Israel Air Force Precision Strike on Qassam Rocket Launcher 30 Dec. 2008 From IDFNADesk
The images on this and other clips from IDF flight videos showed targets being hit and moments later massive explosions when the initial strike ignited munitions hidden in or adjacent to those buildings. Effectively the Hamas "warriors" were hiding their artillery behind the skirts of women and children, behind the wounded in medical facilities, behind the religious peoples there.
But I also noticed a link among the Google references that showed that CBS -- that major trusted TV broadcaster in the US -- had reported on the YouTube effort by the Israeli's. This was -- I thought -- amazingly good news because it would mean that the constant stories of atrocities would now focus on the use of non-combatants as human shields. So I went to see what CBS had discovered:
Israeli Military Pounds Gaza, On YouTube Posted by Khaled Wassef, an analyst and producer with the CBS News Internet terrorism monitoring team.
The article was unbelievably misrepresenting the reality of what the videos had shown. The initial paragraphs were straight factual:
(CBSNEWS) Video clips of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) strikes on Gaza have been posted on a special channel set up by the Israeli military on the famous video-sharing Web site, YouTube.
The channel youtube.com/user/idfnadesk was launched on Dec. 29, 2008, and has already attracted 4,122 subscribers. Twelve videos are on-show so far.
YouTube requires age verification if you want to see some of the clips that show missile strikes on human targets.
Some of the videos have already been censored, and then restored by YouTube.
"We were saddened on Dec. 30, 2008 when YouTube took down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF's (Israeli Defense Forces) operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip. Fortunately, due to blogger and viewer support, YouTube has returned the footage they removed," a message posted on the channel's page explained.
But the conclusion of the CBS report -- for the non-benefit of those who would probably never go surfing over to YouTube for their own look, possibly since the factual portion had made the point that some clips supposedly showed carnage (which was not in any of the footage that I had seen) -- completely misled readers as to the important content. Hiding the reality of the Hamas abuse of non-combatants, CBS stated that the footage showed that the IAF was not as accurate as they'd like the public to believe! Specifically:
(CBSNEWS) The IDF move to set up a channel on YouTube comes amid reports of heavy civilian casualties suggesting that the Israeli air strikes on Gaza may not be as 'surgical' as claimed by the IAF.
What, a lie? Was CBS simply hiring unscrupulous writers with their own personal bias on display and strangely no editor curious enough to check the article? Was there a larger group -- including editors and fact-checkers -- who were covering the conflict in the middle east at the moment and were consciously doctoring data? Maybe some large stockholders had bought major segments of CBS ownership issues and undeniably had influenced the hiring practices or just editorial judgment?
Ordinarily, I wouldn't even have been interested in foreign affairs, much less digging further, but the idea that the once revered venue that produced Walter Kronkite had such a twisted propaganda arm in place was puzzling. I personally would not qualify for any favoritism by Israeli government acceptance as an immigrant. To the Jewish world, I've been labeled a 'shicksa' and my son was called a 'sheigitz' (spelling unknown) by my former mother-in-law. Not that I was ever interested in going to Israel. But my instinctive alarm over such a misrepresentation of reality by a major source of trusted information was ignited. So I looked around for other CBS coverage.
It didn't take long to find that the article hiding the Hamas cowardice and abusiveness of their own people was part of a much larger CBS fantasy production. Video after video was up at the CBS online site whose headlines fit the same picture of Israeli troublemaking and Hamas/Palestinian victimization, with peace as lost and hopeless. Check these examples:
Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution? 60 Minutes: Growing Number Of Israelis, Palestinians Say Two-State Solution Is No Longer Possible
Has peace in the Middle East become nothing more than a pipe dream? As Bob Simon reports, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians feel that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
Is Peace Out Of Reach? (13:09)
* Hamas political leader Moussa Abu Marzuk explained to Steve Kroft, in 2002, that the terrorist organization was developing missiles to escalate the conflict with Israel beyond suicide bombings.
Hamas (3:35)
* Bob Simon reported from Israel and the West Bank in 2003, where the construction of a fence to block Palestinian suicide bombers had received international opposition.
