Wheat from the Chaff Blog

The recent Israeli campaign in Gaza officially began on December 27, 2008. It started with many days of aerial bombardment of the Gaza territory, and then intensified on January 3, 2009, when the Israeli army invaded. 13 Israelis and over 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the fighting, which finally ended on January 21, 2009, when Israel withdrew its forces from the Palestinan territory. For a summary of the war, see the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict

One of the really fascinating aspects of the war was who the western media portrays as the aggressor; not surprisingly, they blame the rocket-firing militants of the Hamas. There’s a problem with this claim. It isn’t true. The first side to break the June 2008 ceasefire was Israel. On Nov. 4, 2008, the Israeli military crossed into Gaza and destroyed what they claimed was a Hamas tunnel. The Israelis killed 6 Hamas militants in the raid.

Of course, something else was going on on November 4th: the American election. So, while the New York Times did report the raid, it was clearly a day when that piece of news would be forgotten by the euphoria of the election. Indeed, the news item is so generic that it hardly emphasizes the raid as the first major violation of the June ceasefire.

Moreover, it didn’t stop major new organizations in the West from blaming Hamas when the Israelis started their invasion 7 weeks later. Even though most of the rocket attacks occurred after November 4, 2008, these attacks were the prime reason for laying the blame on Hamas. On Dec. 29, 2009, the New York Times argued that “Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory.” The vast majority of other major western newspapers concurred, and since then most of the focus has been on Hamas’ culpability.

A significant contrarian view came from the official UN Report, but of course Israel, the US and the western media condemned it:

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/48e5e2be2.html

Though the twisting of this story has been noticed by many people in the alternative press, I first heard about the inconsistency via, of all places, CNN (though CNN has since ignored the issue, and even in this report one of the commentators tried his weaselly-best to mitigate the impact of Israel’s responsibility):

The connection to the American election was pointed out to me on a Rabble.Ca podcast. I strongly recommend it:

http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/redeye/freedom-speech-under-siege