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• Tuesday, May 23, 2006 08:55 PM

  A reporter who has lost perspective

  It's one thing to start chanting an Arabic mantra during a battle; it's quite another to start empathizing with the "militants", aka terrorists. This final bit from the article brings the rest of the piece into focus.

  Here are three choice quotes from the article that wrankled me:

  "But it's not just cynical and calculating; they're Arabs and that stuff about Arabs' respect for guests is very real and sincere." It's true that the Arabs have a longstanding and deeply ingrained belief in respecting guests. I'd suggest the writer, if he's feeling suicidal, mention that he's Jewish and see how far their respect for his status as a guest goes.

  "It was a targeted assassination of a top Islamic Jihad militant in charge of shooting half-assed-looking rockets out of Gaza into neighboring farms in what appears to be a symbolic jihad on Israeli lettuce production." The last "half-assed" rocket that they fired last week fell on a classroom in Sederot while the children were just outside praying. The fact that the rockets that the Arabs keep firing inside a sovereign country don't kill more people is a miracle. Some of these rockets have landed on people's homes and either killed them outright, burned them, severely damaged their property, or malfunctioned. What precisely are the crimes of these Jews? Are these people who are living well-within the 1967 border occupiers? No, they're children and families living on farms trying to live their lives. The Arabs keep sending them rockets at all hours of the day or night in attempt to burn up their lettuce and blow them to pieces. I'd suggest the reporter leave Gaza and report from Sederot for awhile. Maybe it will help him regain perspective as shells are raining down on him from the sky.

  And here's the final straw:

  "But they [Hamas] have more or less -- outside the mostly ineffectual rockets -- honored a cease-fire for over a year."

  In one sentence he puts forward a positive statement about Hamas, playing off their military prowess and religious devotion about which he speaks both before and after the quote in question, and props up the myth that they are the good guys who've lived up to their self-imposed public-relations stunt of not killing Jews for awhile. But wait... doesn't he say that they are still firing lots and lots and lots of those so-called "ineffectual rockets"? Now this implies, I believe, that Hamas keeps firing these rockets to piss off the Jews and do no real damage. It also implies that they wouldn't fire more accurate rockets if they had them because they would only be in violation of their PR stunt if they became more lethal. Has this guy lost all his marbles or has he become another Jew-hating reporter married to his Arab benefactors? I'm not sure of the answer.

  What I am sure of is that this poor reporter is lost in a war-zone and believing what the Arabs want him to believe. He's only seeing one perspective and is starting to sympathize with it without any cultural or historical context. He needs to leave Gaza and report from Israel for awhile and then state, after seeing a bloodbath in Tel Aviv or visiting a child in Sederot still being treated for shock, that the ineffectual rockets fired by his gratious hosts are both moral and warranted.

  —jpincus Read jpincus's other letters
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