PALESTINIANS AND THE "DEATH BOATS" SCANDAL

Khaled Abu Tomeh September 27, 2014  

Full article http://tinyurl.com/pklrc2f

Summary

As the past few weeks have, shown, hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians would rather risk their lives at sea than live under Palestinian governments and leaders whose only goal is to enrich their bank accounts.

Instead of creating job opportunities for young men and women, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have spent the past seven years fighting over money and power. They are now busy planning how to lay their hands on the millions of dollars that are supposed to go to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Hamas wants to use the Palestinian Authority as a tool through which the international community channels funds to he Gaza Strip — a move that would  ultimately empower Hamas to tighten its grip over the Palestinian population there.

They said that Hamas officials are providing the emigrants with forged visas and travel documents to to enable them to enter Europe.

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Over the past few weeks, dozens of Palestinian immigrants from the Gaza Strip have been killed or injured while trying to reach Europe by sea.

At least 500 Palestinians have gone missing after the boats carrying them sank in the sea. Some reports have suggested that rival gangs deliberately sunk the boats. The gangs are fighting for the cash the Palestinians are prepared to pay to leave the Gaza Strip. Palestinians refer to the situation as their "Death Boats" scandal.

The Palestinian immigrants are said to have paid thousands of dollars to Hamas officials and Egyptian smugglers to facilitate the exodus from the Gaza Strip. Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki claimed that each Palestinian paid $1,000 to Hamas personnel at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Others are believed to have paid $5,000 each to leave the Gaza Strip.

Malki said that preliminary investigations have revealed that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have fallen victim to Hamas and Egyptian gangsters who managed to lure them with false promises.

According to various reports, some 13,000 Palestinians have already fled the Gaza Strip to Europe with the help of the gangsters. Most left through Hamas's smuggling tunnels or by bribing its security officials at the Rafah terminal. Another 25,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip have applied to various European countries for immigration.

Although Hamas has denied any connection to the mass exodus, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip revealed that the Islamist movement had set up special offices to register those wishing to start a new life in Europe. They said that Hamas officials are providing the emigrants with forged visas and travel documents to enable them to enter Europe.

A Palestinian journalist in Gaza City said that at one of the mosques in the southern Gaza Strip, a leading Hamas preacher told worshippers: "Those who are not happy can always emigrate to Europe. We do not force anyone to stay here."

Most of the immigrants left the Gaza Strip through a two-kilometer tunnel belonging to a senior Hamas operative. Survivors told a Palestinian Authority Commission of Inquiry that when they reached the Egyptian side of the border, Egyptian gangsters intercepted them and robbed them of their money.

"Hamas gangsters worked in cooperation with gangsters on the Egyptian side of the border," said a senior Palestinian Authority official involved with the inquiry commission. "They operated like a real mafia, exploiting the predicament of the people, especially young men who were hoping to find jobs and better lives in Italy and other European countries."

Palestinians say that the emigration began long before the last military confrontation between Hamas and Israel. But the trend has witnessed a dramatic increase since the end of the fighting in late August.

"Hamas has failed to help the Palestinians ever since it came to power in 2007," said Ahmed Bader, whose son managed to leave the Gaza Strip through a tunnel one week after the end of the fighting. "There is nothing for the young people to do in the Gaza Strip: no jobs, no entertainment and no security. Young men who graduate from universities cannot find work if they are not members of Hamas."

Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority bear responsibility for the tragedy of the Palestinian immigrants. The two rival parties have failed to improve the living conditions of their people in the Gaza Strip.  Instead of creating job opportunities for young men and women, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have spent the past seven years fighting over money and power.

Hamas says that Palestinians are fleeing the Gaza Strip because their leader (Mahmoud Abbas) is a helpless 80-year-old man "who suffers from half the diseases of the universe." The Palestinian Authority, for its part, says that the Palestinians are fleeing the "hell of Hamas.". Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are trading allegations and abuses while their people are being exploited emotionally and financially, then robbed, drowned and fed to sharks.

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are now busy planning how to lay their hands on the millions of dollars that are supposed to go to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

At last week's "reconciliation" talks between the two sides in Cairo, they completely ignored the tragedy of the Palestinian immigrants. Once again, Hamas and Fatah officials exchanged kisses and hugs as they announced yet another agreement to implement a previous agreement. 

