Posted on Friday, August 22, 2014 - 09:43 am:

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Speaking Truth to Crap
By Dan Gordon ~ August 19, 2014

I've been home from participating in Operation Protective Edge for about a week. I am in uniform no more, though I still wear my dog tags in solidarity with my brothers in arms, who, like all citizens of Israel, await the outcome of cease-fire talks in Cairo. Because we never wanted this war. It was forced upon us by Hamas. The current cease-fire is set to expire Monday at Midnight Israel time. Hamas has repeatedly rejected and/or violated each past cease-fire, so no one knows what will happen with this one.

I admit to being a bit cranky.

I don't think it's PTSD, though I've been to too many funerals, had a few too many close calls with rockets and mortars, had people with whom I'd celebrated the night before be killed the next day, seen chunks of the skull of a sixteen year old blown off by shrapnel from a mortar round I successfully dodged, only through luck and the grace of a loving G-d, who, I choose to believe, still has some use for me on the planet.

The song "Fire and Rain" is playing on the local oldies station and I think to myself, " Oh James, you Sweet Hippie Child, you haven't seen anything,"

You haven't been in a shelter during a rocket attack trying to comfort a little girl with nothing but the BS of an adult trying to comfort a child in a rocket attack, who knows better. You haven't seen people race for cover knowing they have only seven seconds before risking being blown apart. You haven't met people who've had to lock themselves in a so called safe room, while only a few hundred meters away a dozen terrorists, armed with anti tank missiles that could incinerate their home, machine guns, grenades, thousands of rounds of ammunition and hand cuffs, with which to take them prisoner and drag them through terrorist tunnels, into underground cells, are on the prowl, and they, this sweet family in a locked room, know that they are their targets. They will live or die in the next hour, depending upon the skill and bravery of eighteen and nineteen year old boys and girls, who are willing to lay down their lives, not to promulgate any occupation, nor subjugate another people, but to protect their homes and families, and on this particular day, some of those kids will do just that. They will lay down their lives to protect this family and others like them. The terrorists' secret "Divine Victory Plan" to kill, maim and take hostage, Israeli men women and children will be foiled and there will be new funerals of nineteen year olds who've given their lives to save the lives of that family huddled together behind a locked door in their home. And you think you've seen Fire and Rain, James?

...Mr. Voight recently penned an open letter to Javier Bardem and his equally talented wife, Penelope Cruz, for signing an open letter condemning Israel as a war criminal without once mentioning the name, let alone the deeds of Hamas. Mr. Voight took them to task and recounted Israel's history in a workman-like fashion, hoping to educate them, and his readers, regarding the facts leading up to the current conflict.

Mr. Voight has thus, recently been taken to task himself, by a member of Academia who has chosen to identify with the downtrodden, put-upon, maligned and much misunderstood freedom fighters of Hamas.

He has done so by taking his stand against the capitalist, pig, oppressors of the Palestinian masses, namely the dreaded Zionists.

...Finally, these mouthpieces for terrorist thugs, wrapping themselves in the robes of Academia, claim that it was Israel that started this current war, and not Hamas.

But that's quite simply a lie.

And we know it's a lie because Hamas did not start digging those thirty two terrorist attack tunnels when Israel started it's aerial campaign against them. Those tunnels were an offensive weapon which was to have handed Hamas their "shock and awe," their 911 moment that would have brought Israel to its knees. They began digging those tunnels five years ago with the cement and steel they stole from their own people, with the cement and steel that was meant to rebuild Gaza, to build schools and hospitals and prenatal clinics. And instead they used it to build terrorist attack tunnels under Israel's internationally recognized 1967 border, aimed exclusively against Israeli civilians, whom they would have murdered, maimed and taken hostage by the dozens. This was their offense, planned and executed at the time of their choosing. But following their doctrine of carrying out terrorist attacks and then claiming the mantle of victimhood, with so called academics as their mouth pieces and enablers, they had to make it look like it was a response to Israeli aggression. So they publicly ordered the kidnap murder of three Israeli schoolboys on their way home from school.