The Fence (4:45)
So we did, check them, and this is what we found in the one titled "Time Running Out for a Two-State Solution". For your convenient study, the text from CBS is presented with highlighted commentary to raise flags as necessary for decent FACT-CHECKING, which we do for our own operation here in our in-house research, my son included:
(CBS) Getting a peace deal in the Middle East is such a priority to President Obama that his first foreign calls on his first day in office were to Arab and Israeli leaders. And on day two, the president made former Senator George Mitchell his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mr. Obama wants to shore up the ceasefire in Gaza, but a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank where Palestinians had hoped to create their state. The problem is, even before Israel invaded Gaza, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians had concluded that peace between them was no longer possible, that history had passed it by. For peace to have a chance, Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank, which would then become the Palestinian state.
It's known as the "two-state" solution. But, while negotiations have been going on for 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved in to occupy the West Bank. Palestinians say they can't have a state with Israeli settlers all over it, which the settlers say is precisely the idea.
Daniella Weiss moved from Israel to the West Bank 33 years ago. She has been the mayor of a large settlement.
"I think that settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal. And this is the reality," Weiss told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon.
Though settlers and Palestinians don't agree on anything, most do agree now that a peace deal has been overtaken by events.
"While my heart still wants to believe that the two-state solution is possible, my brain keeps telling me the opposite because of what I see in terms of the building of settlements. So, these settlers are destroying the potential peace for both people that would have been created if we had a two-state solution," Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, once a former candidate for Palestinian president, told Simon.
And he told 60 Minutes Israel's invasion of Gaza - all the death and destruction in response to rockets from Hamas - convinces him that Israel does not want a two-state solution. "My heart is deeply broken, and I am very worried that what Israel has done has furthered us much further from the possibility of [a] two-state solution."
Palestinians had hoped to establish their state on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have split it up with scores of settlements, and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive - or ride - on the older roads.
When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.
QUESTION: How would it make sense to spend scarce civic construction money on a high speed highway then clog it with hundreds of checkpoints to make it secure enough. In order to carry other-than-Israeli traffic how could it be done without those hundreds of checkpoints? Perhaps there's some logic to the absence of any checkpoints on the highway and the limitation on users that has escaped CBS's writers' mental image of the fantasy they are constructing and it would spoil their big viewership emotional response to clutter up the image with logical complicating ideas of how to accomplish their wishes. We would also wonder if some complication on construction cost-sharing -- as we shall see in the water system -- affected the highway sharing.
(CBS) Asked why there are so many checkpoints, Dr. Barghouti said, "I think the main goal is to fragment the West Bank. Maybe a little bit of them can be justified because they say it's for security. But I think the vast majority of them are basically to block the movement of people from one place to another."
Here's how they block Barghouti: he was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Jerusalem and worked in a hospital there for 14 years. Four years ago he moved to a town just 10 miles away, but now, because he no longer lives in Jerusalem, he can't get back in - ever.
He says he can't get a permit to go. "I asked for a permit to go to Jerusalem during the last year, the last years about 16 times. And 16 times they were rejected. Like most Palestinians, I don't have a permit to go to the city I was born in, to the city I used to work in, to the city where my sister lives."
FACT: Barghouti's cousin was convicted in Israel of the murder of several people and is held in prison there -- where he, Barghouti, is excluded. Guess that fact slipped Barghouti's mind as a possible reason why his visiting privileges might be reduced, because he "neglected" to inform CBS's Simon. As for Simon's research skills -- or those of CBS' vaunted 60Minutes fact checkers -- this connection was found in a quick search of Google records on Barghouti. Either CBS has a seriously pathetic research team or they have no interest in disturbing the fantasy-story they calculate will draw large viewership. Possibly trumped-up war-stories are as good for TV networks as murders were once said to be for selling newspapers. Would a broadcast network be inclined to nudge viewers into an angry mindset and risk US military involvement in an unjust war venture just to boost prime-time? What would be their dis-incentive? Not financial.
(Bob Simon/CBS)What he's up against are scores of Israeli settlements dominating the lowlands like crusader fortresses. Many are little cities, and none of them existed 40 years ago. The Israelis always take the high ground, sometimes the hills, and sometimes the homes. And sometimes Arabs are occupied inside their own homes.
FACT: The incendiary concatenation of this image of crusader invasiveness with the subsequent assertion that the invasiveness is rampant with presumeably settlers invading and occupying Arabs space "inside their own homes" -- after all, settlers' actions were the topic of this paragraph, not Israeli military on security missions -- is sheer calculated hyperbole. The CBS fantasy writers swing right into a vignette to cover the sleight of tongue as though they have easily discovered an ugly example. That's sheer theater tactics, not news reporting.
