Hamas's non-Iranian allies may tilt the result....
Claudia Rosett details the UN's tilt towards terror. She notes that when Hamas starts bombarding Israel the UN remains (predictably) silent; but when Israel returns fire the top UN diplomats unleash a barrage at Israel, condemning escalation & over-reaction, yadda, yadda.... Add to this the UN's subsidy of Palestinian terror, and its ignoring repeated Israeli diplomatic pleas to call upon Hamas to cease & desist, and the picture is abysmally clear: the UN is in the tank for the Palestinians yet again. Michael Goodwin likens leftist complaints about "disproportionate" Israeli response to "affirmative action" for terrorists. The Left would limit the scale of Israel's response to that of Hamas's attack, enabling Hamas to conveniently limit the level of violence and thus avoid punishing retaliation. But true legal proportional response must be calibrated to the level needed to remove the threat, not the level of an attacker's aggression. On the positive side, the State Dept. was pressed successfully to condemn Islamist Turkey calling Israel a terror state.
The world press is, alas, as usual, in the tank for the Palestinians. Hamas media celebrate non-existent victories:
This,
after all, is the Middle East, where win-lose calculations are very
different than in most other regions. In a week of fighting, Gazans and
other Arabs who tuned to Hamas-controlled broadcasts heard only of
heroic victories.
At times citing imaginary Israeli media, those
Gaza-manufactured “reports” created an alternate reality in which the
Knesset was bombarded by Hamas missiles; an American-made IDF F-16
fighter jet was downed and its Israeli pilot taken hostage, and several
Israeli drones were intercepted.
Every rocket launched from Gaza,
regardless of whether it hit or missed, was celebrated as a huge
victory over the hated Zionists.
And world media types take at face value, or, at least, according presumptive validity, without independent investigation, to Palestinian claims as to the number of civilian casualties inflicted by Israel. The historical record of the world press accepting inflated or outright false Arab claims attests to the reportorial bias against Israel.
Even the marvel of Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system is turned against Israel, as noted by columnist David Horovitz:
When
Israel’s short-sighted critics insistently refuse to look beyond the
numerical asymmetry, the very effectiveness of Iron Dome becomes the
latest weapon with which to attack Israel for its purported aggression.
All those Gazans are suffering terribly, dozens have been killed, yet
hardly any Israelis are dying? That can’t be right. How can the Israelis
claim to be the victims of unprovoked and indiscriminate aggression?
They’re still alive.
Even the reasonably fair-minded foreign news
teams focus on Gaza. It’s a much better story. When you’ve done the
first article about Israel’s missile defense system intercepting a
rocket that, yes, would have killed dozens in Ashdod, Ashkelon,
Beersheba or Tel Aviv, except that it didn’t, you’ll only be repeating
yourself if you do a second piece along the same lines a day later. But
Gaza? Fresh faces of suffering daily....
And
Palestinians in Gaza are dying in growing numbers because they are
either directly involved in trying to kill us or — to our genuine sorrow
and Hamas’s cynical delight — they had the misfortune to be sleeping,
walking, talking, studying or praying very close to a key Hamas terror
chief, missile launch site, ammunition store or other element of the
sprawling Hamas kill-the-Jews infrastructure.
To put it
succinctly, Hamas is doing its best to kill any and all of us in Israel,
while cynically seeking to protect itself from attack by emplacing its
offensive capacity among Gaza’s often unwitting civilians. And Israel is
doing its best to prevent its citizens being killed, while trying to
thwart the attacks without harming Gaza’s civilians. There’s the
relevant asymmetry.
Yet Hamas gets sympathetic coverage despite six Hamas thugs having summarily executed six Gazans suspected of spying for Israel, then dragging one victim's body through the streets of Gaza City. And Gazans cheered a terror-bombing of an Israeli bus in Tel Aviv. Hamas even uses journalists as human shields, a practice that one would normally assume would be a public-relations minus for the group.
Israel faces more double standards, with Team Obama pressuring Israel not to build in a disputed section of Jerusalem, as a response, should the UN grant the Palestinians member-state status.
As to Egypt, broker of the Israel - Hamas ceasefire, the US has consistently underestimated the radicalism of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Bottom Line. So long as double standards persist, Hamas and its Islamist allies will continue to reap political rewards despite losing engagements.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, National Security, Foreign Policy, WMD, Nuclear Proliferation, Conservative Politics
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