Both Sides Now

Seven Palestinians died yesterday. How and why? That's the question.

Reuters suggests it was a deliberate attack on unarmed civilians--which would be a war crime:

Palestinian witnesses and medics in the northern Gaza village of Beit Lahiya said a tank shell landed and killed the young Palestinians aged 11-17 from two farming families. Fifteen other people were wounded, several critically.

Israel's army said it had targeted militants who had crept into the strawberry patch and fired mortar bombs into a nearby Jewish settlement, wounding two people. The army commander in north Gaza expressed regret "if civilians were indeed hurt."

Now read the Jerusalem Post story on the same events:

Seven Palestinians were killed, six of them from the same family, Palestinian officials claimed, when an IDF tank fired a shell towards a group of Palestinians after four mortar shells were fired at Nisanit and the Erez industrial site in northern Gaza on Tuesday morning. The IDF said that most of those who were killed were members of Hamas and that the tank opened fire because the Palestinians who had fired on the Israeli targets were preparing to fire more mortar shells.

One of the Palestinian mortar shells narrowly missed a schoolbus that left Nisanit, transporting children to school. . . Col. Avi Levy, the northern Gaza district commander, insisted that the majority of those killed were members of Hamas and said the army was aware of five Palestinians who were killed in the incident. "If innocent civilians were harmed we regret it, but soldiers spotted the assailants on the verge of firing additional mortar shells and according to information, checked from several sources, five belonged to Hamas," he said. . . .

Palestinians said six of those killed by IDF tank fire were members of the Ghabin family: Brothers Hani, 17, Ghassan, 16, and Mohammed, 16, and cousins Rajah, 11, Mahmud, 16 and Jaber, 17. The seventh fatality was identified as Rajeh Abdul Fatah Kasseeh, 16.

A relative, Abu Mohammed Ghaben, told reporters that the boys were working on the land when a tank shell exploded. The dead and wounded were evacuated to the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya.

Which report is correct? I don't know. Which report fully quoted both sides? Not Reuters.

Oh, by the way, how did supposed moderate Mahmoud Abbas, likely the next President of Palestine, react?

"We are praying for the souls of our martyrs who fell today to the shells of the Zionist enemy," Abbas told a rally in the south Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis, a hotbed of militants.

It was his first known use of a phrase favored by Islamist radicals sworn to Israel's destruction.

Which version you think Abbas read--Jerusalem Post or Reuters?

(via LGF)

Finally, a British woman named Melanie Phillips just published an article titled: The Reporting of Iraq and Israel: An Abuse of Media Power. She concludes the media [has] sucummbed to [an] epedemic of bigotry, bias and blindness:"

The outcome is a society which no longer understands how to distinguish truth from lies, no longer understands or accepts the desirability of objectivity and no longer is capable of rational debate based on facts and logic. Instead, all evidence is filtered through prism of prior political prejudice and emotion to which it is wrenched to fit. It replaces evidence by propaganda, rationality by gullibility.

And it is perhaps the single greatest incitement to terror. Terrorism is designed to achieve maximum publicity and to manipulate public revulsion so that pressure is put on the leaders of the democracies to surrender. It cannot be said too often that what drives al Qaeda is not the exercise of disproportionate force by the west but the perception of its weakness and incapacity or unwillingness to fight in its own defence. But even al Qaeda must surely have been taken aback by the craven willingness of the British media to fall into line by abusing and persecuting their own leaders at a time of war. These terrorists know that the more barbaric their acts, the more hysteria and pressure the British media will direct at Blair and Bush. So al Qaeda has every incentive to ratchet up the atrocities. That’s why the hostage Kenneth Bigley was videoed sobbing for his life in a cage; and the media duly do what the terrorists want and put it on their front pages and news bulletins, and the pressure on Blair to split from America becomes more and more intolerable.

The appalling result of all this is that, if a terrorist outrage in London were to claim the lives of hundreds or thousands of people, the reaction of many Britons might not be a revival of the spirit of the Blitz and an iron determination to defeat fascism and tyranny. It might be instead to turn on Tony Blair and blame him directly for bringing about the slaughter. And that, of course, is precisely what makes such a terrible outcome more likely. There can be little doubt that al Qaeda, such a shrewd judge of western decadence and the differences in moral fibre between the countries of the west, will have noted the fact that in Britain, the worse the terrorist outrage that is committed, the more the public will turn on Tony Blair. Every single defeatist, distorted or dishonest article about Iraq, Israel and the war on terror makes another barbaric atrocity more likely.

(via Powerline)

More:

I know what Agence France Press reads, based on the first para of its story about the Palestinian election (emphasis mine):

Palestinian presidential favourite Mahmud Abbas hammered home his dovish message on the penultimate day of campaigning, as Israel denied prisoners the right to vote and settlers threatened to hamper the polls in east Jerusalem.

(via LGF)