As for the location of the settlers enclaves, and yes they would need to be fully community operations because the settlers were originally not welcomed decently... what a crime, "little cities"... don't the Palestinians live in their own towns and "little cities"?
And then there's the accusation that the settlers had taken the 'high ground' as if that were the most desirable in the WestBank. When the settlers began arriving in the beginning, there were no critical services like water and electric for the area and the prime locations were in the bottoms where the water at least would be accumulated naturally and be handy. In those areas the Palestinians had already made the prime land their own. The settlers were told by the Israelis to occupy the then-less-desirable heights, as also offering some security from an unstable situation as well as being what was less contentiously undesirable by the existing population of Palestinians.
When water services were proposed later, the Palestinians were negative, some refusing entirely to participate, some Palestinian officials refusing to contribute their community funding share to the project which put the entire price of the water for their people on the individual Palestinian using the water service. Furthermore, the water coming through the pipelines used by the settlers -- and those Palestinians who did stubbornly choose to be connected to the pipelines in spite of their "leaders" decisions -- is Israeli water, not Palestinian water. It is being pumped from Israeli aquifers within the Israeli boundaries with the exception of a couple wells within meters of the boundary.
The data on the water situation is available online with a simple Google search and download. In pdf form it will be attached here for further reading. Amazing lack of fact-checking by a major news organization makes you wonder whether the entire American schoolsystem is responsible for some mental character-flaw where the listener is expected to take every, and only the, word of some authority and to simply repeat it on request. Totally schoolish. CBS factcheckers do fit the image and their management apparently expects that their viewership will also simply swallow the fantasy pill as presented by their 60Minute news authority experts without questioning any part of the concoction.
(Bob Simon/CBS) One house for example is the highest house on the highest hill overlooking the town of Nablus. 60 Minutes learned that Israeli soldiers often corral the four families who live there and take over the house to monitor movement down below.
Simon and the 60 Minutes team went to an apartment owned by a Mr. Nassif. That morning, Israeli soldiers had apparently entered the apartment, without notice, and remained there when Simon knocked on the door.
"We cannot speak with you, there are soldiers," Nassif told Simon. "We are in prison here."
Asked what was happening, Nassif says, "They are keeping us here and the soldiers are upstairs, we cannot move. We cannot speak with you."
Nassif said he couldn't leave the house and didn't know how long he'd have to stay in place. Asked if they were paying him any money, he told Simon, "You are kidding?"
Abdul Nassif, a bank manager said he had to get to his bank to open the safe, but one of the soldiers wouldn't let him go. He told 60 Minutes whenever the soldiers come they wake everybody up, and herd them into a kitchen for hours while soldiers sleep in their beds. They can't leave or use the phone, or let 60 Minutes in.
(CBS) He sent 60 Minutes downstairs to see if his brother would open the door so we could ask the soldiers why they keep taking over this house. But the brother told Simon, "The soldiers close the door from the key. They take the key."
So Simon and the crew left, and that night, so did the soldiers. But when 60 Minutes returned two days later, the soldiers were back for more surveillance. This time they kept the women under house arrest, but let the men go to work and the children go to school. When the children returned, we caught a glimpse of two armed soldiers at the top of the stairs.
Then more children came home, but the soldiers wouldn't open the door again.
A commander told Simon that he and the crew would have to go back behind a wall in order for the children to be let in.
The commander declined to talk to 60 Minutes. "But we are talking to you now," Simon pointed out, standing outside. "Why don't you tell us what you are doing here? Have you lost your voice? Well they've closed the door now, they've closed the window so I guess if the children are going to get home now we have to leave, so that is what we will do."
An army spokesperson told us the army uses the Nassifs' house for important surveillance operations. The Nassifs told 60 Minutes that soldiers usually stay for a day or two, always coming and going in the middle of the night. When they do go, the Nassifs never know when they will be occupied again. It could be tomorrow, next week, or next month. The only certainty, they say, is that the soldiers will be back.
NOTE: CBS has access to much more senior political contacts, yet they basically wimp out on asking anyone with more authority to discuss legal/political issues whether this is standard practice for a war-zone. Nor do we have any clue on how long this particular surveillance operation has been active.
