Wednesday, September 22 2010

Globe & Mail Flies Off the Radar

Last week, Iyad Shilbayeh, a senior Hamas commander in Tulkarem was killed during an IDF arrest raid.

The raid happened to take place in the late afternoon on the eve of Yom Kippur, while the rest of Israel was shutting down for one of the most important holidays on the Jewish calendar.

I'm wondering what correspondent Patrick Martin of the Globe & Mail (via HonestReporting Canada) was thinking when he filed his report. His double-spinned story called the arrest raid a "targeted killing." And Martin implied that the operation took place on the eve of Yom Kippur to take advantage of the dead media time:

And it came just hours before Israelis celebrated Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays. As a result, there was almost no news of the killing in Israeli media – no newspapers are published Saturday, and almost all Israeli broadcasting goes off the air at midday on Friday.

Addressing the targeted killing claim is easy enough. Buried at the bottom of his dispatch, Martin himself quotes an army spokesperson that Shilbayeh was shot when he moved towards soldiers who had ordered him to halt.

The implication that the IDF operation was timed to "fly under Israeli public radar" is even more ridiculous. Senior Hamas commanders aren't stupid don't spend enough time in one place to allow the IDF the luxury of scheduling arrest raids around holidays.

Or would Martin have us believe that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab scheduled his Christmas Day bombing attempt to fly under the international media's radar too?

Posted at 11:01 AM

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