Certainly, their ideology would justify such a move. As Hamas representative Fathi Hamad said last February, “Palestinains have created a human shield against the Zionist bombing machine.”
For the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life. [Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas) Feb. 29, 2008]
As if to illustrate both the international reach of this Islamic ideology of death and martyrdom and it’s repugnant quality (at least to a Western liberal), a Saudi cameraman filmed live the “making of a martyr” when the doctors pulled the plug on a girl in a Gaza hospital. Could she have lived, had Hamas allowed her to go to Egypt in one of the many unused ambulances waiting at their southern border? We will never know.
What we can know with some assurance, is that, when the civilians die, the Western MSM will play their role in blaming Israel and either exonerating or remaining silent about the Arabs.
This is an old story. The same year that Asad killed over 10,000 Syrian civilians in 1982, the Phalange (Lebanese Christians who were Israeli allies at the time) killed some 800 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps south of Beirut. The media scarcely covered Hama, and lavished attention of Sabra and Shatilla, largely in the framework of holding Israel responsible. Thus, Peter Beaumont could doubly mislead his readership at the Guardian by comparing the “massacre” in Gaza with Sabra and Shatilla – in the former case it was Israelis attacking Hamas with minimal civilian casualties (under 20%, possibly under 10%) – hence not a massacre of civilians; in the latter case, a civilian massacre not carried out by Israelis.
In the more recent case of the 2006 summer war, the key moment came when a building not far from Kafr Qana was hit in the middle of the night. Only nine hours later did the media arrive to a carefully orchestrated scene of rescue workers digging out dead babies. The ghoulish spectacle, amply enhanced with special effects aimed at tugging at the heart strings of viewers the world over, became a massive, grotesque exercise in misplaced moral indignation that easily slipped over into vicious anti-Semitism. While “rescue workers” triumphantly held aloft dead babies, cameramen, both Arab propagandists and Western ideologues, snapped their money-shots.
So even as Hizbullah coerced Lebanese civilians into playing the role of human shields, the media excoriated Israel for their lack of concern for human life.
In a rather courageous press conference in Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas for its mad intransigence, he gave the world a brief insight into the mentality that moves Hamas:
“We want to protect Gaza, our people there, we don’t want genocide for our people. There are some who say, even if Gaza is wiped out, so be it. We reject this, this logic annot be accepted, has nothing to do with the interests of the people. We want to protect every drop of blood of our people… ”
And he is not just speaking here of Hamas, he’s probably also referring to the mobs in the street calling for war with Israel and support for Hamas.
The pathological symbiosis between Arab victimization politics and Western MSM moral Schadenfreude has become, over the last decades, something of a routine, inured to correction. It is predictable, and Hamas’ strategy depends on it. Thus, Palestinian media openly engage in the propaganda war, right under the nose of the Western media, from Pallywood in the streets, to Pallywood in the hospitals. A West Bank Palestinian recently complained of the manipulation:
“A mother of one of the martyrs stood by the door of the intensive care unit while crying… relatives and those around her were telling her what she should say to the television cameras: ‘Say your son [before he died] prayed and went out.’ Another tells her: ‘Curse the Arab leaders’… The journalists [in the hospitals] are going overboard in their insensitivity and taking advantage of the [difficult] moments, with the explanation that they are showing this to the world. One cameraman told a mourning mother: ‘Hit your face, cry, do some action.’”
[Al-Ayyam, December 29, 2008]
Pierre Rehov caught a similar scene from 2002 of a doctor coaching a couple to lie about having their baby born while the father was driving because the Israelis stopped him at a checkpoint (used in Pallywood).
So far, Hamas has Israel exactly where they want them, exactly where Hizbullah had them — thinking they’ve won the media war even as, for days the world has been treated to a constant barrage of Palestinian victims in picture and narrative, with violent demonstrations in the streets of the Arab and Western world pressuring their unwilling governments to side with feared and hated Hamas, with Jews around the world endangered, and no end in sight because Hamas will fight to the last drop of their own people’s blood…
Time for a media spectacular.
And Israel will only be the most obvious loser.
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2008/12/31/get-me-a-massacre-up-next-the-kfar-qa...
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