Frank Salvato, Managing Editor

Gaza & The One-World Media’s Propaganda
January 16, 2009

As the Israelis continue their push into Gaza; as they continue an offensive military campaign against Hamas, born of the need to protect Israeli civilians from rockets fired by Hamas jihadis, it is almost impossible to gather accurate information regarding the conflict, at least not from the mainstream media. The accounts advanced by mainstream news sources are so devoid of balance – and, thusly, devoid of a whole and honest truth – that their product reaches a caliber of propaganda not seen since the disinformation campaigns of the Third Reich. Goebbels would be envious.

It is next to impossible for someone seeking a full accounting of daily events in Israel and Gaza to divine them from the one-world media sources. This is because their coverage serves as an encore to the one-sided reporting they provided during the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon.

During the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict of 2006, the mainstream, one-world media routinely purchased pictures for publication from photographers sympathetic to Hezbollah. Two widely exposed incidents of disingenuous and/or staged photography proved to be the benchmarks. In one incident a wailing Arab women was repeatedly photographed standing in front of different war-torn buildings, each said to be the remnants of her house. In another, an Arab rescue worker spent the larger portion of a day carrying around a dead child who had been recovered from the rubble of a building hit by Israeli artillery fire. He would pose, his face wrenched in despair and urgency, for any photographer who would ask. Reuters was eventually confronted with the photographs and they reluctantly admitted that they hadn’t vetted the photographers prior to running with the pictures. Incidentally, the Arab rescue worker has turned up in several pictures from the current Israeli-Gaza campaign.

While many will argue that these are isolated incidents, this declaration flies in the face of the facts when one takes into consideration that Hamas and Hezbollah have active propaganda arms. To catch a glimpse into this world of deception all you have to do is to watch the short films Pallywood and Al-Dura: The Making of an Icon, which expose how Palestinian propagandists manipulate an eagerly accepting and agendized one-world media.

And while the one-world media bemoans the fact that the Israelis have refused to allow the international press into Gaza to cover the conflict, they have no problem accepting the accounts of those who have manufactured the propaganda of the recent past, reporting it as fact. To say that responsible journalism is dead is a gross understatement, especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Yet, the one-world media continues to “report” on the “poor Palestinians.”

The “Poor Palestinians”
In 2006, elections were held in Gaza and the West Bank – the Palestinian “territories.” The result of the 2006 elections saw the Palestinian people handing a decisive victory to Hamas. Hamas (Harakat Al-Muqawama Al-Islamia) was formed in late 1987 as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and is, to this day, dedicated – by charter – to the establishment of an Islamic Palestinian State that encompasses Israel, the West Bank and Gaza and the eradication of Israel and her people. Hamas won a majority 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats and, thus, became the dominate political force in the Palestinian Authority...by mandate of the Palestinian people.

Even then, Hamas couldn’t share the power of government with their Palestinian brethren, Fatah. In 2007 Hamas staged an armed insurrection in Gaza, expelling Fatah as a political force and dividing the Palestinian people between the West Bank, ruled by Fatah, and Gaza, ruled by Hamas. Israel immediately instituted a blockade of Gaza for several reasons, chief among them the fear that Hamas would resurrect terrorist attacks on Israel; a fear justified by Hamas’ own charter.

The Gaza Strip, according to the CIA World Factbook, is approximately 223 square miles in area, not quite the size of Jacksonville, Florida.

According to James Prince, who in 2005 served as a consultant to the Palestinian Investment Fund, the Palestinians receive “the highest per-capita donor aid in the world." Former head of the International Monetary Fund, George T. Abed, declared that the banking system in the Palestinian territories, circa 2005, was generally sound, “healthier, in fact, than most banks in neighboring Arab countries, such as Egypt, Syria and Jordan.” In 2005, the 22 Palestinian banks regulated by Abed's authority had a total of $4.3 billion in deposits. Today, under the tyranny and mismanagement of government executed by the hand of Hamas, the banks in Gaza are on the verge of collapse and the threat of jihadist recruitment among the Palestinian people looms, as the promise of income derived from entities that share Hamas’ goal of the end of Israel entices.

While the pro-Palestinian factions and protesters around the world curse Israel for their blockade of Gaza, blaming Israel for the financial and societal hardships being experienced by the people of Gaza, the truth is that the Palestinian people voted this reality into power. This reality is routinely ignored by the one-world media, as is the reality that the cause of Israel’s actions is immediately derived from the violent conduct of Hamas and its refusal to exorcise the goal of Israel’s destruction from their charter.

