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Perusing this morning’s story in the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s devastating weekend airstrikes against the Arab terrorists who hold the Gaza Strip by the throat, I wondered how I would react to the conflict if I were a good Christian farmer from Wichita.
Being conscientious, I have been tracking the bitter winter weather and its effect on my livestock far more closely than I have been following the constant sparring in the remote, confusing Middle East. Nobody here in Kansas seems to know who is good and who is bad anyway.
Since it is very American to choose sides, even when you only are vaguely acquainted with the players, I, a fair-minded farmer, would be dead stumped.
Ashraf Khalil, the Egyptian Arab stationed in Jerusalem for the Times, clumsily crafted the lead story in the newspaper as if Boy Scouts from the East Side were attacking Boy Scouts from the West Side for no known reason except the East Side Scouts are Jews.
It is amazing but true that Mr. Khalil failed the most rudimentary test for a journalist in covering this conflict:
Why did one side attack the other?
Clearly sympathetic to the Gazans throughout his loose-jointed 26-paragraph report, Mr. Khalil blatantly ignores the triggering device — that for years Arab terrorists who have kept Gazans effectively imprisoned for decades, have been raining rockets on Israeli border towns.
Imagine reporting on Dec. 8. 1941, that America was shooting at Japanese fighter planes without mentioning what happened the day before to ignite the war.
Imagine reporting that a Culver City resident shot and killed a certain person in the middle of the night without ever mentioning that the dead man was a burglar.
A Reporter’s Motives
We can only speculate whether he purposely committed this gaffe, out of partisanship for his fellow Arabs, or out of amateurish carelessness.
It is a double-barreled reprehensible breach of responsibility — for both Mr. Khalil and for the copy desk editor at the Times.
His failure is screamingly egregious.
Even “human rights” advocates, who insist that Gaza’s population is a blameless victim of mean-spirited Israel and that Hamas may not be a moral giant but is the duly elected government of the Strip, admit that the Hamas terrorists have been smuggling arms into Gaza for years.
Even the A.P. Admits the Truth
The true deadly purpose of the tunnels is so obvious, so out in the open, so widely accepted that the Associated Press — never mistaken for being sympathetic to Israel — described the buried passages in the first sentence of its main war story for today as “smuggling tunnels.”
And they ain’t smuggling kosher bagels.
Most of the civilized world realizes that the dead-eye hoodlums who founded Hamas about 20 years ago and have terrorized Israel (and the U.S.) ever since, explicitly formed a terrorist organization
Mr. Khalil, the lion tamer, however merely identifies the terrorists as “the Hamas movement.”
He wouldn’t even describe Christian Scientists that benignly.
It is like referring to the Mafia as “a group of elderly gentlemen from upstate known for their penchant for finely tailored gray suits.”
Fairness Died a Thousand Deaths
According to Mr. Khalil, muscular Jews, behaving like the neighborhood bully, are killing guileless Arabs by the hundreds.
By his telling, Israel, without provocation, attacked the good and decent people in the Gaza Strip where 1.25 million people are crammed into a sardine can that comfortably can accommodate perhaps 20 percent of that population.
If I really were a farmer in Wichita, supporting the poor Gazans would become my easy choice for a rooting interest. Surely that was one of Mr. Khalil’s objectives.
