Reporters Have Finally Found Hamas. What Took So Long?

[Valin]

The New Republic:

Oren Kessler

August 11, 2014

 

The Western media have found Hamas. A month into the group’s mini-war with Israel, journalists have begun publishing images of Hamas fighters and reports on its human-shield tactics and intimidation of journalists. Whatever the reason—Hamas PR savvy, media incompetence, or the fear of retribution—it is astounding that the discovery has taken this long.

 

The Gaza Strip, after all, is just 25 miles tip-to-toe and seven miles at its widest. More than 700 journalists went there to cover Israel's ground offensive, during which Hamas fired more than 3,500 rockets into Israel—an average of more than 100 a day.

 

(Snip)

 

On Friday, Anshel Pfeffer, a reporter for Israel’s left-wing Haaretz daily, pressed a number of foreign journalists just back from Gaza about their coverage. Responses ranged from the patently false (Hamas was “too busy fighting to bother” with media, offered one) to the plausible (“I would have got killed,” a veteran war correspondent said).

 

Israel is having none of it. “This is the A-team of the war-reporting profession,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman lamented. “How did Hamas succeed so completely?”

 

Other journalists acknowledged regret.

 

“Looking back, I should have at least tried to report a bit more about the Hamas fighters,” one unnamed reporter told Haaretz while he was still in Gaza.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Media: ‘We’re Not Defending Hamas, But …’
David Rutz
August 12, 2014

 

 

There has been a lot of throat-clearing by the media when it comes to the terror organization Hamas during the current Gaza conflict. Reporters and pundits criticizing Israel want you to know they are not defending Hamas.

 

Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States since 1997. It has the destruction of Israel as a charter goal, has employed suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, and openly urged Gaza citizens to remain in their homes to serve as “human shields” against Israeli shelling.

 

So it’s strange that so many have had to qualify their comments on the fighting over the past month by insisting they’re not defending Hamas while they simultaneously bash Israel. Much of the coverage has focused on the deaths of Palestinian civilians and international outrage at Israel’s supposed responsibility for the conflict, while less has been devoted to condemning Hamas for starting the war in the first place through indiscriminate rocket attacks and the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli boys, and breaking multiple ceasefires by continuing to fire on Israeli civilians.

 

(Snip)