depends on whether you read it as an lying or lying. A Freudian slip?

Doctor in Gaza: Patients 'lying everywhere'

5:56 p.m. In case you're wondering how I'm posting so quickly, Alex Margolin, HonestReporting's social media editor, is now assisting me with papers.

5:54 p.m. Whoa. al-Indy published something nice about Israel.

5:52 p.m. Put on your sunglasses before clicking on Time. Khaled Mashaal gets the glow treatment.

5:50 p.m.  Scott MacLeod needs to brush up on Mideast history.

Israel's failure to finalize a historic deal with Yasser Arafat's nationalist party, and refusal to even continue peace talks for seven years, made it inevitable that Israel would face continual conflict with Palestinians, with Hamas increasingly in the forefront.  It was just as inevitable that Israel's security operations would kill untold numbers of civilians, further inflame hatreds in the region and never bring lasting peace for Israel. 

Refusal to continue peace talks? There was a Declaration of Principles, the Hebron Accords, the Wye River Accords, Camp David II, the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement . . . . did I leave anything out?

Let's face it, Hamas bears responsibility for working in civilian areas, and as I noted at 1:09, Arabs have a remarkable hatred for each other; even if the Zionists were driven into the sea or sent back to Europe, the Arabs would slaughter each other anyway.

5:10 p.m. Oakland Ross, Toronto Star correspondent, visiting Sderot has a very close call with a Qassam rocket.

Then I realized the rocket had crashed within a very short distance – about 10 metres, it turned out – of where I'd been standing just two or three minutes earlier, when I had decided to turn back and return to my car.

I'd have been pummelled by shrapnel for sure – or worse.

I took another deep breath. That was really close.

5:02 p.m. I hope Barack Obama has a magic wand to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict -- for James Carroll's sake.

4:58 p.m. Received an email with a link to this nasty Irish News cartoon from the poison pen of Ian Knox.

4:54 p.m. Expect Hamas to make the most of an Israeli "massacre." And if there is no massacre? Engineer it. Our latest communique just went live online.

4:25 p.m. Twitter spam is drowning out conversation about Gaza. The Ridiculant explains how and why, but not who (yet):

. . . somebody has recently set up a couple of automated Twitter feeds, which are simply searching Twitter for tweets containg the word 'love', and re-posting them with '#gaza' in place of 'love'. So, for example, when Twitterer katiesol mentions how much she loves the Randy Newman song 'You've Got A Friend In Me', it gets republished word-for-word by the Twitter bot Furttuna - except now she gazas the song, instead of loving it. The same for richardhiscutt, trying to tell British MP Tom Watson how cute his son looks in glasses (and the gazafied version). And so on.

Why do this? Obviously, it's an attempt to drown out the natural conversation about the events in Gaza. Who might be behind it? It could be a supporter of either side (and while instinct might suggest that you'd lean towards someone with a pro-Israel stance, some on the Palestinian side have also shown a fondness for pranks), it could be a random troll or griefer doing it for the lulz, or it could even be an official (albeit clandestine) part of the ongoing propaganda war.

3:49 p.m. Over at Pajamas Media, the author of Explaining Hitler says comparing Hamas to Nazis is an insult to the Nazis.

Even if you're not inclined to agree, Ron Rosenbaum's argument why Hamas is worse is compelling food for thought.

3:38 p.m. A very welcome dose of optimism from the Wall St. Journal:

We don't agree with those who claim that Israel faces only two bad options: either a limited campaign that scores a tactical victory while allowing Hamas to survive as a military force; or a return to the full-scale occupation that Israel abandoned in 2005. Israel could re-occupy some parts of Gaza, this time without Israeli settlements to defend. More realistically, given Israel's domestic reluctance for such a presence, it could fight long enough to eliminate Hamas as a military threat, then announce a policy that every rocket fired at Israel in the future would be met by a "proportionate" airstrike or other reprisal. This would allow Israel to claim military victory in the short term, while creating a deterrent going forward.

3:29 p.m. Excellent IICC report on Palestinian rocket fire in 2008, via QassamCount, one of my favorite Twitterers. Are you following QassamCount?

3:19 p.m. An Aussie echo: John Lyons sounds like John Bolton, but not as assertive. The Australian also pairs off commentaries by Joseph Wakim and Colin Rubinstein.

3:06 p.m. Almost forgot to check my emails periodically. Too many well-meaning people add me to nice mailing lists, and the cumulative effect clogs up the inbox. I saw online somewhere that there's no such thing as information overload, just bad filtering. Message to me: unclog the inbox and update the email filters later.