Note also that the demure, beautiful woman that is in one of these scenes and never says a word or plays any significant role, becomes the main icon used for the cover image to the entire video, in contrast to the burly, roughneck woman mayor from one of the troublemaking settlers' groups who was featured repeatedly and usually quoted after presenting her with incendiary remarks that challenged the safety of the settlers from eviction from the homes they've built, diminishing the roles they've played in support of the occupation's security.
(Bob Simon/CBS) Another crippling reality on the West Bank is high unemployment, now about 20 percent. So some Palestinians can only find jobs building Israeli settlements. They're so ashamed to work on the construction sites that they asked 60 Minutes not to show their faces.
The settlers now number 280,000, and as they keep moving in, their population keeps growing about five percent every year. But the 2.5 million Arabs have their strategy too: they're growing bigger families.
NOTE: Curious lack of notice by Bob Simon that larger families in circumstances where you can't find jobs or support your existing population is rather irresponsible for anyone else to do. In this fantasy of CBS creation, it's just a 'strategy'. Interesting that the Hamas use of women and children as human-shields could also be confirmation that the value of individual lives is in low regard and that more human-shields are expected to be useful for their 'strategy', hence the women must produce more human-shields -- or warriors if needed . Canon-fodder time is immoral personal, civic and military operation. Yet we see no uprising against Hamas in any of Simon's reporting. Support for those who make your children into human shields makes no sense. Possibly the Palestinians are, in effect, hostages of the Hamas mafia and are excusably Stockholm syndrome affected, which is not an attempt at diagnosis only an observation reminiscent of the Patti Hearst events of my graduate school days when we saw the kidnap victim join her kidnappers and take up weapons to rob banks to get funds to support her abusive kidnappers' agenda.
(Bob Simon/CBS) Demographers predict that within ten years Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank, or they could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could try apartheid - have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians, but apartheid regimes don't have a very long life.
"Unfortunately, and I have to say to you that apartheid is already in place," Dr. Barghouti argued.
(CBS) Apartheid? Israel is building what it calls a security wall between the West Bank and Israel to stop suicide bombers. The Palestinians are furious because it appropriates eight percent of the West Bank. Not only that. It weaves its way through Palestinian farms, separating farmers from their land. They have to wait at gates for soldiers to let them in. Settlers get a lot more water than Palestinians, which is why settlements are green and Arab areas are not.
FACT: CBS is again repeating a standard -- but gross 'inaccuracy' -- line from the Palestinian propaganda machine. The pdf attached above -- including factual data on water in the West Bank and Gaza -- and cited earlier shows the reality of Palestinian refusal to participate in the construction of the water pipeline.
Further the damning idea that Israelis are profligate water-wasters and that the Israeli claim to greening the desert -- by using intelligent methods of agriculture and conservation -- is supposedly exposed as phony are also revealed to be gross propaganda when checking the facts. The Israelis' water usage is approaching the sustainability levels that have been measured for their water sources and the Israelis have been the 2nd lowest water users among the arab neighboring countries.
(Bob Simon/CBS) Moderate Israelis who deplore the occupation used to believe passionately in a two-state solution. That is no longer the case.
Meron Benvenisti used to be deputy mayor of Jerusalem. He told Simon the prospects of the two-state solution becoming a reality are "nil."
"The geopolitical condition that¹s been created in '67 is irreversible. Cannot be changed. You cannot unscramble that egg," he explained.
Asked if this means the settlers have won, Benvenisti told Simon, "Yes."
"And the settlers will remain forever and ever?" Simon asked.
"I don't know forever and ever, but they will remain and will flourish," Benvenisti said.
"The settlers, the attitude that I present here, this is the heart. This is the pulse. This is the past, present, and future of the Jewish state," Daniella Weiss told Simon.
She says the she and the settlers are immovable. "We will stay here forever."
But one very important Israeli says she intends to move them out. She's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a candidate to become prime minister in elections next month. She's also Israel¹s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, and she told 60 Minutes peace is unthinkable with the settlers where they are.
"Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?" Simon asked.
"It's not going to be easy. But this is the only solution," she replied.
"But you know that there are settlers who say, 'We will fight. We will not leave. We will fight,'" Simon asked.
"So this is the responsibility of the government and police to stop them. As simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order," Livni said.