In fact, this is what Hamas and Fatah have been doing since 2006 – signing one reconciliation agreement after the other without tangible results. Needless to say, so far none of these agreements has been implemented. Skeptics say the most recent agreement between Hamas and Fatah is also likely to remain ink on paper due to the wide gap between the two parties.

Hamas appears to be willing to bring the Palestinian Authority back to the Gaza Strip not because it has changed its ideology. Rather, Hamas wants to use the Palestinian Authority as a tool through which the international community channels funds to the Gaza Strip – a move that would ultimately empower Hamas to tighten its grip over the Palestinian population there.

But many Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have obviously lost their confidence in both Abbas and Hamas. As the past few weeks have shown, hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians would rather risk their lives at sea than live under Palestinian governments and leaders whose only goal is to enrich their bank accounts.

LANCET 'HIJACKED IN ANTI-ISRAEL CAMPAIGN'

By Jake Wallis Simons 22^nd Sept. 2014

http://tinyurl.com/padlp4o

Senior British medical figures say the well-respected journal is being used as a platform by alleged conspiracy theorists David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klansman

Two of the authors of the open letter, Dr Paola Manduca and Dr Swee Ang, have sympathies with the views of David Duke, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard.

For almost 200 years, it has been regarded as a well-respected medical journal. But according to senior British medical figures, the Lancet is being hijacked to campaign indefatigably against Israel, and used as a platform by alleged conspiracy theorists.

In August, it published a controversial “open letter for the people of Gaza” that condemned Israel in the strongest possible terms, but strikingly made no mention of Hamas’ atrocities.

The five principal authors of the letter made it clear that they had “no competing interests”. However, all of them have campaigned vociferously for the Palestinian cause over many years.

Dr Swee Ang is an orthopaedic surgeon, and Dr Manduca, a professor of genetics at the University of Genoa in Italy – who are both members of pro-Palestine NGOs.

In another email, Dr Manduca forwarded a message alleging that the Boston marathon bombings were in fact carried out by Jews. “Let us hope that someone in the FBI is smart enough to look more carefully at the clues in Boston and find the real culprits behind these bombings instead of buying the Zionist spin”, it said.

Elsewhere, she shared an article comparing the Jewish state to a “strangler fig”, which grows around other trees and takes their sunlight, often resulting in the death of the original trees.

In response to questions by the Daily Telegraph, Dr Manduca issued a statement in which she denied being anti-Semitic. “But I legitimately use my right of freedom of opinion,” she said, “and do not agree or value the politics of the government of Israel, nor of many others, including Jews in and out of Israel.”

For her part, Dr Ang said: “I didn’t know who David Duke was, or that he was connected to the Ku Klux Klan. I am concerned that if there is any truth that Jews control the media, politics and banking, what on earth is going on? I was worried.”  She said that she was made aware of Duke’s conspiracy theories by a friend, Dr Kamal Alubaid, who appears to have been active on 9/11 "truth" websites. In one post, he referred to the Jewish State as "Racist Apparthide (sic) Israel".

Moreover, Dr Mads Gilbert, a third author of the letter, gave an interview with the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet in 2001 in which he said that the 9/11 atrocities were as a result of Western foreign policy, and that he supported terror attacks in that “context”.

Israeli campaigners brought this information to the attention of the Lancet in a letter sent on 1 September. However, the journal has refused to issue a response and has not removed the open letter from its website – through which it collected 20,000 signatures in support of the letter.

“It's utterly irrelevant. It's a smear campaign,” the editor of the Lancet, Dr Richard Horton, told the Daily Telegraph. “I don’t honestly see what all this has to do with the Gaza letter. I have no plans to retract the letter, and I would not retract the letter even if it was found to be substantiated.”

Dr Horton, who has in the past spoken at rallies organised by Stop The War Coalition, denied that the journal's reputation would be damaged by giving a platform to people who appear to hold such views, and said that the Lancet is not intending to investigate the allegations. According to its critics, the current episode is just the latest example of anti-Israel prejudice that the Lancet’s editors have encouraged.