Most interesting thing was a message from Israel Matzav. Like Simon Plosker, he didn't think the chronological order was working.

2:55 p.m. The Financial Times raises an interesting point:

In the public relations war, Hamas has largely relied on others to make its case, although this often means belittling the significance of the rocket attacks that represent its main claim to be leading resistance against Israel. Politically it has put itself into a position where a ceasefire will be seen as a defeat, because this will require accepting that it must stop firing rockets.

2:51 p.m. British MP Michael Fabricant sees red over the Beeb's coverage of Gaza. Melanie Phillips fills in more info. Glad I don't pay a British TV license fee.

2:46 p.m. Simon Plosker just instant-messaged me to say its more effective to put the most recent stuff at the top, just like individual blog postings. Just fixed it, but why didn't I think of that before? D'oh!

2:25 p.m. Just finished reading Max Boot -- in a nutshell, he explains why Israel won't heed Michael Lerner's advice, which I posted at 11:25 a.m.

2:17 p.m. Gaza sources are a very slippery slope for this dispatch in The Scotsman. Is it me, or does correspondent Ben Lynfield rely too much on Ewa Jasiewicz and another activist from the International Solidarity Movement?

2:07 p.m. Reporter Orly Halpern talked to Palestinians with foreign passports as they left Gaza. One confirmed that Hamas operates in civilian areas:

The fighting has taken place near her house, she said. Hamas fighters “come into the neighbourhood and they shoot rockets.”

1:37 p.m. One way to gauge Israeli deterrence: Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's shooting off nothing more than his mouth.

1:28 p.m. William Kristol's more optimistic than the Washington Post.

1:19 p.m. John Bolton's modest proposal -- that Egypt should administer Gaza and Jordan the West Bank -- won't score him points with the Arab street.

 1:09 p.m. Bruce Anderson's trite commentary:

As long as Israel occupies the West Bank, Palestine will be the Arab world's sore tooth. It will also be the Arabs' excuse for their failure to make political, social and economic progress.

But as Robert Satloff, Daled Amos, and Mindelle Jacobs point out, the Arabs will continue killing each other anyway.

12:56 p.m. Michael Totten articulates a very important point:

If Israeli Air Force pilots were trying to kill civilians -- if they were the war criminals they're accused of being all over the world -- they'd kill a lot more than 0.8 people per air strike.

12:33 p.m. Dion Nissenbaum, I sympathize, but here's why Israel is placing unfortunate, but necessary restrictions on press coverage.

12:26 p.m. I wonder if anyone's going to top this for polemics. Mondli Makhanya, an editor at the Sunday Times of Johannesburg writes:

Israel’s response to the “provocation” amounted to a steroid-pumped heavyweight boxer arriving to fight an anaemic midget armed with steel-lined boxing gloves.

Israel’s response to these attacks was, as always, wanton destruction of everything that lay before it.

It's Almost Supernatural gives Makhanya a fuller fisking. Here's one snippet worth keeping in mind:

It’s no surprise that the benighted Sunday Times editor, Mondli Makhanya, has come out with such a polemical editorial. Makhanya was a delegate on last year’s haughtily entitled “SA Human Rights Delegation” to Israel. After the trip, Makhanya described Israel as evil. Actually, the record will show that even before his trip to Israel he had already referred to Israel as “evil” in the context of an editorial on Robert Mugabe!

12:13 p.m. I wouldn't expect this heartwarming video of Israelis and Palestinians working together to save a baby to be published at the E&P Pub, which is the blog of Editor & Publisher. A welcome surprise.

12:02 p.m. Noah Pollak corrects Christiane Amanpour, via Camera Snapshots.

On CNN a few moments ago, Christiane Amanpour, in the midst of an otherwise completely warped report on the Gaza war, said that over the past year only two Israelis were killed by Hamas rocket fire. Her point in the segment was to insinuate that Israel is overreacting to Hamas attacks that have been largely harmless. In order to do that, she had to abstain from mentioning important facts and context, such as that Hamas’ attacks in 2008 more than doubled — to 3,278 — from the 2007 number.

11:59 a.m. LA Times correspondent Ashraf Khalil blogging is more interested in plugging Arab media than blogging news. As a former editor I worked with used to tell me, "The stories aren't in the office. They're out there!"

