Show and Tell Picture Day
I don't have a lot of time for blogging these past couple of weeks -- one humor, one wry and one angry was about all I could manage given my schedule, but I do look at other blogs from time to time.
I am amazed at the Useful Idiots that are out there preaching about how Gaza is "under seige" and suffering a humanitarian crisis. Certainly the Pallywood Press plays up that angle.
But pictures are worth a thousand paragraphs of propaganda:
Here is the typical propaganda picture showing what is described as the "wide-spread destruction in Gaza." I only find this laughable because the local (Israeli and Jordanian and Al Jazeera news programs) news often quotes Hamas spokesmen speaking from Gaza with a wholly intact, gleaming city stretching out behind the speaker.
Does this look like a starving crowd of people under seige? Didn't think so.....Hardly the Warsaw Ghetto imagery that the Palestine propagandists pimp to the unwary.
Another shot of shoppers. There is apparently both food and clothing for sale in Gaza and people with enough money to buy. Note that in this picture and the preceding one, the skyline is intact and the city is NOT lying in ruins.
As these two pictures show, neither clothing nor shoes are in short supply.
Candies -- today Grandstanding Galloway is leading yet another 15-minutes-of-fame-pay-attention-to-me convoy of "humanitarian aid" into Gaza. None of the people in these photos look like they need George's help, or his publicity (except for Hamas, whose popularity is quickly waning)and the whole thing is really a stunt organized by Socialist Unity. The fact that foreign aid is trucked into Gaza daily from Israeli crossings goes unmentioned. Hamas's beef is that Israel won't allow in construction materials (kassam rockets are made from pipes; concrete and rebar used to build bunkers and command centers) and insists on searching all the aid packages (because we keep finding weapons and ammunition in boxes marked "baby formula" for example).
This is an older picture of the trucks at the Keren Shalom border crossing into Gaza, waiting to bring in humanitarian aid, which they do on a daily basis.Really?! you ask--because you've been told that Gaza is "under seige" and "blockaded" by Israel. Well, you've been lied to. It's true that the borders are closed. The borders are closed because an Islamist dictatorship whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and genocide of the Jewish population seized power in a coup d'etat in 2007, and has refused to honor any past agreements (these include agreements on border crossings) with the "Zionist Entity."
Fine. We closed the borders. We will open them as soon as Hamas renounces violence, recognizes Israel and agrees to abide by earlier Palestinian agreements with Israel. These aren't just Israel's conditions--they are also the conditions of the international community.
But in the meantime we truck in humanitarian aid daily because Hamas is too busy building tunnels to smuggle weapons, training kassam and missile crews, running war camps for youngsters, building better command and control centers, adding more ammo dumps, to do anything about building an infrastructure for a state that will help its people. Thus, while we have closed borders we do NOT have a blockade.
None of these people look undernourished. 
More food.
Gaza. Hardly the image of mass destruction.
And I had to post this picture. I love it! You hear all the time about the "Wall" surrounding Gaza -- well, here it is! A fence with a road which is patrolled by the Border Police and army, as is customary in most nations. But what I like best about this picture is the wide open spaces. Haven't you heard that Gaza is "the most densely populated area on earth?" It's not. In fact, downtown Tel Aviv is more densely populated than Gaza.
And while civilian deaths are tragic, look at this last picture and understand that Gaza's civilians died because Hamas chose to pick a war and fight from the midst of its civilian areas, even though there was ample room outside the towns and cities to fight in the open. Even the Palestinians say it now, bitterly: HAMAS--stands for Hides Among Mosques and Schools.
Cowards and liars.
posted by aliyah06 at 10:21 PM
22 Comments:
Actually the first picture is of the American school in Beit Lahia, the thing was bombed by the Israeli's in the Gaza- war of a year ago.
Written by De Volkskrant correspondent Alex Burghoorn, very good inside information.
Right--the same school that had suffered previous bouts of Gazan violence:
"The American School has seen its share of violence since its founding, including several small incidents which did little damage and killed no one. However, at least three major assaults on the school have occurred, by Palestinian groups who object to the co-ed classes and American curriculum of the school.
In 2004, the school was attacked when Palestinian gunmen fired a rocket landing near the school playground.
In December 2005, the Dutch principal and an Australian teacher were kidnapped, and released unharmed eight hours later. It was reported that the kidnap was engineered by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and they mistook the two for Americans. Afterward, all the foreign teachers left, and the school's population dropped to 300 students.
In April 2007, an attack on the buildings occurred several hours before the school day started. At the time it had more than 600 students. No one was killed; the watchmen were tied up and released by the attackers, who told the guards they were "Al Qaeda of Palestine."
The stated goal was to destroy all symbols of the American regime.
These last attackers blew up large parts of the school with explosives, devastating the building. They stole computers and other also equipment. Following that attack, enrollment dropped precipitously.
