Look - in 2009 UN, Betselem, Hamas, etc. claimed that there were 200-300 militants killed out of 1300 or so total. IDF, at the end of the operation, reported that it was 709 militants killed out of 1166 total.
Later, Hamas’s minister admitted that there were 700 militants killed.
So - excuse me if I consider Hamas, UN, and Betselem’s statistics as self-serving garbage. Because they have a history of being garbage.
I repeat.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/5136/fear_and_trembling_western_media_and_hamas
Every few years, Israel is seemingly overcome with an insatiable lust for blood that can apparently only be satisfied with otherwise inexplicable attacks on Gaza – or so innocent consumers of Western media are likely led to conclude from the coverage of the conflict.
With depressing regularity, each military confrontation between Israel and Hamas triggers the same old, tired cycle of misinformation among much of the international media. Instead of providing much-needed context, Israel’s defensive war against Islamist terrorists hiding among their own civilians is turned into a simplistic morality play where, like in a sports match, the side with the higher score, i.e. casualty figures, wins.
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It wouldn’t be the first time that Western journalists play by Palestinian rules. In 2000, Ricardo Cristiano, from the Italian state television RAI, published a letter of apology in Arabic over the filming of the lynching of two Israelis in Ramallah. Mr. Cristiano promised to “respect” the “rules” laid down by the Palestinian Authority, and pledged to prevent similar images being shown in the future.
Whatever the reason is for today’s miscoverage – fear, ignorance or bias – we are not getting the true picture from Gaza.
A: None of us have a clue, because the mainstream US media doesn’t report the fundamentals of the Hamas perspective. Because terrorism. And we don’t read Al Jazerra or Juan Cole.
I think that pretty much falsifies the OP. Not only does the US media have a pro-Israeli bias, but it can’t even report the basic facts or war aims of both sides.
I’ll see what I can dig up later.
I certainly agree with you about the pro-Israel bias of American media. It’s inconceivable to me how it’s possible to argue otherwise. At the same time it’s worth noting that CNN – which BTW I consider a pretty poor news organization – has at least made an effort to report the war aims of both Israel and Hamas. They do prominently list as the #1 Hamas objective “the destruction of Israel”, but that’s probably pretty close to the truth.
Like I said, you might argue that they’re not accurately reporting things, but that’s not the argument you made. You said they had no means of collecting information other than what Hamas or Israel tells them --* that’s* nonsense.
They don’t. Betselem says they have two people “on the ground” collecting data. Two. And, of course, they are Gaza Palestinians. They report whatever Hamas wants them to report, if they know what’s good for them. Same with the UN. UN already admitted, several times, that they have numerous staffers that are Hamas members. That’s those they know about. How many they don’t? There is no such thing as independent sources in Gaza. They all, ultimately, come from Hamas.
Here’s a report on rockets being fired from the Shifa Hospital from a “brave” Finnish reporter. This isn’t likely to be shown on Al Jazeera any time soon, or ever.
They ended the blockage on land in 2010 and replaced it with a strong border control between Egypt-Gaza. Basically any civilian goods/equipment were allowed in, as well as freer movement of peoples. Many Gazans who had been stranded in Egypt at this time were allowed to return to Gaza at this time.
So the “siege” was actually loosened. But it’s to Hamas’s benefit to use the siege in its propaganda, so it basically ignored the fact that it was actually eased. One thing that helped Hamas was a UN report that said in spite of the eased blockade, people’s lives didn’t improve. That’s good propaganda fodder for Hamas because they can use it to make it seem like the full siege is still going on, but in fact it just says that even letting materials flow into Gaza legally didn’t much improve the place.
Plus Israel has maintained a tight naval blockade during all of this, which Hamas can use as propaganda. Additionally Israel has randomly stopped some people and some materials from crossing over, sometimes for valid security reasons but sometimes for unknown reasons, which Hamas can use as propaganda.
While the situation wasn’t/isn’t great, there hasn’t been a true blockade since 2010 (I’m guessing there is again now, I don’t know), and the Israelis and Egyptians (who had dutifully enforced it on their side as well) have genuinely eased the blockade since 2010.
WTF are you talking about? Who cares how many people that group has or doesn’t have in Gaza. The question is how many people the UN gas in Gaza.
The UN Commissioner General for Relief and Works Agency was in Gaza city a couple of days ago. His name is Pierre Krahenbuhl, which doesn’t sound Palestinian to me. He reported that well over 100 UN facilities have been damaged in Gaza and 7 UN employees have been killed since the fighting started.
