Matter of Context

NBC Nightly News aired another report bludgeoning Israel for the blockade of Gaza last night. Tom Aspell highlighted grim conditions inflicted by those bad old Israelis on the poor, beleaguered innocents of Gaza. If I knew nothing of the conflict, I would have thought Israel an evil aggressor nation on a par with Nazi Germany that merited only defeat and dissolution. This is precisely the image that NBC sought to convey. How hard would it have been to mention that the isolation of Gaza was brought on because of the reign of the terror group Hamas who murdered their Palestinian Authority rivals on the ground (and by tossing from the rooftops) there, the rain of missiles, rockets, and mortar fire on Israel with thousands of attacks emanating from there (particularly directed at the Israeli city of Sderot), and finally set in motion by an unprovoked attack on an Israeli border post where several IDF troops were murdered and Gilad Shalit, a young conscript with dual Israeli-French citizenship was wounded and abducted? Israel had fully withdrawn from Gaza, evacuating (expelling) many of her own citizens to open the door to peace, only to have a genocidal visitor in the form of Hamas walk in. Any deficiency in the circumstances in Gaza is directly attributable to this terror group which has always favored the eradication of the Jewish state and has become a wholly-owned proxy of Iran. Tom Aspell's story echoed past blood libels against the Jewish people and surely would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.