Saturday, January 03, 2009

Taghreed El-Khodary is back (with a chaperone)

So she is back along with Kershner. She starts her piece with this: "Israeli warplanes pounded Hamas targets in Gaza." So right at the outset, she wants to tell the readers that Israel only bombs Hamas "targets." Now El-Khodary has two missions at the New York Times: 1) to follow the plight of the Israeli collaborators who are dear to the hearts of her editors; 2) to find evidence of hostility to Hamas. Here, she only reports that she detected "at least a temporary increase in popular sympathy for Hamas." But how does she know that it is temporary unless she sees into the future? Or was she afraid to break bad news to her editors and felt compelled to quality the sentence? She then quotes an Israeli "analysis": "Alex Fishman, the military analyst of the popular daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot, wrote Friday, “Since the name of the game is killing and destruction". If an Arab were to vomit such hateful and violent words, would he be labeled as an analyst or a terrorist? If an Arab journalist were to write such words, the US would be calling for his extradition to the ICC. But you can't accuse El-Khodary of ignorant the civilian casualties of the Israeli terrorist war. Here, she reports on the innocent victims and the identity of the attackers: "Palestinian militants continued to launch salvos of rockets at southern Israel on Friday, with several hitting the coastal city of Ashkelon, lightly injuring two Israeli women there." But my favorite sentences in the entire article, the ones that really qualify her to win the top award from the Jobotinsky Institute, are these: "Israeli air and naval forces pummeled more bases of Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza. The military said it hit the houses of several Hamas militants." First notices that Israeli air and naval forces are bombing Hamas "bases". So she makes it sound like a classic war between two armies. Yet, the following sentence explains to you what she means by Hamas bases: houses of people. So the houses are military bases by israeli terrorist (and Taghreed's) standards. Can you imagine the uproar if Palestinian groups were to refer to Israeli houses as military bases? American liberals would be at the UN in droves. And she covers up for the Israeli terrorist occupation everywhere in the land of Palestine: "In Israeli-controlled East Jerusalem, the police came out in force to prevent disturbances." She does not tell you that all Palestinian below the age of 50 were prevented from entering the Aqsa mosque and notice that Israeli military oppression is justified on the grounds that they want to "prevent disturbances." Can you imagine if a New York Times Middle East correspondent were to write such words about the police of any Arab country? Notice that she glosses over the clear repressive policies and measures of the Dahlan gangs of the PA in the West Bank. Here, El-Khodary delivers the bad news to her editors in New York: "Both Israel and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority have been working assiduously to subdue Hamas in the West Bank since the Islamic group took over Gaza in 2007. But the events in Gaza and the gruesome images broadcast repeatedly by the Arabic television networks are stirring strong emotions among West Bank Palestinians, who are directing most of their anger at Israel and the Palestinian Authority." Long live this shameful journalism.