Here’s How—As With This Israel-Hamas War—Western Elites Are Baffled by the Middle East

[Valin]

The Rubin Reports:

Barry Rubin

11/17/12

 

The elite currently in power in the Western mass media is never going to comprehend the Middle East. There is a problem with bias, for sure, but the big problem is the impenetrable ignorance of the very people who are entrusted with explaining the region to others. They insist on imposing their own misconceptions on the situation while ignoring the evidence.

 

Consider Janine Zacharia. What a distinguished resume: Jerusalem bureau chief and Middle East Correspondent for the Washington Post (2009-2011); chief diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg News (2005-2009) and before that five years working for the Jerusalem Post in Washington DC and another five years working for Reuters and other publications from Jerusalem. Right now she’s a visiting lecturer at Stanford University in communications.

 

Surely, such a person must understand the region’s issues and if anyone isn’t going to have an anti-Israel bias in the mass media it would be her. And she isn’t anti-Israel in a conscious, political sense. Indeed, she obviously views herself as being sympathetic. Rather, it is her assumptions that make her type of views inevitably anti-Israel and more broadly inevitably destructive of U.S. interests on other issues.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

So You Want to End the Israel-Hamas War? Here’s How To Do It

Barry Rubin

November 18, 2012

 

A lot of people have asked the purpose of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Some, including those supposedly expert on the region, have been mystified. They cannot seem to figure out what is going on or what the goal of this Israeli operation could be.

 

The answer is simple. Given the premise that Hamas is in a permanent state of war with Israel and will attack Israel whenever it can get away with it, Israel needed to do three things.

 

First, Israel had to show Hamas that it cannot daily attack Israel and Israeli civilians without a cost.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

How the New York Times Covers Evil

All the moral equivalence that’s fit to print.

Dennis Prager

11/20/12

 

The way in which the New York Times reports good vs. evil is one of the most important stories of our time.

 

Take the war between Israel and Hamas that is taking place right now.

 

This war is as morally clear as wars get. Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to annihilating the Jewish state. It runs a theocratic totalitarian state in Gaza, with no individual liberty, and no freedom of speech or press. In a nutshell, Hamas is a violent, fascistic organization.

 

(Snip)

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