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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Al-Aretz sinks even lower

Well, that didn't take long.

Ha'aretz' Gideon Levy has written another of his predictable, sickening articles where Israel's evil is so taken for granted that he makes Al Jazeera sound like Arutz-7:
Our finest young men...set out to bomb the graduation ceremony for young police officers who had found that rare Gaza commodity, a job, massacring them by the dozen. They bombed a police station, hitting a doctor nearby...They bombed a university that we in Israel call the Palestinian Rafael, the equivalent of Israel's weapons developer, and destroyed student dormitories.
The point is that, according to Levy, there are no legitimate military targets in Gaza; every one is fraught with the possibility of hurting someone innocent nearby. Israel must tell its Sderot residents to go to hell, and that will solve the problem. By not doing that, this is all Israel's fault.
According to reports, about half of the people killed were innocent civilians.
Even the UN - hardly unbiased itself - puts the number at half that amount. So what is Levy's source for this bogus number? Here's my guess:
Hamas says some 200 uniformed members of Hamas security forces have been killed.
So Levy, uncritically believing Hamas' own statistics, goes beyond what Hamas is saying in trying to demonize his country. He doesn't even consider that perhaps Israel managed to kill some members of Islamic Jihad, the PRC or the DFLP, and according to Levy any non-uniformed member of Hamas don't count either - presumably because Hamas is so careful about adhering to international law concerning havng soldiers wearing uniforms.

A hint as to where Levy's, and Ha'aretz', mindset is at comes from an article today about that newspaper from Der Spiegel.
The irreverence of the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz is visible from the first moment a visitor enters the paper's editorial headquarters.<
There in the foyer hangs an open pig's carcass, looking just as it would in a slaughterhouse. This one, however, is reproduced in pieces of candy -- red ones for the muscles, and yellow for the innards. The building's doorman is on hand to help interpret this installation. The sculpture, he says, is like the land of Israel itself: "Beautiful on the outside, rotten on the inside."
Putting aside the fact that the symbolism is exactly the opposite of the stated interpretation (the carcass is ugly on the outside and sweet on the inside), this is the best encapsulation of Ha'aretz' guiding editorial philosophy: Israel is an inherently rotten country, not dissimilar to Ahmadinejad's characterization of it as a "rotting corpse." The elites at Ha'aretz know best, and the 95% of the nation that is to its right are ignorant rubes - too religious or too nationalistic or too Jewish to be taken seriously.

They hate their own country, and they share that hatred with their readers every day.

(h/t EBoZ and Mohammed the Teddy Bear)