In a public relations campaign launched in the Palestinian Authority, the Hamas terror organization is claiming victory over Israel's withdrawal and promises to terrorize Haifa and Tel Aviv until Israel is defeated and Palestine restored to the Arabs. They are taking credit for the Israeli withdrawal, saying that Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip defeated by the "resistance," not as the result of "useless negotiations." Caption and Image Credit: HyscienceHamas Leadership Dispenses Terror That Cuts Two Ways
The biggest tell on a government and its attitude toward its people in a crisis situation is how it responds to the protection and care of the citizenry.
Hamas has finally poked the beehive of Israel to where the government of Israel had to respond with a damaging force where the Hamas leadership knew that Israel would not tolerate having rocket bombs being shot into their national boundaries any longer.
After Israel dropped bombs on the launching points from where the Hamas initiated rocket bomb activity had been traced, collateral damage in sued and injuries to the citizens who lived under Hamas rule needed a response. The appropriate response would be to allow a quick first medical response in order to allow the injured but living to remain living.
This excerpted and edited from Pajamas Media –
Revealing Silence at the Gaza-Egypt Border
Why does Hamas victimize its own people? And why doesn't the media call them on it?
January 2, 2009 - by Richard Landes
At about 1:10 on Sunday, December 28, 2008, the BBC anchor Peter Dobbie found out, along with his audience, that there were 40 Egyptian ambulances ready to evacuate wounded, and lorries full of medical goods sent by Qatar to restock Gazan hospitals, waiting at the border crossing in Egypt. (According to another source there were also 50 Egyptian doctors ready to go into the Strip to help.) Since Dobbie and his audience had heard the repeated complaint from the people in Gaza that the hospitals were overwhelmed by the injured and desperately lacking in supplies, one would have expected the border to be full of purposeful activity. Instead, nothing was happening. The Gazan side lay silent.
A real journalist, someone with a smell for revealing anomalies, would have immediately recognized this as an important story to follow up on. After all, Dobbie had not hesitated to interrupt and challenge Israeli spokesmen on precisely the issues at stake: the disproportion between Israeli-caused fatalities and Israeli-suffered fatalities, the inevitable suffering of innocent civilians when such a bombing campaign takes place in so densely populated an area. “The math doesn’t work,” said Dobbie, implying what commentators emphasized elsewhere — the “disproportionate use of force” the Israelis were employing.
So here was a perfect issue with which to challenge Hamas spokesmen: If they were so distraught at the loss of life of their own people, why didn’t they take care of them? What on earth would possess Hamas not to avail themselves of what they pleadingly told the world they so desperately needed? As the honest and courageous Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey put it, “My head hurts.”
Alas, the BBC did nothing of the sort. The next six hours saw nothing but canned footage repeating Palestinian complaints, voiced not only by Hamas spokesmen and BBC reporters, but UN officials like Chris Gunning and human rights advocates, and, of course, others in the Western MSM.
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Too bad. Had the BBC behaved like real journalists instead of parroting Palestinian narratives, they might have taken the “golden” (read excremental) thread that leads out of the labyrinth and straight to the “real story.”
That story, of course, is the dreadful Palestinian strategy, taken to new heights by Hamas in the early 21st century — play the victim card at any cost. In this case, create a genuine humanitarian crisis.
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Hamas initially offered two reasons for not allowing the wounded out: 1) the roads were too dangerous to venture out on, and 2) they were composing a list of the wounded.
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Then Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, speaking to Khaled Abu Toameh, denied the Egyptian allegation that Hamas was to blame, “claiming that many of the wounded rejected an Egyptian offer to receive medical treatment in Cairo in protest against Cairo’s ‘support’ for the IDF operation.
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On the contrary, as Ma’an News Agency reported, Hamas would allow no passage of wounded until the border was completely open.
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And of the 600 wounded (according to Palestinian sources) all of them, suffering in a ludicrously crowded and understaffed hospital, refused to go to Egypt?
Although the reasons are hollow, they do tell us about Hamas priorities, and the overwhelming message of this refusal is that helping their own civilians survive ranks very low on their scale, well below revenge and public relations concerns. Indeed, as with Israel, so with Egypt: they hold their people hostage to maximalist demands.
Some say Hamas doesn’t care about their people. The evidence suggests far worse. They actively seek the victimization of their own people. Indeed, the enormous resources they have expended on the constant, if largely ineffective, barrage of rockets on Israeli civilians is actually quite staggering. Not only have they lavished much of their meager resources to this vicious and gratuitous activity, but, as a result of those attacks, guaranteed that their borders would be closed and their people would continue to suffer — hostages to their hatred. Thus, the phony excuses offered for the border snafu disguise something far more sinister: Hamas wants the crisis; they want civilians dying dramatically in wretched hospitals.
On the face of it, it seems absurd that a government would actively victimize its own people. What advantage in making an already miserable people suffer even more?
There are two major explanations here. First, Hamas, like many other Palestinian groups, is addicted to violence against Israel. Anything they can do, no matter how small, to make Israelis suffer, they will do, whatever the cost.
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But the second explanation is far more disturbing, because it involves the media. Hamas only gains a real advantage to having Palestinians suffer if they, who do so much to inflict that suffering, can blame it on Israel.
It would be absurd for Hamas to stand in front of the world and say, “Look at how much we make our own people suffer; join us in hating Israel.” So the game is intensely hypocritical. It depends on getting public opinion, both in the Arab-Muslim world and in the West, to accept a scapegoating narrative — the Palestinian Guernica — that deflects responsibility.
And the pathetic thing is that it works.
Reference Here>>
The truly odd thing to all of this is that this scapegoating narrative of suffering has a parallel application.
This strategy of deflecting responsibility is also being used by our current Executive and Congressional leadership to diffuse the problems in our economy in the causes and attempts to right the wrongs caused by our leadership.
Further, they have a willing partner in the forces of the MSM to NOT report the story outside of the narrative template that Hamas is using in its campaign of terror in the Middle-East.
To reconstruct the questions asked at the beginning of this article:
Why does our Executive and Cogressional Leadership victimize its own people through social engineering agendas (using taxpayer money in programs that continue to fail)? And why doesn't the media call them on it?
