In Washington, D.C. In 2010 an expert at a seminar said of the 2009 Israeli attack on Gaza " It's unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn."]
The mainstream media’s coverage of all things Middle Eastern is almost always toxic.
In times of war this toxicity exceeds tolerable levels. I’m not referring to the war in Afghanistan; recently brought under greater attention courtesy of General Petraeus’s body and those with access to it, and not the piling corpses of civilians being slaughtered there.
No. I meant Gaza where Israeli bombs continue to rain death and destruction from air and sea killing scores of civilians. There are fears of an imminent ground invasion. Take, for example, Richard Engel, the award-winning NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent. In his report aired 16 November, he assured viewers that “so far Israel has been using surgical strikes.” Never mind that news reports had already revealed the heavy toll in Gaza among civilians and especially children (including the eleven-month-old baby of a Palestinian who works with BBC Arabic).
We were told that “civilians are dying too,” but we are shown ample footage of Palestinian rockets being fired from Gaza. The total of Israelis killed by these rockets since 2004 is twenty-six. In its 2009 assault against Gaza alone, Israel killed nine hundred sixty Palestinian civilians, including two hundred eighty-eight children and a hundred and twenty-one women. None of these figures are worthy of inclusion.
The main thrust of the report focused instead on the ties between Hamas and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and how the former is emboldened because the Arab revolts brought the latter to rule Egypt.
The icing comes at the end when Engels tells Brian Williams: “An Israeli incursion [read: invasion] could be very bloody and could risk inflaming the entire region, but that, Brian, could be just what Hamas is hoping to do.”
Read more at Mowing the Lawn in Gaza.