“For many years, the Lancet has been consistently using its reputation to attack Israel,” says Professor David Katz, an expert in infection and immunity at University College London. The Lancet is supposed to be a politically neutral medical journal. 

The fact that they have given proven anti-Semites a platform and not rescinded it, even when confronted with the evidence, is appalling. They have allowed their hatred of Israel to blind them to the norms of medical science and the pursuit of reason.”

NGO Monitor, an Israeli watchdog, points out that over the past 15 years, the journal has formed a number of partnerships with Palestinian groups, including the Lancet-Palestinian Health Alliance, Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. By contrast, there have been no comparable collaborations with Israeli groups. Professor Katz and a number of other senior medical figures have written to the medical ombudsman to register their complaints.

On 29 August, Professor Sir Mark Pepys, director of the Wolfson Drug Discovery Unit at UCL, wrote: “The failure of the Menduca et al authors to disclose their extraordinary conflicts of interest… are the most serious, unprofessional and unethical errors. The transparent effort to conceal this vicious and substantially mendacious partisan political diatribe as an innocent humanitarian appeal has no place in any serious publication, let alone a professional medical journal, and would disgrace even the lowest of the gutter press.”

He accuses Dr Horton, the Lancet editor, personally: “Horton’s behaviour in this case is consistent with his longstanding and wholly inappropriate use of The Lancet as a vehicle for his own extreme political views,” he says. “It has greatly detracted from the former high standing of the journal.”

TERROR TUNNELS: THE CASE FOR ISRAEL'S JUST WAR AGAINST HAMAS

by Alan M. Dershowitz

September 12, 2014

Hamas quickly produces photographs of dead babies to be shown around the world, while at the same time preventing the media from showing its rocket launchers in densely populated areas.

Unless Hamas's "dead baby strategy" is denounced and stopped -- by the international community, the media, the academy and all good people -- it will be coming soon "to a theater near you".

If Hamas's dead baby strategy works, why not repeat it every few years? And why shouldn't other terrorist groups, like ISIS and Boko Haram, adapt this strategy to their nefarious goals as Hezbollah has already done?

On June 13, 2014, the commander of the Gaza Division of the Israel Defense Forces took me into a Hamas tunnel that had recently been discovered by a Bedouin tracker who serves in the IDF. The tunnel was a concrete bunker that extended several miles from its entrance in the Gaza Strip to its exit near an Israeli kibbutz kindergarten.

The tunnel had one purpose: to allow Hamas death squads to kill and kidnap Israelis.

 The commander told me that Israeli intelligence had identified more than two dozen additional tunnel entrances in the Gaza Strip. They had been identified by the large amounts of earth being removed to dig them. Although Israeli intelligence knew where these entrances were, they could not order an attack from the air, because they were built into civilian structures such as mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes. Nor could Israel identify their underground routes from Gaza into Israel, or their intended exit points in Israel. Israeli scientists and military experts had spent millions of dollars in an effort to develop technologies that could find the underground routes and intended exits for tunnels that were as deep as a hundred feet beneath the earth, but they had not succeeded in finding a complete solution to this problem. The planned exits from these tunnels in Israel were also a Hamas secret, hidden deep in the ground and incapable of being discovered by Israel until the Hamas fighters emerged. At that point it would be too late to prevent the death squads from doing their damage.

I was taken into the tunnel and saw the technological innovations: tracks on which small trains could transport kidnapped Israelis back to Gaza; telephone and electrical lines; crevices beneath schools and other civilian targets that could hold explosives; and smaller offshoot tunnels leading from the main tube to numerous exit points from which fighters could simultaneously emerge from different places.

My goal is to show that Israel's military actions in defense of its citizens have been just, and that they have been conducted in a just manner. They are no less just than the military actions being conducted by the United States and its allies against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups. And they have been carried out at least as justly, with a lower percentage of civilian-to-combatant casualties.

Yet Israel has been unjustly condemned from too many corners, thus encouraging Hamas to continue its despicable and unlawful dead baby strategy. For the sake of justice and peace, the world must stop applying a double standard to the nation-state of the Jewish people.

