This is a short follow up to yesterday’s dispatch. For more extensive writings on the squandering of donations to the Palestinian Authority, and about the mainstream media’s highly selective use of photos and photo captions, please see previous dispatches and articles on this website.
CONTENTS
1. The BBC: Don’t mention all those suicide bombs if Israelis are the victims
2. Did you see these photos in the mainstream media?
3. The poor of Africa
4. Ignored by the media, ignored by western governments
[Note by Tom Gross]
Yesterday’s dispatch was written and posted only a very short time after the bomb attacks in Dimona, southern Israel. Thankfully it turns out the death toll was reduced to one Israeli (and the two bombers). However, the number of injuries is much higher than I reported yesterday. The woman murdered while going out shopping was 74-year-old Razdolskya Lyobov, a Dimona resident born in the former Soviet Union. Her husband remains in Beersheva hospital in critical condition.
THE BBC: DON’T MENTION ALL THOSE SUICIDE BOMBS IF ISRAELIS ARE THE VICTIMS
Only the BBC could run a headline yesterday stating:
Rare suicide bombing hits Israel
“Rare”? By any normal standards the following list of well over 100 suicide and other bomb attacks in the last decade would seem to suggest otherwise.
(In fact, together with Iraq, Israel has suffered more acts of terrorism on its civilian population than any other country in modern history.)
And of course, it comes as no surprise that, in both in its TV and radio reports, the BBC fails to mention that Israel’s remarkably efficient intelligence services regularly apprehend Palestinians bombers – from both “moderate” Fatah and “Islamist” Hamas – or that Israel’s “ghastly” security barrier (as one BBC “expert” referred to it) and its “evil” (i.e. life-saving) checkpoints have made it much more difficult for bombers to enter Israel.
And as has become common practice after Israelis are murdered, Palestinians in “impoverished” Gaza handed out candy, sweets and flowers yesterday morning in response to the attack. (Please see this photo from Reuters Gaza Bureau.)
DID YOU SEE THESE PHOTOS IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA?
Following up on my item above (which was posted online yesterday), these photos and captions (below), taken by Reuters, were reproduced by Yahoo, one of the few large media outlets in the world to report the Middle East fairly. I wonder if the newspapers you buy carried these photos?
(The New York Times didn’t; they ran a picture of the weeping mother of one of the Palestinian murderers.)
Please click on the links below, in each of these photos captions:
(1) Mon Feb 4, 5:58 AM ET
A Palestinian boy distributes sweets and flowers to people in the southern Gaza Strip after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in southern Israel February 4, 2008. A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up and police shot dead his accomplice in an attack in a shopping center in southern Israel on Monday that killed at least one Israeli, emergency services said. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA)
(2) Mon Feb 4, 5:53 AM ET
A Palestinian boy distributes sweets to people in the southern Gaza Strip after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in southern Israel February 4, 2008. A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up and police shot dead his accomplice in an attack in a shopping center in southern Israel on Monday that killed at least one Israeli, emergency services said. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA)
[The two captions above are very similar, but the photos are different, so please click on each.]
(3) Mon Feb 4, 12:21 PM ET
An Israeli rescue worker surveys the scene of a suicide bombing in the southern town of Dimona February 4, 2008. A Palestinian suicide bomber from the Gaza Strip killed a woman in southern Israel on Monday, the first such attack in the country in a year, but Israeli officials said peace talks would not be derailed. REUTERS/Ammar Awad (ISRAEL)
(4) Mon Feb 4, 11:43 AM ET
A Zaka paramedic service volunteer cleans the bloodstains at the scene of a bombing in the town of Dimona, southern Israel, Monday, Feb. 4, 2008. A Palestinian suicide bomber attacked a shopping center in Dimona on Monday, killing one woman and wounding nine other people. Militants claimed the attacker infiltrated Israel from Egypt, fueling Israel’s concerns that it was left more vulnerable to assault after Gaza militants blew up the border with Egypt. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
THE POOR OF AFRICA
About five minutes after I posted yesterday’s dispatch, I received a press release emailed from the “U.S. Department Of State, Office of the Spokesman.”
It was headed: “Additional United States Contribution to Refugees and Conflict Victims in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Africa.”
It began: “The President has authorized the use of $32 million from the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance (ERMA) Fund ... to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the West Bank and Gaza and to conflicts in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR), and Sudan and Chad, and to support the return and reintegration of Mauritanian refugees to Mauritania.”
And vast bulk of it went to? You guessed it. The Palestinians, who are already getting billions of dollars from European and other countries, and are not actually suffering a widescale humanitarian crisis, contrary to false reports in some western media. (Yes there are poor people in the West Bank and Gaza. But there are poor people in America, Europe, and Israel too. It is easy for partisan journalists to manipulate images and copy to vastly exaggerate the suffering of Palestinians.)
IGNORED BY THE MEDIA, IGNORED BY WESTERN GOVERNMENTS
It seems that if you just play-act enough for the cameras (see, for example, here) while at the same time intimidating western countries through the threat of terrorism, you can persuade them to hand over large amounts of money.
Meanwhile, according to the U.S. State Department email, considerably smaller amounts are now being allocated by the U.S. to “refugees and conflict victims in Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia, Uganda, Rwanda, Senegal, Mali, Darfur, Cameroon and Chad”.
Americans reading this might want to ask the State Department why their tax-money is being distributed in these proportions.
-- Tom Gross