Then last winter, the empty campus was being used as a forward launching base for rockets and missiles. Missile/rocket launches guarantee return fire during war, "school" or not.
You are extremely well informed, where did you get this overly detailed information?
On the internet. If you google Beit Lahia American International School, there is a lot of information. Most of mine came from the NY Times/Herald Trib and similar sources.
These are objective quality papers, how come your posting to be overwhelmed by anger?
Because the bald-faced deceit propagated by the purveyers of such Big Lies serves the narrow agenda of those who wish to deconstruct my country and destroy my people and it advances no agenda except that of continued conflict -- no matter how many Israelis and Palestinians are killed--because they keep pouring gasoline on the fire.
In a far away past I'vee been thinking like you, later and from a distance there is a better and more clear view.
Your posting is slightly unbalanced.
Balance is the criterion for professionalism journalism. As a profession, "professional journalists" routinely fail to apply true "balance" to news stories concerning Israel and the Israelis. If they bother with a fig leaf of "balance" at all, they give a slight nod, buried in a back-page paragraph. Given such a sorry state of professional ethics among professional journalists, you can hardly call on a diarist recording my own observations and opinons to adhere to a higher standard than, say, BBC, a media entity so unbalanced that it is laughingly referred to as "Britain's Al Jazeera affiliate."
You do feel offended by the media because they do not write it the way which in your eyes is the truth.
The problem is there to be a lot of people in Israel to have lost contact with reality.
If I may ask, seen tot the intensity of your writing you do live on the West Bank?
I live in Jerusalem. Where do you live?
I don't require that the media agrees with me, or that anyone agrees with me. What I do require is honesty, and the complete lack of it in MSM make their pretension to professional journalism a joke. The fact that bloggers uncovered Green Helmet Guy's fraud and photoshopped pictures during the Hezbollah attacks, and that the MSM has swallowed whole, without question, the Jenin Massacre and Al Dura myths, among others, is a sad commentary on how bias drives the media and how untrustworthy propaganda-disguised-as-journalism is.
Rule: Trust no one. Question everything.
Did have a better look at your site and Wikipedia, you do live on the dark side of the Green Line, no wonder you are this agressive in your writing.
I'm not going to eat you, you are just defensive because the world is turning it's back to you.
My goodness, there is a good deal of baseless vest-pocket psychology and projection going on here. I live in Jerusalem. You still haven't told me where you live.
The Green Line doesn't have a "dark side." The "Green Line" is the 1948 armistice line and is meaningless absent Resolution 242's call for a negotiated settlement. It is not a border, has never been recognized as a border, even by the Arabs, and means nothing in the absence of a peace agreement.
Are you suggesting that the armistice line, which Arab nations and polities refused to recognize as a border at all, is somehow key to a discussion of Palestinian propaganda pictures? It's not--you are simply trying to change the subject and find a way to side-step the truth about Palestinian propaganda by dismissing it through the device of invoking the Green Line.
You are not in a position to wax self-righteous about over-the-Green-Line settlement unless you're also prepared to talk about Jewish dispossession--although I'm sure you would prefer to ignore the ethnic cleansing of the Old City and Kfar Etzion and other over-the-Green-Line locales rendered Jew-free by illegal Arab conquest and occupation. Arguments such as yours always conveniently overlook the fact that many areas over the Green Line were Jewish neighborhoods and towns and farms.
You need to learn to distinguish between "defensive" and opinionated. The fact that a woman holds strong opinions and dares to back them up does not mean she is "defensive"--quite the contrary.
The fact that you choose to subscribe to a belief system molded and informed by morally bankrupt half-truths and propagandistic distortions masquerading as politically correct "truths" does not give you a fiat to proclaim that those of us who vehemently disagree with you are wrong, and dismiss out of hand any discussion that dares suggest you could be incorrect. It's just a bit grandiose to claim that you speak for the "world" and that you hold the only genuine "Truth" -- like most uninformed people, you have reduced a complex situation with deep historical roots to a simplistic black and white, good and bad paradigm which fits your preconceived, and ill-informed, notions.
Well, unlike your friends, we do not need to chop down trees to force up our arguments, we do believe in democratic solutions.
You are extremely self confident about your so called truth, than how come you are hedgehoggerish digging yourself in behind this etnic cleansing talk and all the other well known excuses?
You simply know me to be more right than you, you just avoid in all ways to give even in.
"You are extremely self confident about your so called truth, than how come you are hedgehoggerish digging yourself in behind this etnic cleansing talk and all the other well known excuses?"
Well-known excuses? WHAT a double standard!! Also very typical of a certain political agenda which demonizes Israel and wraps the Arabs in the mantle of pediatric colonialism, excusing all Arab savagery because they're "not European." It's a sort of underhanded, soft racism--don't hold Arab polities to any international standards of civilized behavior because, well, they're Arabs.....Deliberate war crimes by Arab entities acting in the name of and at the behest of Palestinian nationalists are merely an "excuse" to you?
