Don't fall for Hamas' CNN strategy

The Hamas CNN Strategy
by Alan M. Dershowitz
Don't play into the deadly, cynical ploy of Hamas and blame Israel.


As Israel persists in its military efforts -- by ground, air and sea -- to
protect its citizens from deadly Hamas rockets, and as protests against
Israel increase around the world, the success of the abominable Hamas
double war crime strategy becomes evident. The strategy is as simple as it
is cynical: provoke Israel by playing Russian roulette with its children,
firing rockets at kindergartens, playgrounds and hospitals; hide behind its
own civilians when firing at Israeli civilians; refuse to build bunkers for
its own civilians; have the TV cameras ready to transmit every image of
dead Palestinians, especially children; exaggerate the number of civilians
killed by including as "children" Hamas fighters who are 16 or 17
years old and as "women," female terrorists.

Hamas itself has a name for this. They call it "the CNN strategy"
(this is not to criticize CNN or any other objective news source for doing
its job; it is to criticize Hamas for exploiting the freedom of press which
it forbids in Gaza). The CNN strategy is working because decent people all
over the world are naturally sickened by images of dead and injured
children. When they see such images repeatedly flashed across TV screens,
they tend to react emotionally. Rather than asking why these children are
dying and who is to blame for putting them in harms way, the average
viewer, regardless of their political or ideological perspective, wants to
see the killing stopped. They blame those whose weapons directly caused the
deaths, rather than those who provoked the violence by deliberately
targeting civilians. They forget the usual rules of morality and law.

For example, when a murderer takes a hostage and fires from behind his
human shield, and a policeman, in an effort to stop the shooting
accidentally kills the hostage, the law of every country holds the hostage
taker guilty of murder even though the policeman fired the fatal shot. The
same is true of the law of war. The use of human shields, in the way Hamas
uses the civilian population of Gaza, is a war crime -- as is its firing of
rockets at Israeli civilians. Every human shield that is killed by Israeli
self defense measures is the responsibility of Hamas, but you wouldn't know
that from watching the media coverage.

The CNN strategy seems to work better, at least in some parts of the world,
against Israel that it would against other nations. There are many more
protests -- and fury -- directed against Israel when it inadvertently kills
fewer than 100 civilians in a just war of self defense, than against Arab
and Muslim nations and groups that deliberately kill far more civilians for
no legitimate reason. It isn't the nature of the victims, since more Arabs
and Muslim civilians are killed every day in Africa and the Mid East by
Arab and Muslim governments and groups with little or no protests. (For
example, on the first day of Israel's ground attack, approximately 30
Palestinians, almost all Hamas combatants, were killed. On the same day an
Islamic suicide bomber blew herself up in a mosque in Iraq, killing 40
innocent Muslims. No protests. Little media coverage.)

It isn't the nature of the killings, since Israel goes to extraordinary
lengths to avoid killing civilians -- if for no other reason than that it
hurts their cause -- while Hamas does everything in its power to force
Israel to kill Palestinian civilians by firing its missiles from densely
populated civilian areas and refusing to build shelters for its civilians.
It isn't the nature of the conflict, because Israel is fighting a limited
war of self defense designed to protect its own civilians from rocket
attacks, while most of those killed by Arabs and Muslims are killed in
genocidal and tribal warfare with no legitimate aim. The world simply
doesn't seem to care when Arabs and Muslims kill large numbers of other
Arabs and Muslims, but a qualitatively different standard seems to apply
when the Jewish state kills even a relatively small number of Muslims and
Arabs in a war of self defense.

The international community doesn't even seem to care when Palestinian
children are killed by rocket fire -- unless it is from Israeli rockets.
The day before the recent outbreak, Hamas fired an anti-personnel rocket at
Israeli civilians but the rocket fell short of its target and killed two
Palestinian girls. Yet there was virtually no coverage and absolutely no
protests against these "collateral" civilian deaths. Hamas
refused to allow TV cameras to show these dead Palestinian children, who
were killed by their own rockets. Nor have there been protests against the
cold blooded murders by Hamas and its supporters of dozens of Palestinian
civilians who allegedly "collaborated" withIsrael. Indeed Hamas
and Fatah have killed far more Palestinian civilians over the past several
years than have the Israeli, but you wouldn't know that from the media, the
United Nations or protesters who focus selectively on only those deaths
caused by Israeli military actions.

The protestors who fill the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco were
nowhere to be seen when hundreds of Jewish children were murdered by
Palestinian terrorists over the years.

Moreover, the number of civilians killed by Israel is almost always
exaggerated. First, it widely assumed that if a victim is a
"child" or a "woman", he or she is necessarily a
civilian. Consider the following report in Thursday's NY Times:
"Hospital officials in Gaza said that of the more than 390 people
killed by Israeli fighter planes since Saturday, 38 were children and 25
women." Some of these children and women were certainly civilians but
others were equally certainly combatants: Hamas often uses 14, 15, 16 and
17 year olds as well as women as terrorists. Israel is entitled, under
international law, to treat these children and women as the combatants they
have become. Hamas cannot, out of one side of its mouth, boast that it
recruits children and women to become terrorists, and then, out of the
other side of its mouth, complain when Israel takes them at their word. The
media should look closely and critically at the number of claimed civilian
victims before accepting self-serving and self-contradictory exaggerations.

By any objective count, the number of genuinely innocent civilians killed
by the Israeli Air Force in Gaza is lower than the collateral deaths caused
by any nation in a comparable situation. Hamas does everything in its power
to provoke Israel into killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible,
in order to generate condemnation against the Jewish state. They have gone
so far as firing rockets from Palestinian schoolyards and hiding their
terrorists in Palestinian maternity wards. Lest there be any doubt about
the willingness of Hamas to expose their families to martyrdom, remember
that the Hamas terrorist leader recently killed in an Israeli air attack
sent his own son to be a suicide bomber and then refused to allow his
family to leave their house even after learning that he and his house had
been placed on the list of military targets.

Nor is this double standard -- applied to Israel on the one hand, and Arab
and Muslim nations and groups on the other hand -- limited to the current
situation in Gaza. It has provided an excuse for the international
community to remain silent in the face of massive human rights violations
including genocides perpetrated by Arabs and Muslims around the world for
years. Many of those who protest Israeli self-defense actions remain silent
in the face of real genocides -- such as that in Darfur.

The reality is that the elected and de facto government of Gaza has
declared war against Israel. Under Article 51 of the United Nations
Charter, they have committed an "armed attack" against the Jewish
state. The Hamas charter calls for Israel's total destruction. Under
international law, Israel is entitled to take whatever military action is
necessary to repel that attack and stop the rockets. It must seek to
minimize civilian deaths consistent with the legitimate military goal, and
it is doing precisely that, despite Hamas efforts to maximize civilian
deaths on both sides.

The best outcome for purposes of producing peace would be the destruction
or substantial weakening of Hamas, which rejects the two-state solution.
Israel and the Palestinian Authority could then agree on a peace that would
end both the Israeli occupation and the rocketing of Israeli civilians.

http://tinyurl.com/bu4xgr

-- 
L'Chaim,
Mimi

fcpnmimi(at)cox.net

http://www.myspace.com/fcpnmimi

St. Gregory, 4th century Bishop of Nanianzus, wrote:
"A little jargon is all that is necessary to impose
on the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire."

--- Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Windows/20081209)