Melanie Phillips: The (real) news

 Melanie Phillips

 

 NOTE TO READER: I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Melanie Phillips at UCSC a few years ago. She, like me, identifies with the left. She, like me, when examining the issues associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has come down firmly on the pro-Israel side. She, like me, has paid a huge price for holding that position.  So it is with great pleasure that I offer my blog readers her analysis of the death toll in the Gaza 2012 War from a reasoned point of view.  No photos of dead, bloody babies. Just facts, research, and a persuasive analysis.  ---Becky Johnson, Ed.

 

 

18 November 2012

Here is the (real) news

 By Melanie Phillips

Published in: Melanie's Blog





Here is some information about the war between Gaza and Israel that for some unaccountable reason you may have missed today in Britain’s mainstream media.

• The casualty rate in Gaza from Israeli strikes is astoundingly low

Since the beginning of Israel’s operation Pillar of Defence last Wednesday against Hamas rocket attacks, there have been more than 1000 Israeli air strikes. At time of writing, the Palestinian death toll is 69. That is a staggeringly small number of fatalities for more than 1000 bombing raids.
It shows beyond doubt that the Israelis are not only doing everything they can to avoid civilian casualties, but have achieved a degree of precision in doing so which no other army can match. For sure, every civilian casualty is regrettable, and the deaths of children are always tragic -- today’s apparently heavy toll particularly so, including at what appears to have been a mistaken target. Such mistakes inevitably happen in war.
But consider this: the very low casualty rate among Israelis from the thousands of rockets that have rained down on them from Gaza is largely due to the fact that Israel has provided its citizens with shelters to save their lives. In Gaza, by horrific contrast, the Hamas leadership has deliberately exposed its citizens to attack by siting its rocket arsenals among them in order to maximise the number of civilian men, women and children who will be killed.

• A number of Gazan civilians may have been killed by their own rockets

Israel says that no fewer than 60 of the 703 rockets that Hamas fired at Israel between last Wednesday and Saturday fell inside Gaza on Palestinian civilians. The question therefore is how many of the 69 dead Palestinians were killed by their own rockets?

• Here’s one: Hamas lies that a child killed by its own rocket was killed by Israel

Last Friday, a number of papers along with outlets such as CNN in the US published prominent footage of the Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kanil weeping over the body cradled in his arms of a dead child, Mahmoud Sadallah, who Hamas claimed had been killed in an Israeli air strike. Blogger Elder of Zyon smelled a rat and, piecing together convincing circumstantial evidence, had concluded by this morning that the child was almost certainly not killed by an Israeli strike – not least because on Friday morning when the child died the Israelis had paused their bombing missions to allow for cease-fire talks in Gaza to proceed -- but by a Hamas missile that was fired at Israel but had fallen short in Gaza. Now experts from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights who visited the site on Saturday have said they believe that the explosion that killed Mahmoud Sadallah was indeed caused by a Palestinian rocket.
Just how prominent do you reckon the apologies on CNN and in the British media for this sloppy and incompetent reporting/malicious war libel of Israel will be?

• Hamas admits to using human shields

In 2008 , Gaza MP Fathi Muhammad boasted that Hamas used Gaza’s civilian population as human shields. He screamed:

‘For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy, “We desire death like you desire life”.’

Remember this next time you hear or read of claims by Palestinians or their useful western media idiots of ‘massacres’ of civilians in Gaza.

• Hamas is now using journalists as human shields

Hamas is preventing at least 22 foreign journalists from leaving Gaza for Israel. According to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, among those being detained are nine Italian citizens, one Canadian, one South Korean, a French national and six journalists from Japan. In addition, two Turkish Red Crescent members have been refused exit.

• Hamas tells lies as a matter of routine

Hamas has claimed, inter alia, that Israel’s Ben Gurion airport has been closed (false), that it had succeeded in shooting down an Israeli F16 plane (false), that it had hit Tel Aviv and had cut off electricity there (false). When will the western media stop assuming that they can believe any claim that Hamas ever makes?

• Hamas is now threatening human bomb attacks

Hamas is now threatening to use human bombs against both Israeli civilians in buses and cafes, and against Israeli soldiers in any ground offensive in Gaza. This is what almost certainly faces the Israel Defence Forces if they go in, because as Fathi Muhammad said (above), the Palestinians are a death cult; they are committed to death and to killing, while the Israelis are committed to life and to saving life.

• Israel is feeding the hand that bites it

Unprecedentedly for a country at war, Israel continues to supply food, gas and medical supplies to its enemies in Gaza for humanitarian reasons. Would any other country in the world keep the supply route open to people who are firing thousands of rockets to murder its people and are threatening to turn themselves into human bombs to kill its soldiers and civilians, so that they can continue to do so?

• And now for some news from civilised Britain

On BBC Radio’s Any Questions on Friday evening, audience questioner Stephen Bedford asked:

‘Despite all the foreign aid and support, Israel has spectacularly failed to get on with its neighbours. Does Israel deserve a future?’

So with Israel having faced existential attack from the Arab and Muslim world for the six decades of its existence, and having been under intensive rocket, missile and human bomb attack from them for more than a decade, the BBC Any Questions production team selected as the audience question to launch its discussion of the Gaza war whether Israel actually deserved to exist at all.
Vile.