[1] Different acronyms have been used to refer to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] and simply the Islamic State [IS].

For the full article see the link below:

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4695/hamas-terror-tunnels

THE BLACK FLAG OF JIHAD IS THE REAL THREAT TO THE WORLD

FINALLY SOME TRUTH AND COMMON SENSE FROM A UNITED KINGDOM NEWSPAPER, THE DAILY EXPRESS.

HOPEFULLY THE REST OF THE WORLD WAKES UP TO REALITY. WORTH READING EVERY PARAGRAPH.

Douglas Murray, 21.08.2014

 http://tinyurl.com/podjhcs

Stop blaming Israel and wake up: 

Jews are attacked here in Britain, they are blockaded into a synagogue in Paris and the chant ‘Death to the Jews’ is heard in Germany for the first time in 70 years.  

But too few people seem to want to notice this or admit what it means. They think this is just about Israel, or just about Jewish people. It isn’t. It is about all of us.

The decision last month by the Israeli government to respond to Hamas rocket-fire from Gaza is the response any government would choose if rockets were fired at its citizens. The Israeli government has the right - as does any government - to stop the bombarding of its people.

However, in recent weeks it has become plain that much of the world expects a different response from Israel. They expect Israel not to fight for the safety, security and survival of their people, but to lie down in front of the Islamic extremist enemy.  

The UK government has even - disgracefully - stopped selling some arms to Israel just when the country needs such weapons most.  But in expecting Israel to behave differently from the rest of us our societies and governments reveal far more about our own state than the State of Israel.
 
Because the truth is that behind the demands for Israel to lie down in front of its enemies is a fatal unwillingness of our own to face the problem which is in our midst.

There are those who think that Israel is somehow the cause of the world’s problems, or that in defending themselves from Islamic extremists Israel is somehow causing Islamic extremism. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

The extremists of Hamas are the ideological bedfellows of the extremists of ISIS who are rampaging through Syria and Iraq, crucifying and beheading as they go.

The video of the apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley by an ISIS murderer with a British accent has shocked the world. ISIS or IS are the soul-mates of Boko Haram who kidnap and kill Christian villagers in the North of Nigeria and stole 300 schoolgirls earlier this year.  

They also share the exact same ideology – if not yet the same means – as those people who were found in Birmingham earlier this year teaching British pupils to hate wider British society and cut themselves off from non-Muslims.
 
But it is this last part of the equation which many people seem so incapable of dealing with. They see the millions of Muslims who have come to our continent and see how many of them are radical. But it is a problem they fear they cannot deal withISIS mi

They believe that if Israel just gave up fighting and disappeared that the rest of us would be able to live in peace.  They see the young Muslims who stormed into a supermarket in Birmingham last weekend, trashing the products and assaulting a British policeman and they think “this is caused by Israel.”  

They see young Parisian Muslims throw slabs of concrete at police and set fire to cars and they think “If only Israel weren’t responding to Hamas rocket-fire.”  And they see Imams in Germany and Italy preach that all Jewish people  must be killed and they pretend that it is not a problem for all of us.
 
How wrong they are.  The problem of anti-Semitism, and Islamic anti-Semitism in particular today, is undoubtedly a problem for Jewish people. But it is only a problem for them first. It is a problem for all of us next.

What is it that lies behind this terrible Hamas-driven rage against Israel?  What lies behind the desire for Israel to disappear? Today the world is finding out.  

Because behind the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah which have flown at anti-Israel demonstrations in recent weeks is another flag. The black flag of jihad – the black flag most recently being waved in Iraq and Syria by ISIS.

Last month the black flag was flown from a car in London’s Blackwall tunnel as East End Muslims blocked the traffic. At the entrance to a council estate in East London earlier this month there were anti-Israel banners and Palestinian flags. And then, on top of the lot, the black flag of jihad was flown. In Oxford Street last week Islamic extremists set up stall to try to recruit people to rally around the black flag of ISIS.
 
The black flag is not about Jewish people. Today in Iraq and Syria it is about Christians who ISIS is forcing to convert to Islam at gunpoint or face beheading. Many Christians are being killed by ISIS for refusing to renounce their faith. On some occasions Christians have tried to save their lives by “converting” at gunpoint and ISIS have killed them anyway.
 