...And don't you buy the crap so-called academics are peddling, that Hamas was the duly democratically elected government of Gaza. Hamas took power, not in an election, but in a bloody coup, machine gunning their fellow Palestinians, blindfolding, binding and throwing them off of multi story buildings. They have terrorized their own people, not only Israel. Their people, indeed, live under the yoke of occupation, but not by Israel, by Hamas.

And as for the apologists and enablers of Hamas, who contribute to the misery of Palestinians and Israelis alike, while sitting in their club chairs in the faculty lounge, may I suggest that from now on they speak only through the orifice which Mr. Voight has so eloquently enlarged for them, since what they are peddling is pure, unadulterated crap.

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Posted on Friday, August 22, 2014 - 04:12 pm:

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The killing is massively disproportionate, amongst which there are many CHILDREN and women killed and being killed by Israel.

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Posted on Friday, August 22, 2014 - 07:02 pm:

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All the News That’s Fit for Hamas
By David Gerstman Friday, August 22, 2014

Forbes investigative journalist exposes biased coverage of Hamas and the Gaza conflict

At his Muckraker column at Forbes, The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times In Israel-Hamas War, investigative journalist Richard Behar exposes many of the problems – really scandals – with the MSM reporting on Gaza.

Though he focuses a lot on The New York Times, he focuses on other news outlets too and how, through a combination of credulousness, bias and laziness, they have become in the words of his friend, and fellow investigative journalist, Gary Weiss, “part of the Hamas war machine.”

...Behar looked at the media in general and specifically at The New York Times “because it is, without question, the most important media outlet in the world, in terms of setting the table each day for other outlets.”

Behar’s first critique of the Times is for its Gaza based reporter Fares Akram, and what he discovered when he visited Akram’s Facebook page.

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His profile photo was not of himself, but of PLO leader Arafat. A second photo, still in his album, waxes poetically about Arafat in the context of “heights by great men.” But Arafat, among many things as the longtime leader of the Palestinians (the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre comes to mind), opted for the Second Intifada in 2000, rather than accept a generous peace offer from Israel. Before he died, he said on TV that dead Palestinian children are good for the cause. In 2009, following an Israeli air strike that tragically killed his father and a cousin, Akram wrote that “I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza.” Akram, a Palestinian resident of Gaza, has also published more than a dozen dispatches for Al Jazeera, parallel to his Times reporting, since the war began last month.

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...Behar also looked into Qatar based network Al Jazeera.

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And what of the Qatari government’s subsidiary, Al Jazeera America? I posed the matter to Steven Emerson, who has studied the network extensively. He is a longtime expert on Islamist terror who runs the Investigative Project in Terrorism (IPT), and he worked prior to that as an former investigative journalist for CNN and U.S. News and World Report.

“AJ America does very good reporting, but it was set up to provide cover as a propaganda outlet for its unabashed pro-Islamist, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, pro-Hamas owners,” says Emerson. “Qatar is the Number One financial supporter of the Brotherhood and Hamas today. Its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has been scurrilously one-sided even though they pretend to be “evenhanded” by interviewing official Israeli spokesmen.”

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Many American news organizations cite Al Jazeera and don’t care that it functions as an arm of the Qatari government. Worse plenty of American reporters have signed on to the station leading Emerson to comment, “The journalists who joined AJ America have sold their souls, I’m sure for a very good price. Some of them went over to AJ America because it perfectly suited their ideological agendas.”

...Another major focus of Behar’s throughout the article is the use of casualty statistics to paint Israel as careless if not criminal in its conduct. But Behar writes:

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The arithmetic of civilian casualties in Gaza is one of the principal media crimes in this war. It became obvious weeks ago that major Western journalists routinely swallowed the huge civilian-casualty figures dished out to them by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, a bureaucratic arm of a terrorist group that was shown to have lied about such figures in past wars. In some cases, reporters cite numbers instead from the United Nations, which gets its numbers from—surprise—the Hamas ministry, a dubious source of information, akin to relying on the Reich Health Office for German civilian-casualty statistics during World War II.

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...Col. Richard Kemp [the former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan] noted after Cast Lead that in any war civilian casualties usually exceed military casualties, but the Israel had lowest the civilian to combatant ratio he’d ever seen.

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