You are simply making shit up and denying anything that doesn’t fit with your preconceived notions.
Does he, personally, independently go and collect the data? Or does he rely on UN staffers who are Gazan Palestinians, some of them Hamas members, and who report what Hamas tells them to report, because they have to live there and know what’s good for them?
According to the UN, they have 11 thousand staff in more than 200 facilities, on the ground in the Gaza Strip. You’re just talking out of your ass.
And we assume the majority of them aren’t locals who work for the UN? Like the many Americans who work for the UN HQ in NYC?
Typically the ground-level workers will be local, and management will be a mix.
But the point is that any conspiracy would involve 11 thousand staff members working in harmony from the bottom right to the top.
This isn’t the UNs first rodeo. This isn’t even their first time on this particular horse. They have expertise on the complications in estimating damage and the politics behind it.
I can’t argue about the bases or fears of UN staff people. But Terr was simply making shit up by claiming the UN had no resources to assess anything in Gaza beyond whatever stories Hamas or the Israelis tell them. That is just complete bullshit.
Seriously? You think 11 thousand UN personnel are sitting there collecting statistics on Palestinian casualties?
Judging by their missing the militants fatalities in 2009 by about 50% (and judging by how close their erroneous numbers were to what Hamas disseminated at the time) - no, it is the truth.
Now this is hilarious:
A Finnish journalist reported seeing Hamas terrorists launch a rocket at Israel from a Gaza hospital, but later attacked news outlets for using her report as a pro-Israel “propaganda weapon.”
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“Don’t use me as your propaganda weapon,” she wrote. The main purpose of her report, she explained, was to cover “Palestinian civilians who were victims of war.”
Girl, if you don’t want to be used as a “propaganda weapon”, stop telling the truth. Just lie and toe the Hamas line like the other journalists.
The only thing that’s hilarious here is what your OP was supposed to be about (emphasis mine):
Let me say this as clearly as I know how: The journalists covering Gaza are brave. I’m not saying they should be braver — much less reckless. I do think they should be honest with their readers and viewers about the conditions under which they are operating; namely, conditions of coercion, manipulation, restriction and censorship.
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A few have acknowledged their predicament, mostly on social media. For example, Italian journalist Gabriele Barbati on July 29 tweeted: “Out of #Gaza far from #Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children [today] in Shati.” In other words, having left Gaza, he can now say what he would not dare report while in the territory: It was a Hamas rocket, not an Israeli rocket, that killed 10 people, eight of them children, at the al Shati refugee camp along the northern Gaza seacoast.
Israeli filmmaker Michael Grynszpan wrote on Facebook that he had met with a Spanish journalist who had just left Gaza and asked him why TV viewers are not seeing Hamas fighters in action. Mr. Grynszpan said he was told: “It’s very simple. We did see Hamas people there, launching rockets. They were close to our hotel, but if ever we dared pointing our camera on them, they would simply shoot at us and kill us.”
An op-ed in The Australian noted that after TV reporter Peter Stefanovic tweeted that he had seen rockets fired into Israel from near his hotel, a pro-Hamas tweeter warned: “in WWII, spies got shot.” French-Palestinian journalist Radjaa Abu Dagga was “detained and interrogated by members of Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigade at a room in Shifa hospital next to the emergency room.” He published an account of his treatment in the French newspaper Liberation — but that article has since been “unpublished at Dagga’s request.” Why do you suppose?
John Reed of The Financial Times was threatened after he tweeted about rockets being fired from near that same hospital. The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Casey posted a photo of a Hamas spokesman being interviewed from a room in the hospital along with this tweet: “You have to wonder (with) the shelling how patients at Shifa hospital feel as Hamas uses it as a safe place to see media.” After “a flood of online threats,” the tweet was deleted. But Twitter accounts “continued to attack Casey, including him on lists of ‘journos in Gaza (who) lie/fabricate info for Israel’ and ‘must be sued for crimes.’”
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Finally, a few words on more subtle forms of journalistic bias: Early in the current round of fighting, reporters for The New York Times asked an Israeli military spokesman “about the repercussions of carrying out” operations against Hamas “during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.”
If it occurred to these reporters to ask Hamas spokesmen about the “repercussions” of firing missiles at Jerusalem during Ramadan, I missed it.