"You simply know me to be more right than you, you just avoid in all ways to give even in."
I know no such thing. You've come here with a very ill-informed agenda, and while you're always welcome to comment, comments that are baseless, facile and/or ad hominem will not pass without rebuttal.
Sorry, but the inconvenient truth is that Hamas can end its isolation at any time by agreeing to abide by previous Palestinian agreements with Israel (it won't) and renouncing violence (it refuses to) and the Palestinians can have their state as soon as they agree we can have ours (Has yet to happen).
I'll trade your cut down trees for kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and his three and a half years of imprisonment, incommunicado, sans Red Cross visits (one, finally), letters (2 after international pressure) in blatant violation of the Geneva Convention.
The problem with the way you and your fellow ideologues think, is that international law only applies to Israel and never to Arabs.
Wow! What an exchange.
Mongrel, a blog is not the news page of a newspaper. It's more like the op-ed page, with an attitude. People blog so they can share their opinions. And their biases.
We Israelis sometimes get an angry tone because the rest of the world likes to condemn us, while making excuses for the Palestinians.
I live on the "politically correct" side of the green line and I'm on the board of Rabbis for Human Rights, which should establish my bona fides as being sympathetic to the mistreatment of the Palestinians. However, I differentiate between real mistreatment, and "self-induced" mistreatment. As a crusader for human rights, I am appalled by the loss of life during Operation Cast Lead -- even if much of the damage has now been cleaned up and life has gone back to normal. At the same time, as an Israeli, I am very glad that the number of Qassams hitting Sderot is down by a couple of orders of magnitude. Hamas has openly declared war on Israel, and continues to call for our destruction. Did the allies ship building supplies to Germany during WW II ? Of course not. On the other hand, they helped rebuild Germany after the war. I look forward to Israel helping rebuild Gaza, "after the war is over."
Why do people allways use institutions when/if they come in handy.
After the chaotic wars in Lebanon and Gaza you dare to mention the Geneva Convention?
Both lost!
"Why do people allways use institutions when/if they come in handy." I'll let you answer that question since your comments indicate you belong to that political spectrum that does just that.
"After the chaotic wars in Lebanon and Gaza you dare to mention the Geneva Convention?"
Absolutely! There is nothing in the Geneva Convention that prohibits defending your country from cross-border attacks and missile strikes, both of which Hamas and Hezbollah engaged in and paid for.
Reb Barry, discussion with folks like this is sort of futile--I appreciate the effort at reasoning with the unreasonable, but as long as you're talking to someone who can only see Israel through the lenses of Far Left and Arab propaganda and not see Israel as we really are, it's hopeless.
BTW, even people on the "dark side" of the Green Line care about Palestinians--I belong to an organization that drives sick people from the checkpoints to the hospitals and back again. MOST Israelis care about the well-being of the Palestinians; most Palestinians, OTOH, engage in rhetoric and statements that indicate they would like to see us dead or driven out of Israel and our country conquered.
There was a peace march today in Tel Aviv--has anyone ever even SEEN a peace march in the Territories? Or in any Arab city?
You name those unguided stovepipes missiles?
We do have to stay reasonable, next time you name a tractor an APC.
What about the use of White Phosphor, prohibited!
Seen to your word Territories you implicate these to be under occupation, yes?
What about a tiny confession about me being right in some matters.
"You name those unguided stovepipes missiles?"
Katyushas are hardly unguided stovepipes. And they've been raining down on us periodically for years. Where was your outrage when Israeli children were killed? Oops, I forgot--Israeli children don't count in your version of morality.
"We do have to stay reasonable, next time you name a tractor an APC."
Not yet. So far 'tractor attacks' have been classified as 'tractors.'
"What about the use of White Phosphor, prohibited!?" So was 8 years of deliberate rocket, mortar and missile attacks against civilians--around 12,000 rockets.
I'm still waiting for proof of white phosphorous burns---other than self-serving Gazan propaganda. Because you know what? Everyone here uses propane to cook with---and propane burns, such as you would get when your stove blows up during a bombardment, look exactly like the many pictures we saw touted as "white phosphorous burns." Let's get an independent medical opinion--so far, there isn't one.
"Seen to your word Territories you implicate these to be under occupation, yes?"
Don't read what you wish for into that word. "Territories" is a nice, neutral word to discuss un-sovereign, disputed land waiting for final status negotiations. "Territories"--yes; "occupied" --no.
"What about a tiny confession about me being right in some matters."
When you finally get something right (not half-right, or spinned) I'll be the first to let you know [grin].
Are you never going to tell me where you live? You know where I live--is your town/country a secret?
The place where I live is a haven in the Kingdom by the sea.
Actually, we do have a queen.
The North Sea.
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