FACT: Livni is as athletic and brusque as any military paratrooper and constitutes the embarassing third puppet-image for this feminized theatrical production, to contrast with the burly settlerwoman and the demure silent arab beauty. Livni is tough and impressive and promising brutal fighting among the Israeli troops and the settlers. Stay tuned, viewers! More theater! To CBS, of course, the broadcaster who also knows how to use women.
CBS has presented this image of the settlers as brutal invaders who don't belong there, but the fact is that Israel has absorbed over 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries so that by now there are almost no Jewish refugees left to come, but the Arab 'brothers' have outright refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees, not even lining up to provide substantial resources for them -- nothing sufficient to thrive, only to suffer -- much less encouraging them to come to their brothers' homelands. Just the opposite. The Egyptians shoot at Palestinians trying to flee Gaza. (See evidence below).
The Palestinians never did have a state of their own either. There was no reason why they should have been considered to have been forced to be refugees for these 40 years when they could have had their own state -- multiple times in past negotiations as far back as 1967 when the offer was made to them after they had been evicted from Israel for the attack that led to the 1967 Seven Day War. Or even been welcomed into the homelands of their Arab 'brothers', but they were more convenient and useful to their Arab brothers as abscesses on the Israeli border. What would Americans have done if we were the Palestinians' arab brothers with our refugee brothers on our doorsteps? Think about it.
Further, none of the current states in the Arab world were in existence much longer than the Israeli state, so the claims of invasive state-creation is diminished to a suspect claim. There were over a million Jews spread out in the Arab world in 1948, and if they had not been badly treated by those Arabs, why have those populations of Jews emigrated to the point that there are few left in Arab countries and Israel has welcomed 600,000 of them when they arrived destitute on Israel's doorstep. The Arab world and their Palestinian brothers are the cause of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees. The earliest Arab state was a product of the WWI conflict resolution, barely 40 years prior to Israel's claim. The other Arab statehood dates are even later -- Syria as late as 1941 and Kuwait in 1961. Prior to WWI, the area was mostly ruled by Turkey, and subsequently imperially 'incubated' by France and England while they were supposedly developing their infrastructure for independence again in some new form. Ethnic groups were not neatly separated, the Jewish population had an established presence in the area and their claim to statehood is contemporary with the objecting Arab countries. (See the population movements in the evidence below).
There were 600,000 Jews in Israel in 1948, and over 1,000,000 jewish refugees in the Arab countries surrounding Israel. Israel has demonstrated their statehood-worthiness in both economic, military and humanitarian responsibility for their Jewish brothers effectively banished from the Arab territories, something their Arab neighbors have yet to demonstrate for their own brotherhood. The Egyptians guard their border with Gaza and treat any Palestinians trying to escape the carnage in Gaza as if they were criminals to be excluded from Egypt at all costs. Jordan even reneged on supplying their agreed quota of critical water for the Palestinians. Only the Israelis have supplied access to water from their own resources as well as electric from their own resources.
All of these 'inconvenient truths' are public knowledge if any fact-checkers or responsible editors were employed by CBS News. The sources quoted in the pdf on water and the public history dates, the history facts are all credible sources, not just Israeli propaganda.
How long will the American viewers remain docile in the face of CBS lying to us? How long will Americans continue to trust the educational curriculum and training of the factory-schoolsystem that inculcates this sort of docile ignorance and susceptibility to trumped-up enthusiasms that make such scams as CBS is pulling over viewers' eyes possible? For whose benefit is this fantasy-enthusiasm being created and where will those misled by it be circumstantially guilty of what crimes?
Stay tuned to CBS? We have a new administration that is currently more trusting of such fantasies as CBS is broadcasting. Where will they lead? Will there be more alertness when we are told the sky is falling. And yes, there's going to be carnage, and yes we care, and we realize this is a warzone where carnage happens. The Israelis airlift warnings -- air-dropped leaflets to be precise -- but war produces disasterous mindsets that need to be corrected, which we have seen happens occasionally among the Israelis when one of their combatants goes over the edge. Hamas however is the supposedly elected government of the Palestinians and that government is totally over the edge (see the evidence below) and will not be at all capable of justice. In fact, since there is such a curiously drastic difference between Gaza and the West Bank in the guerilla activities, it would appear that the Hamas have decided that Gaza is not worth a decent life since they concentrate their death-and-destruction activities in Gaza, effectively deciding that Gaza's people are to be sacrificed as victims -- useful for crying and reproducing. If there were a decent humanitarian peace group, their focus would be to transfer Gazans -- willing to be abandoning everything in their current homes that they cannot carry -- to new homes in the West Bank. There are instances covered online of what happens to Gazans who protest to Hamas when they don't wish to be human shields any longer and the Hamas response was gruesome. The peace groups on site are the only ones capable of finding a way to do something to relieve the unwilling sacrificial human shields.