And this is not only about Christians. It is also about other minority faiths in Islamist dominated countries. In Iraq it is also about the Yazidis, the Mandeans and other ancient beliefs which predate Islam.  
 
The ambition of the jihadists – from al-Qaeda to Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and more – is to subjugate the entire world.  

It is now the duty of all decent people – including decent Muslims – to turn on these barbarians and make it clear they will not win.  

Rather than offer up beleaguered Israel we should send another message.  That the extremists will not win in their desire to take over Israel anymore than they will win in their stated desire to raise the black flag of jihad over Rome, Washington, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace.  

Israel is not the cause of the world’s problems. It is simply on the front line of them.  

But increasingly so are we all. And if we abandon Israel today then one day – too late – we will realise that in fact what we abandoned was ourselves.

==========================================

A video has recently come to light, which if true, shows the Hamas activities rebuilding tunnels since the “ceasefire”. http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/4478.htm. The world must be made aware of Hamas intentions not to accept a demillitarised zone and to let Israel live in peace.

HAMAS LEADERS GARNER SYMPATHY OVER CHILDREN'S CORPSES

Egyptian-American Writer Magdi Khalil:

MEMRI August 19^th 2014

In a recent Al-Jazeera TV show, American-Egyptian writer Magdi Khalil criticized Hamas' claim to have the moral high ground, saying: "They garner sympathy over the corpses of children." "We are talking about a group like ISIS," Khalil said in the program, which aired on August 19, 2014. "If you want to die – go and die. Let Khaled Mash'al, Haniya, and Al-Zahhar die. Just don't let the children die."

Following are excerpts:

Magdi Khalil: "How many casualties were caused by Hamas missiles that landed in Gaza by mistake? The Hamas missiles that landed in Gaza by mistake caused many more casualties than they caused in Israel.

"For example, a missile landed in the Al-Shati refugee camp, killing ten children. Another missile landed on Al-Shifa Hospital, killing four children. They defused an unexploded Israeli missile without knowing the basics of how to do it, and as a result, six people were killed, including an American journalist.

"My colleague said that we have won the moral high ground... Is it moral to launch missiles from hospitals, from schools, from bedrooms, from mosques, and from the roof of a church, where thousands of Gazans had found refuge? The church's priest was interviewed on CBN and said: "From the roof of this church, Hamas members are launching missiles at Israel. We welcomed them in our church, but they began launching missiles at Israel from the roof." Is this the moral high ground that my colleague is talking about?

"Is it moral for Hamas leaders to hide in Al-Shifa Hospital, thus risking the lives of regular people? Is this the moral high ground? They are fleeing like rats, hiding behind patients in Gaza hospitals. Is it moral for Hamas leaders to hide behind these patients?

"They garner sympathy over the corpses of children. This is part of the strategy of the Islamists. They consider sympathy garnered over the corpses of children to be a victory.

"The whole world knows that Hamas does not care about the spirit of humanity. They do not care about the children, about their people, about the losses, about the destruction of their country, or about the number of casualties.

"We are talking about a group like ISIS. What kind of honor is it if it is at the expense of children's corpses? You don't know the meaning of life. All you know is the meaning of death. You constitute an enterprise of destruction in the region. You are wreaking destruction in Palestine. You don't know the meaning of life.

"Go and die, brother, but don't make others die instead. If you want to die – go and die. Let Khaled Mash'al die. Let Haniya and Al-Zahhar die. Just don't let the children die."

Palestinian activist Ibrahim Hamami: "We should clean our own home before we confront the occupation. These people must be eliminated even before the Zionists are eliminated, because they stab us in the back..."

Magdi Khalil: "Are you threatening to eliminate us, you terrorist?! Are you threatening me, you terrorist?!"

TV host Faisal Al-Qassem: "Dear viewers, let me just thank both of our guests..."

View the clip: http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/4441.htm

================================= 

We strongly recommend viewing the video below which clearly shows the dangers faced by Western Jewry.

