June 14, 2007
Murder in Gaza
Why Israel and not Fatah is demonized.
by Bruce ThorntonPrivate Papers

Posted at http://www.victorhansen.com/ see recommended sites.

In Gaza the fighting between Fatah and Hamas has escalated to the point of all-out civil war, replete with dead women and children, kneecapping, and handcuffed prisoners thrown from roofs. Meanwhile in Lebanon, the Lebanese army continues to shell a Palestinian refugee camp, with who knows how many civilian deaths. Arab is killing Arab, Muslim is killing Muslim, and the world basically is shrugging its shoulders.

How different from the intense media attention and the U.N.’s hysteria over Israel’s attempt to root out terrorists in Lebanon last summer. This obscene double standard that strains out the gnat of Israeli self-defense while swallowing numerous camels of Muslim-on-Muslim violence cries out for explanation.

Larger cultural dysfunctions are at work, not least being the corrupt Western media. The major print and television media are filled for the most part with self-styled champions of “social justice,” crusaders not for the truth but for “progressive” ideologies in turn based on incoherent ideals and sheer ignorance of history. Their minds shaped by sentimental Third-Worldism, Marxist demonizations of “colonialism” and “imperialism,” and arrogance about their own moral superiority, many Western reporters are easily turned into the chumps and shills of corrupt Arab regimes and Muslim jihadists. The Palestinian Arabs in particular have brilliantly exploited the useful idiots of the media….

…For the modern jihad against the West did not start on 9/11, or even in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. Its first major campaign took place in 1948 when the Arab states ignored a U.N. resolution and attacked a U.N. member state. As significant as this rejection of the Western-crafted international order was, the response of the West — leaving Israel to sink or swim — was even more important. By sitting on the sidelines while a Western democracy battled for its life, the West sent a message: that it would not intervene to protect a cultural brother and a legitimate state when attacked by autocracies and religious fanatics.

for the rest of this revealing opionion see: http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/thornton061407.html

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