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Reserved rage Posted on Sunday 30 July 2006
The international press has had a field day.

Unleashed following the Saturday night tragedy of a misguided missile attack on the Lebanese village of Kana – an attack aimed at terrorists rocketing Israel, but which went horribly wrong, demolishing a house on top of dozens of Lebanese refugees – the fury of the world’s media has known no bounds. Flowing from every pore, their anti-Semitic venom was emptied out over Israel throughout the day Sunday.

Anti-Semitic? Yes, anti-Semitic. I know its flavor because I have lived in Israel for nearly 20 years, and have witnessed these news networks’ coverage of innumerable terrorist atrocities inflicted on this country’s Jews. I know that the spitting rage that sprayed Sunday from the mouths of reporters like CNN’s Rosemary Church and Brent Sadler, Sky News’ Emma Hurd and others, is a special kind of anger; a peculiar form of fury.

It is a fury that is reserved exclusively for use against Israel; a fury the like of which no Arab leader or Arab terrorist chief has ever felt the force of, no matter how heinous the outrages and massacres they have committed or supported.

The following is a simple and repulsive fact: If just one of the deadly deluge of rockets that is pouring down on Israel were to score a direct hit on a bomb shelter or community center, killing dozens of Jews, there would be nothing like today’s level of fury directed against Hassan Nasrallah, whose men are firing the rockets; Syria’s Bashar el-Assad, who ships the rockets to Lebanon, or Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who sponsors the Hizb’allah and openly and regularly incites for the total destruction of Israel.

Hizb’allah’s killers, who have tried for the last 20 days, one hundred times every day, with deliberate purpose and intent, to wreak on Israeli men, women and children what Israel is beating itself up over having accidentally inflicted on the refugees in Kana, have never felt a fraction of the ferocity that the bruised and shaken Jewish state is weathering today.

A rabid rage, it is held back to let fly against Israel on occasions like the 1994 massacre of Muslims in Hebron, or the accidental shelling of a United Nations outpost, also in Kana, in 1996, or the 2002 Jenin “genocide,” or the alleged (but denied) June 9, 2006 Israeli artillery strike on a family picnicking on a Gaza beach.

In between these aberrations it pulses along, just below the surface, fed by the biases and bigotry of so many journalists who simply cannot stomach Israel’s existence.

It is glaring in its absence when Arabs kill Jews: When they blow up busloads of Jews, pizzerias full of Jews, or discotheques full of Jews. There is no comparable outrage when Arabs bludgeon Jewish schoolboys to death, or dismember Jewish soldiers, or explode themselves in the midst of mostly elderly Jews celebrating their Passover. There was no whiff of it when a rocket hit a Haifa train shed on July 17 and killed eight workers – eight civilians; eight innocent people; eight Jews.

Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniya (Hamas leader) would have been drawn and quartered by journalists if, as they like to portray themselves, these journalists were concerned about justice, truth, and the saving of innocent lives.

Instead, they wear the badge of the hypocrite.

Where is the outrage at Fouad Siniora? Instead of being excoriated and tongue-lashed for his failure to disarm Hizb’allah and thereby prevent this terrible tragedy from coming on his people, Lebanon’s prime minister has been wined and dined by a gushingly compassionate media; while America’s Condoleezza Rice and Britain’s Tony Blair have gathered caringly around.

And where, for that matter, is the moral fiber of the American leadership? US President George W. Bush should be out there, strongly and even vociferously supporting Israel’s contention that the Jewish state would never deliberately target civilians in a war. He tries, sometimes too hard, to play the fair and balanced world leader.

This is a conflict that does not require balance and equity as much as it requires truth.

And people of honesty and integrity know what the truth is today. With a few exceptions, the international press corps covering the conflict here cannot be counted among them.

http://www.stangoodenough.com/2006/07/30/reserved-rage/