In the Face of Evil
The indiscriminate firing of missiles by Hamas into civilian areas of Israel forces Israeli families to stow protective gear close by at all times. Every Israeli must also know where the closed bomb shelter is located and be able to arrive at the location within a prescribed 15 to thirty seconds. Even at the height of the Cold War, in the dire hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we in the United States never lived under that prerequisite.

And as the explosions of Hamas’ Katyusha rockets serve as a constant reminder of the frailty of life, the Israelis have never wavered from providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people. Even as the current conflict rages the Israeli military has instituted three-hour windows of calm to facilitate the transport of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government has provided medical care to Palestinians and Hamas operatives alike who have been injured throughout.

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has appointed a minister to “coordinate between the different government bodies in the humanitarian assistance to the civilian population in the Gaza Strip." A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s office said the move was aimed at "bolstering the humanitarian efforts in the Gaza Strip following requests by international bodies and states that have expressed concern over the developing humanitarian situation."

Even as the Israelis struggle with how to provide aid and medical treatment to the Palestinian people, even as the Israelis put down their weapons daily for three-hours to facilitate humanitarian aid, Hamas used the same opportunities, the same time periods, to fire rockets into Israel’s civilian centers. This reality is also ignored by the one-world media as is the fact that most of the Arab world does nothing to impede Hamas’ path to violence.

The Ominous Influence of Iran
In all of this – and in all of the reporting by the one-world media on the events taking place – one aspect is being either ignored or overlooked: The influence of Iran in the current conflict.

Throughout Operation Cast Lead, Iran has been interacting with not only Hamas, but Hezbollah (a terrorist entity inspired, and some say created, by the Islamist Revolution that stole Iran from the Iranian people), Syria and sympathetic operatives and elected officials in Lebanon. Iran, not unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, stands committed to the destruction of the Israeli state by any and all means possible. It is in this quest that these three entities – regardless of their juxtaposed Sunni and Shi’ite dogmas that have served as a catalyst for centuries of conflict between the two groups – stand united against a country roughly the size of Maryland.

Iran serves as Hamas’ primary benefactor, providing political, military and financial support to the Sunni group. Iran denies that they are facilitating weapons but the technology being used to extend the range of the rockets fired by Hamas evidences Iranian influence and support.

On January 14, 2009, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged Arab leaders to sever all contacts with Israel and to use their political and economic means to pressure the Israelis into halting their offensive in Gaza.

In an interview with al-Manar television, an entity of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad said,

"Arabs can do many things on the political level...they can cut off all open and secret contacts with Israel...they can use their political capabilities to pressure the backers of the Zionist entity by severing relations with them. And they can make use of their economic wealth."

In an interview I conducted with Dr. Walid Phares, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Director of its Future of Terrorism Project, I asked if Iran could be using Hamas, in the current conflict, as a probe, as a feeler, to test the resolve of not only Israel but the commitment of the West – and especially the United States –  to liberty in the Middle East. His response was in the affirmative.

“Absolutely. When we mention that Hamas is a jihadi instrument which is now in the hands of the Iranian led axis because of their full-fledged funding and military training, you have to imagine that there is a ‘war room’ in Tehran and that ‘war room’ moves its branches on several fronts...So, yes, it’s true that Hamas is moving along the lines of an Iranian strategy and it’s also true that this is the perfect time for the Iranians to use Hamas to test the reaction of the new administration in the United States...”

Yet the one-world media, the mainstream media, stands delinquent in examining the intense relationship between Iran and Hamas and the motives behind Iran’s desire to entertain the relationship at all, given their respective Shi’ite and Sunni origins.

The Canary in the Proverbial Coal Mine
They say that Israel is America’s “canary in a coal mine”; that whatever happens to Israel will eventually happen to the United States and the West. As the dawn of a new presidential administration here in the United States takes place, one that has put into place people who mistakenly believe – and sometimes gravely so – that acts of terrorism are to be treated as law enforcement issues, we should all ask if we haven’t put ourselves in a position favorable to inviting violent jihad back to our shores.

The Gazan battlefields on which Israel now defends her people must be considered one of the battlefields that comprise the global battle theater in the war against radical Islamist aggression. This global battle theater is not unlike the consequential battlefields of ages past; battle theaters that saw violent, tyrannical Islamist aggression vanquished at the gates of Vienna and at al-Andalus. It is a battlefield – not unlike the battlefield of Badr, circa 624 AD – that, if lost, could determine the veracity of those who quest to establish a global Islamic Caliphate.

Despicably, in the end – and even though the information surrounding the events in Gaza and the greater Middle East concern everyone in the free world – the truth of the situation in Gaza and Israel, the truth about Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah and radical Islamist aggression, doesn’t fit into the one-world media’s Progressive-Left agenda.

God help us all.