Melanie Phillips: “Western Jewry - Paying the Price for Gaza”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKosCIScvO4

ISIS AND HAMAS: SPOT THE DIFFERENCES

Evelyn Gordon 27.08.2014

 http://tinyurl.com/lkphstu

It’s not every day that an organization feels compelled to insist it’s truly nothing like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Why Hamas leader Khaled Meshal felt this need is a mystery: He’s in no danger from the global anti-Israel crowd, which takes great care to avoid any information that might challenge its preconceived notions, whereas anyone who knows anything about Hamas knows the disclaimer is ridiculous. Still, since he raised the subject, it’s worth examining some of the common fallacies Meshal’s distinction relies on.

ISIS seeks a global caliphate, while Hamas just wants to end the Israeli “occupation.” Actually, Hamas also seeks a global caliphate, as its own interior minister, Fathi Hammad, reiterated on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV last November:

We shall liberate our Al-Aqsa Mosque, and our cities and villages, as a prelude to the establishment of the future Islamic Caliphate … we are at the threshold of a global Islamic civilization era. The fuel and spearhead of this era will be Gaza.”

Indeed, Hamas’s charter explicitly terms the movement a “universal” one and declares that Islam must ultimately regain “all lands conquered by Islam by force” in the past. It’s just that every global caliphate has to start somewhere, and Hamas started with Israel, whereas ISIS chose Syria and Iraq. This might prove the ISIS is shrewder; starting with a weaker enemy enabled it to progress much faster. But it doesn’t change the fact that the goal is the same.

ISIS kills “anyone who gets in their way: 

Sunnis, Shia Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Iraqis, Syrians,” while Hamas only kills Israelis. Actually, Hamas also kills anyone who gets in its way. That includes Palestinian civilians who dare to protest its decisions or belong to its main rival, Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party; its more memorable murder methods include throwing Fatah members off rooftops. It also includes Egyptians: According to Cairo, Hamas has cooperated with local terrorists on several attacks in Sinai; Egypt even sought to extradite three senior Hamas operatives for involvement in an August 2012 attack that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers.

Granted, ISIS has greater opportunities: It controls a huge territory seized from two collapsed states, Iraq and Syria, whereas Hamas is boxed in by two functioning states, Israel and Egypt. But within the limits of its opportunities, Hamas has been no less enthusiastic about killing “anyone who gets in their way.”

ISIS is exceptionally brutal; witness the snuff film it disseminated after executing journalist James Foley. I particularly like this claim, given that Hamas promptly followed suit with its own snuff films showing the executions of no fewer than 25 fellow Palestinians, including two women. A few weeks earlier, Hamas executed over 30 fellow Palestinians. Of course, Hamas claims all were collaborators with Israel, but it offered no evidence. 

Thus as the pro-Palestinian Amira Hass delicately put it in Haaretz, these executions primarily appeared to be a warning to the Gazan public “to be careful in anything it says and does” that might upset Hamas, because “The definition of ‘informing’ and ‘collaboration’ can become very murky in times of war.”

But Hamas brutality doesn’t stop at executions. How depraved do you have to be, for instance, to shell a border crossing while your own wounded civilians are passing through it, as Hamas did on Sunday, hitting four Arabs waiting on the Israeli side to drive them to the hospital?

 Meshal risibly claimed on Saturday that if Hamas had more accurate weapons, it would aim them exclusively at military targets. But Hamas has deployed the extremely accurate smart bombs known as suicide bombers for years, and it used them almost exclusively to kill civilians–from elderly people at a Passover seder to buses full of schoolchildren.

In short, there’s only one significant difference between Hamas and ISIS: Hamas has infinitely less power than ISIS to wreak global havoc, because Israel has managed to keep its capabilities in check. And for that service, needless to say, Israel has reaped nothing but global condemnation.

WHY HAMAS ARE WINNING PROPAGANDA WAR IN GAZA

Lynne Coates; 22^nd Aug.2014

http://tinyurl.com/ppqejtw

l

THE resumption of hostilities between Hamas and Israel will, no doubt, result in more appalling scenes of carnage in Gaza. No right-minded person can fail to be affected by the tragic images of dead and injured children, graphically displayed on TV and in the press. Yet, as a photo-journalist, I question the veracity of the media coverage of this conflict.

