[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Before leaving for my synagogue on Saturday morning, I put my head down on the dining room table.
Almost uncontrollably, I began to weep as the day’s newspaper limply tumbled from my shaking hand to the floor.
In the spirit of appreciating a strongly sympathetic 37-paragraph report in the Los Angeles Times about the hourly suffering endured by the professional pathetics in the Gaza Strip, how could I do less than dampen my wife’s favorite tablecloth with the saltiest tears I could summon?
If I had been fortunate enough to find a reasonably dry hanky nearby, I could have used two more.
Be still my aching, pained heart.
Tenderly, in the soothing tones of a first-time mom nurturing her newborn, the reporter Eddie Sanders, fresh from four years of reporting on serial starvation endemic to the continent of Africa, visited the wretches in the wretched Gaza Strip last week.
Darned, if he did not find the same darned conditions. It was an exquisite piece of Mr. Sanders’ good fortune because his background is so rich in chronicling suffering. The lone distinction between Africa and Gaza is that only half of the suffering in Africa is blamed on the pesky, ubiquitous, oppressive Jews of Israel.
Facts Become Supporting Players
If Mr. Sanders wants to stay employed by the Times, and he does, he is going to pitch the fictionalized company line when explaining the “tragedy” of Gaza, without ever acknowledging that the world-famous suffering is completely calculated and self-inflicted.
Sobbing over Gaza is like a play that unfolds on stage every evening. Ain’t no drama here, boys. We know the final score every time.
Mr. Sanders, alas, will not win the Imaginative Reporter of the Year Award.
If we still used carbon copies, as some of us remember from the dark technological ages, Mr. Sanders could have saved himself time.
Why he could have niftily recycled an account fromthe Times shortly after Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel turned the Arabs into brooms and shovels and dustpans.
Sixty-seven, you see, was another of those red-crayon years in Israeli history when the peace-shlepping, career unemployed Arabs who shake their fists at Israel tried again to obliterate the Jewish state.
For 61 years, Mr. Sanders’ fellow Palestinian pity poopers — they were just plain dusty Arabs back in the ‘40s, ‘50s and much of the ‘60s — sing the same sympathy song, “Lordy, You Can’t Believe How Long We Have Been Victims and Hopefully Will Continue To Be,” whenever they fear peace is about to break out.
By shucking just a couple of facts, a guy named Sanders can compose 37 paragraphs that would make a buddha bawl, especially when he finds out Jews are at the bottom of the blame barrel.
Momentarily, we shall return to two of the most salient absent facts.
When the peace-loving Arabs tried and failed to destroy Israel in 1967, the fighting carried into Gaza, and Israel prevailed, meaning the Israelis gained control of Gaza. This was an unpleasant development analogous to inviting your mother-in-law to share, but not to hog, your hearth.
A Change in the Land
Soon, regular Jews settled in Gaza.
Arabs, as a culture, despise Jews. They carped for 38 years that ordinary Jews were occupying land that belonged exclusively to Arabs. They complained that the resident Jews were just trying to show up lack of Arab creativity by beautifully developing land the Arabs claimed for centuries was too barren to blossom.
“Right on,” the rest of the world supportively told the Gazans.
Four years ago, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon ordered all Jews to abandon their Gaza homes in the name of winning peace with the Arabs.
Jews left many buildings in place to give the needy Arabs a headstart on developing a mature infrastructure.
The next scene, however, was of rampaging Arabs setting fire to all former Jewishly “occupied” lands.
Jews are not easily discouraged.
As a goodwill gesture in the autumn of ’05, wealthy Jews around the world sent millions of dollars to the Arabs to bolster an historically flagging economy. Who knows what the Arabs blew the stash on?
We just know it was not on food, not on construction and not in any way on their families. That would have ruined the whole pity party.
Arab front men in Gaza swore to the world in ’05 that once the Jews had been swept out of Gaza, peace would make its first appearance and, like the Three Arab Bears, they would live happily ever after.
Arabs Yearn for Peace
Perhaps the most egregious myth of modern times is that Arabs want peace, especially the Arabs of Gaza, who have been held in locked-up captivity by their leaders since 1948.
A few months after the last Jew cleared out, these gentle, peace-loving souls of Gaza elected perhaps the world’s filthiest terrorist group, Hamas, to hold the get-out-of-jail keys for them.
No Mensa grads in Gaza.
By now it was getting hard for gentiles to keep a straight face about Gaza, but many of them have, including the aforementioned Mr. Sanders.
Here is one of the salient facts Mr. Sanders purposely skipped in his ain’t-this-pitiful account:
In the background of these events, in fact predating them back to the turn of the century, Arab terrorists, usually in the person of the Hamas terrorist group, were firing rockets into Israel on a virtual daily basis. They rained down by the thousands, driving Israeli schoolchildren and their families nuts.
For Arabs, the downside was the rockets did not kill a lot of Jews, although the unimaginable tension it caused was delicious to mull.
The scripted upside was that the rocket attacks gave the terrorists a chance to tell sympathetic journalists across the world. Oh, how they sang. They said those darned Jews were oppressing these pitiable, impoverished, peace-loving people of Gaza by blocking tunnels and other sneaky routes to import weapons more sophisticated than primitive rockets.
Right on, said the world, and the terrorists took heart. Again.
To compensate for the lack of Jews the rockets were killing, assorted terrorist enterprises regularly dispatched suicide teams into Israeli population centers, the better and faster to blow up dozens of Jews in one punch.
Right on, said the world. What are a few Jewish deaths compared to Israel’s historic oppression of sweet-faced Gazans?
And so Mr. Sharon’s government began building a barrier between Arab territories and Jewish lands to thwart terrorists from leaking in. The world, which loves the Palestinians, protested bitterly to Israel and to its BFF, the United States, that those darned unlucky Arabs were being deprived of their God-given freedoms. Security stops all along the wall made it nearly impossible for sneaky Arab terrorists to tippy-toe into Israel without being checked first for explosives.
It has been little noted that the incidence of Arab suicide terrorists slipping into Israel and throwing bombs has all but vanished since the wall/fence appeared.
One more salient fact that Mr. Sanders deviously distorted.
The lead of his story, as with 100,000 accounts since last December, was that Israel’s 22-day offensive against Gaza last winter, by golly, just savaged the shining present and the golden future for the 1.5 million faultless virgin adults and children who evidently were residing in a workers’ paradise before December.
Never mind that Mr. Sanders amazingly reports that these self-pitying Gazans are lazily lying around, hoping that a miracle will slap them in the face.
Mr. Sanders shrewdly chose to ignore what ignited the war, a step-up in daily rockets peppering the Land of Israel, forcing Israel to swing back against the massive caches of ammunition Hamas and friends had been sneaking into Gaza from its many allies across the world.
Mr. Sanders also chose not to report this critical fact: Being gentlemen above all, the freedom fighters of Hamas based all of their firing during the war in mosques, schools, sympathy-generating businesses and the most heavily populated residential areas.
Before You Go
Another throwaway fact:
In advance, Israel warned Gazans to clear out before their troops came roaring in. Ever hear of an army doing that? Saved many lives.
Fourteen hundred mostly Hamas-related terrorists were killed along with 13 Israelis during the three weeks.
Although it barely has been reported, Israel’s war objective was achieved: The rocket fire has stopped.
Obliviously, meanwhile, Mr. Sanders smilingly swims in a pity pool of deliberate distortions and crucial omissions to make his story come out as a sympathy piece.
