Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The New York Times on Gaza: El-Khodary strikes again

Today's article in the New York Times (front page), is quite revealing. It also has the byline of Bronner and El-Khodary. The first sentence of the article uses the term "punishing air attacks." One needs to look at that phrase. Who invented that? Which bureau of Israeli occupation's military or intelligence apparatus came out with that one? Punishing air strikes. Just ponder that one. It clearly absolves Israel of any moral or political culpability when you describe its crimes as "punishing." This is another version of "retaliatory air strikes" that Israeli propagandists came up with in the past. So if a Palestinian group in Gaza were to bomb some target in Israel, would the New York Times describe it as "punishing car bomb" or "punishing bombings"? Bronner continues in his consistent record of justifying the bombing of every school, building, mosque, apartment in Gaza. Look at his language: "which also hit nearly all of Hamas’s security complexes, its university and other symbols of its sovereignty and power." Symbols of power? So do you find Palestinian bombings of school and synagogues justified by the same logic since they are "symbols" of Israel's power and sovereignty? But Taghreed El-Khodary has a different mission in Gaza. The New York Times today devotes half a page (a separate article) to the "suffering" of Israelis under ineffective and useless missiles that are made in the kitchen of homes in Gaza. Yet, while El-Khodary could have provided coverage about the human suffering in Gaza, she has a different agenda, or different orders. Yesterday, her mission was to cover the plight of the collaborators. Today, she cruelly went around Gaza asking the people there who they blamed, hoping that she will find people who are not blaming Israel. She found a 13-year old, and she quotes him at lenghth about his views in favor of peace with Israel. While his older brother standing next to him blamed Israel, she did not quote the brother, just the gist of what he said. He was not quotable enough for her. She later also went around asking the "blame" question hoping to find people who absolved Israel for its crimes. And even though there is a separate article in the paper about the "suffering" of Israelies, the main article also talked about the impact of Hamas missiles (which appear as cruise missiles in the US press): "There was a report of light injuries as well as a number of people in shock." People in shock? Notice that when there are no injuries the paper has to find a way to claim that they were injured, psychologically this time, I guess. In shock? Do you think that the Palestinians in Gaza are also in shock? Or do you think that bombs from fighter jets don't cause the shock that Hamas cruise missiles cause?