The spectacle of throngs of international media, jostling for the most advantageous position to film and photograph injured or dead children, is both distasteful and disrespectful.

How do they know where to be and when, in order to capture those images, and how do they get there? Gaza is a theatre of war. Unless they know in advance where and when a bomb is going to fall, how can they be at the target site immediately after or, in some cases, before the attack takes place?

The answer has now been well-documented. Hamas deliberately fire rockets from populated areas, mosques, schools and hospitals, in the knowledge that Israel will respond to destroy the rocket launchers. Therefore, Hamas can direct the media to the location from which they have fired rockets, knowing full well the carnage that will follow.

By using this strategy, they manipulate the world’s press. This is how Hamas conduct their war. It is the duty of journalists to witness and report factual information, and to be fair and accurate. How can they report fairly when they are led by events that are clearly orchestrated for their benefit?

Indian television channel NDTV filmed Hamas firing rockets into Israel from a populated residential area next to their hotel. They are to be commended for their courage and for getting that film aired on TV.

 After they had safely left Gaza, the reporter, Jain Sreenivasan, wrote an article in which he asked: “How long do we self-censor because of the fear of personal safety,in return for not telling a story that exposes how those launching rockets are putting so many more lives at risk, while the rocket-makers themselves are at a safe distance?”

The FPA (Foreign Press Association) reported that many foreign journalists in Gaza have been harassed, threatened or questioned.

They also revealed that Hamas have put in place a “vetting” procedure that would allow for the blacklisting of specific journalists.

French-Palestinian journalist Radjaa Abou Dagga wrote in an article for French newspaperLibération about how he was “detained and interrogated” by members of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigade in a room in Shifa hospital and was forced to leave Gaza immediately without his papers. Similarly, John Reed of the Financial Times was reportedly threatened after he tweeted about rockets being fired from the same hospital.

Gabriele Barbati, an Italian reporter, refuted the Hamas version of an incident which killed 10 children. According to Mr Barbati, a misfired Hamas rocket was responsible, and militants “rushed and cleared debris”. 

The Palestinian version of events, blaming Israel, was broadcast by all major media outlets. Mr Barbati’s version was suppressed. Journalists in Gaza are not allowed free access. They are herded around from bomb site to hospital, stage managed and directed.

Hamas ensures that reporters are exposed to maximum casualties by insisting interviews only take place in the courtyard of the Al-Shifa hospital. In some cases bomb sites are used to provide PR opportunities.

 Sudarsan Raghavan, of the Washington Post, described how he was taken to photograph a mosque that had been bombed and it was obvious that someone had “prepared” the scene by placing a prayer mat and burnt Koran pages, too perfectly, with obvious symbolism. It was easily spotted by a TV crew who filmed it.

Despite reports that Israel hit 1,678 rocket launching facilities, 191 weapons facilities, 977 command centres, and 32 tunnels, there was little footage of those facilities. Given the huge numbers of press in Gaza (an estimated 700) this exposes the prejudiced portrayal of the conflict. 

The tragedy is that the more complicit the media is with Hamas, the more that Hamas continues to sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians.

Hillary Clinton said in a recent interview that Gaza has been “effectively stage-managed” by Hamas, and that the PR battle is one that is historically tilted against Israel. Many of us are guilty of forming opinions based on sensational headlines, and no other country comes under such intense media attention as Israel.

The relentless publication of graphic imagery from Gaza is having dire consequences for Jewish communities throughout Europe, with the exponential growth in anti-Semitic incidents.

However, it would be naïve to imagine that supporting Hamas in Gaza will only harm the Jews. Siding with one terrorist group will serve to empower others. Journalists in war zones have a greater moral responsibility, both to act as witness and to report with integrity and honesty.

 In the 21st century it is the media that has the ammunition to fight terrorism – let us hope they are brave enough to use it wisely.

* Lynne Coates is a Yorkshire-based photo-journalist who has worked in the Middle East on Palestinian/ Israeli co-existence peace projects.

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Times of London columnist Melanie Phillips reports on growing anti-Semitism in Europe 

and particularly the UK, and explains.

We consider this is well worth watching.

Danny Seaman with Melanie Phillips - YouTube