The pattern of how news is reported by our media when it comes to either Israel or the west seems to have been established. Report an atrocity, Condemn it, organize protests, demand concessions and then the actual facts come out:
There was just one problem: The story, as etched in people’s minds, was not quite accurate.
Physical evidence and interviews with several eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the shelling, make it clear: While a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed. The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.
Stories of one or more shells landing inside the schoolyard were inaccurate.
And then of course comes the yeah buts… How people still fall for it is beyond me.
At the same time that the federal government is making a dumb move here in Massachusetts Gov Patrick, (David Axelrod’s dry run for President Obama) is doing it as well on a smaller scale:
The good news is that Deval Patrick has been declared “America’s Best Governor” by the state’s taxpayers and small business owners.
The bad news? That state is New Hampshire.
If you own a convenience store, restaurant or packie north of Massachusetts, you’ve got to have a man crush on Patrick. Just months after packing your store with Bay State smokers saving $20 a carton on cigs, Patrick wants higher state taxes on beer, booze, candy bars and soda, too. Not to mention meals and hotel rooms.
Now Massachusetts is a small state physically. No part of it is more than 40 min from the border of another state, and no part of it is more than 90 minutes from New Hampshire.
But lets say you don’t smoke or drink very little as I do. I’m not likely to take a 20 min drive to save 4 bucks on a fill-up. So instead lets make a day of it:
After Mass we’ll stop at Parker’s Maple Barn (they re-open Feb 11th) and have a big breakfast, maybe pick up a Yankee Candle or a hat at the shop there. Once done we can hit a mall and the wife can do some shopping. My boys are into Comics, games and Doctor Who. There are some really good hobby shops in Nashua, we can catch a movie once we are done or in warmer weather play some mini golf and perhaps we’ll even hit a restaurant before filling up the tank and heading home.
Now instead of just the gas station , coffee shop, the local mall, comic store, movie theater and maybe the restaurant have all lost my business. Multiply this by hundreds and it adds up.
You might remember Samantha Power who’s views on Israel were a bit of an issue but her statements about the now secretary of state were embarrassing enough to remove her from the campaign. But not embarrassing enough to keep her out of the administration:
Officials familiar with the decision say Obama has tapped Power to be senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, a job that will require close contact and potential travel with Clinton, who is now secretary of state. NSC staffers often accompany the secretary of state on foreign trips.
Many readers back in 2002 will remember Palestinian allegations of a “Jenin Massacre” which both the U.N. and many journalists hyped. The ensuing investigation, however, showed that there had been no massacre, and that Palestinian claims of casualties were exponentially exaggerated. At a George Soros-funded conference since published in the volume Ethnic Violence and Justice (2003), Power seemed upset that The New York Times had chosen to correct the narrative about Jenin, instead of holding Israel’s feet to the fire over allegations of its human rights violation.
Power is not just assenting to the Israel Lobby view of American foreign policy, but is also arguing that Israel had something to do with the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003–an appalling slander, and a telling one.
Also of note is a recent opinion piece Power wrote for TIME magazine, titled “Rethinking Iran,” the thrust of which rethinking involves the need to engage diplomatically the mullahs and pretend that the Iranian nuclear program is a figment of the paranoid imagination of the Bush administration.
Power has argued that the US should stop financially supporting Israel’s military and instead invest in a Palestinian state, with US forces on the ground to protect it from genocide by Israel. She has also expressed annoyance that the New York Times had admitted there had been no 2002 massacre of Palestinians by Israel in Jenin and condemned Israel for allegedly committing human rights abuses.
A clip on the subject:
And finally Abe Greenwald yesterday on Obama’s moves in general:
It is fascinating watching “progressives” who’ve lectured everyone about the sins of America in supporting dictatorships and oppressive regimes during the Cold War now turn silent when America embraces that same amoral approach when it no longer faces nuclear annihilation.
President Obama is freely willing – in total silence – to work with oppresive regimes and dictators and respect their sovereigny if they unclench their fists against us. Meanwhile, they can use that fist ad libitum, so to speak, against their own people without one word of criticism from the US. Respect, you see, is the new game in town.
Stability isn’t always a good thing. In 1850 “stability” would have been strict enforcement of the Fugitive slave law. In 1954 “Stability” would have been rejecting Brown vs Board of Education since Plessy v Ferguson was established law for nearly 60 years. Stability would have been keeping the Berlin Wall up.
Gotta love this stuff.
Carter 7 Arthur 2 I don’t know if I’m going to have a 10 run mercy rule.
You know If I’m the democrats and I really believed that this bill was a great idea and would work; I’d be thrilled.
I’d be thinking that I can take full credit, when the solution comes New Deal 2 earn the love of the country. This will keep us in power for decades and be written in the history books as a triumph!
I wonder my that isn’t the case? Actually I don’t wonder. If you do re-read my posts here and here.
