16 August 2014
B’tselem and the Martians (2)
The Gaza War and Hamas
In Part 1 it was suggested that whereas the Martians were only able to see one of the parties to a conflict due to an equipment malfunction, B’tselem has no such excuse. Its failure to see is a product of downplaying or ignoring what it prefers not to see.
As an illustration of this, Part 1 noted that the B’tselem website covers the conflict in Gaza with only a single article devoted to Hamas out of 15 front-page articles (on 11 August 2014). This briefly comments that the Hamas practice of firing rockets from civilian areas in Gaza into civilian areas in Israel is ”morally and legally reprehensible” – but apparently this is not illegal or criminal for B’tselem.
Given the unrelenting blame heaped upon Israel by B’tselem elsewhere on its website with a variety of accusations of criminal activity, it is hard to view this mild rebuke as other than a mere token. Presumably, its inclusion is intended to provide at least some appearance of 'balance' in its criticism.
How else to explain that nowhere in the article, or elsewhere in its coverage of the war, or elsewhere on the B’tselem website, is there any mention that Hamas is a murderous anti-Semitic terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of as many Jews as possible?
Typically, this is also absent from the coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by the mainstream mass media. But why would B’tselem want to hide it? Is it such an irrelevance that it can be ignored? Or is it information critical to understanding the conflict?