11:51 a.m. Need break from UK papers; shifting gears to see some blogs. Richard Landes is fed up -- the BBC interviewed pop diva and emerging celebrity Mideast analyst Annie Lennox.

11:44 a.m. If he weren't commenting from the comfort of the UK, I wonder how Gary Younge would view Operation Cast Lead if he lived, say, in Sderot for the past seven years.

11:37 a.m. This staff-ed in The Guardian (UK readers call 'em leaders) misses one very crucial point: bad things happen when well-armed terrorists hide among civilians in densely populated areas. Can't the editors who wrote this at least acknowledge Hamas culpability?

If you're wondering about the speed of these updates, it's because our UK site editor, Simon Plosker, went through the British media and emailed me a bunch of links.

11:29 a.m. Phew. The Times balances Lerner with Lior Lotan of the Herzliya-based ICT.

11:25 a.m. What's gotten into Michael Lerner?

Hamas had respected the previously negotiated ceasefire except when Israel used it as cover to make assassination raids. Hamas argued that these raids were hardly a manifestation of a ceasefire, and so as symbolic protest it would allow the release of rocket fire (usually hitting no targets).

Lerner also wants to reverse the disengagement (?)

Yet Israel, as the militarily superior power, ought to take the first steps: implementing a massive Marshall Plan in Gaza and in the West Bank to end poverty and unemployment, rebuild infrastructure and encourage investment . . .

11:15 a.m. Fisk's being Fisk again.

But the last time Israel played this game – in Jenin in 2000 – it was a disaster. Prevented from seeing the truth with their own eyes, reporters quoted Palestinians who claimed there had been a massacre by Israeli soldiers – and Israel spent years denying it. In fact, there was a massacre, but not on the scale that it was originally reported.

Fisk's colleague, Phil Reeves debunked the massacre charge.

11:03 a.m. Fares Akram, The Independent's Palestinian stringer is mourning the death of his father killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beit Lahiya.

My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I am to become a father, I have lost my father.

It isn't appropriate to address this now. Akram's grief is too raw. My condolences to his family on the tragic loss.

Posted at 11:04 AM
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A selection of news blunders requiring reader intervention. See HonestReporting Canada's latest communique: Canadian Media Coverage Deconstructed

Posted at 10:24 AM
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Sunday, January 4 2009

From Michael Ramirez

Posted at 10:00 PM
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The MSM is raising questions about the veracity of this this IDF video. While the IDF says these are Grad rockets in the back of the truck, McClatchy News and The Independent, among others, pick up on B'tselem claims to the contrary. The BBC writes:

It turned out, however, that a 55-year-old Gaza resident named Ahmed Sanur, or Samur, claimed that the truck was his and that he and members of his family and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from his workshop.

It's incredibly brazen that the MSM is now interested in debunking Mideast footage. They're charging Israel with Pallywood tactics.

Where were all these so-called "watchdogs" when the Mohammed al-Dura video inflamed the Arab world, when the Gaza beach video was the basis of another blood libel, when Lebanon fauxtography pulled the wool over everyone's eyes?

Here's the IDF video that has the MSM buzzing:

See more at The Big Lies, HonestReporting's interactive page.

Posted at 10:29 AM
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Abe Greenwald (via Daled Amos) writes:

Israel is the only country in the world that can be excoriated for its disproportionate response one day, and then immediately criticized for its military failure in the wake of this supposedly outsized and undeserved retaliation.

If a picture's a worth a thousand words, Toronto Star cartoonist Theo Moudakis speaks volumes. I couldn't have summed up the situation better.

Posted at 09:25 AM
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Saturday, January 3 2009

Hamas frequently boasts how much it looks forward to death. So don't be surprised if the terror group engineers a made-to-order massacre that it can them blame Israel for. Sounds preposterous? Professor Richard Landes lays it out in chilling detail:

Whether by Israeli accident or Hamas engineering, expect a spectacular civilian massacre in the coming days, followed by an orgy of Pallywood photography, amplified by a compliant Western media, and even greater fury in the streets of the Muslim and Western world. It’s in the Hamas playbook… and will be until the media gets sober. Here’s the background, and the obscenity that will probably be played.

Barry Rubin has laid out the various endgames open to Hamas, and how, when all else fails, it’s the media reserves you draw on to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat . . . .

But what if the Israelis don’t make a mistake and kill a significant number of people in one blow, like Gaza Beach or Kfar Qana? . . . .

Would Hamas secretly blow up its own people in order to blame Israel? Certainly, their ideology would