So where is the UN, to insist that the Palestinians should be welcomed into the countries of the surrounding Arab states? The UN? All hiding behind their own oil dependence. At least for now. If the end of the oil age is approaching, this whole scenario could turn totally around. It would seem the only practical solution is to stall while we work for independence from foreign oil. Then insist that the Palestinians be re-settled by their Arab brothers. Some attempts at progress on this oil-independence path are in play all over the world -- third world and first world. Economics is going in this direction if we can just keep the situation from getting out of control with trumped-up enthusiasms based on 'gross inaccuracies' THEN PEACE IS NOT OUT OF REACH AS CBS WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE.
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Further evidence:
** Egyptian government shoots at hundreds of Palestinians fleeing Gaza. Simply fleeing for their lives and their children's lives. Three hundred extra Egyptian guards rushed to seal the border and to repulse Palestinians along this small 9 mile border. Where is the American big media coverage of these inhumane acts against sensible Palestinians wanting to live freely?
** Who's the humanitarian side in this struggle? Refugee rescue, or none
** Water usage photos of Palestinian swimming pools -- as well as the data on water systems -- that the powerful US big-media somehow never notices for public broadcasting of their fantasy reports. Which Palestinians are using scarce resources, further reducing water for their fellow refugees while maintaining that the Israelis cheat the Palestinians out of water for life's needs.
** How pathetic must we believe the CBS journalists and editors are to have not found this scoop -- at wikipedia no less -- on why the excellent Dr Barghouti wasn't welcomed to visit Jerusalem. CBS instead honors the good doctor's claims that Israelis were trying to handicap Palestinians' rightful freedoms, while never mentioning that his cousin, a convicted Intifada political murderer, held in prison on the Jerusalem side had co-conspirators and operatives in those murders -- still at large -- who might avail themselves of access to the good doctor's freedom of movement among the Barghouti clan and allies. Whether the Barghouti cousin is a political prisoner or a POW or a war criminal or other criminal is immaterial, there is justification for the Israeli judgment to sensibly restrict the good doctor's access to the area because he would be a convenient target for Hamas or Fatah to use in an attempt to engineer the escape of a prize prisoner. Claiming that this case shows that Palestinians are unjustly blocked from their rightful freedom is either grossly neglectful of responsible broadcasting or outright deception being practiced on us. Take your pick.
** Hamas' leader bragging in public speech that Hamas has adopted a strategy of death for women, children and the aged, making Hamas operatives fully authorized to use women and children as human-shields -- willing or not -- and making it clear to the women and children what's expected of the population. Human sacrifice to provide the media with a message to sell to the world that Palestinian women and children prefer death to Israeli occupation. How could this public broadcast by Hamas have escaped CBS's notice in their professionally required intensive review of material on and from their subjects?
** And some of the women and children are not willing, as seen in this clip captured by some Italian youtube member in the tumult of IDF conflict, where armed Hamas operatives grab children apparently at random as the operatives are running from an Israeli assault. When you are the target for the shooting, you are not 'saving' anyone by grabbing them and dragging them along the road with you, the target. Nor are you enhancing your speed and agility by dragging someone, so you're not improving their survival chances nor are you improving your own UNLESS you have another use for them.
** Hamas claims that their opposing party - Fatah - is harboring spies and collaborators with the Israelis. Official spokesman claims they'll be hunted down and jailed, but somehow, in that month of hunting there was not much jailing, instead CNN reported that 175 Fatah members were reported shot -- knee-caps, elbows, feet, etc -- at close range and by Hamas members. I suppose CBS wouldn't have noticed this sort of behavior among their play-actors in the CBS fantasy as an indication of a responsible, truly elected government of the Palestinians methods of dealing with the opposition party.
