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Sunday, August 24, 2014

The Invisible War

Sadly for Hamas, their war against Israel might as well be invisible to the American public engrossed in the Ferguson drama.

Israel is still hammering Hamas, which still hopes to kill some Jews with rocket attacks and score "victim card" points for suffering casualties (that Hamas tactics guarantee) from Israeli attacks:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Palestinian civilians on Sunday to leave immediately any site where militants are operating, one day after Israel took the Gaza war to a new level by flattening a 13-storey apartment tower.

Israeli aircraft first fired a non-explosive rocket at the building, a sign to residents to get out, before attacking it on Saturday. Seventeen people were wounded in the strike on the structure, which Israel said had housed a Hamas command centre.

The war is old and now background noise for new stuff to Tweet about.

Unless Hamas stages an anti-Ferguson police department rally with Al Sharpton leading the parade, I'm not sure how much attention Hamas is going to get here.

UPDATE: I'm probably too hopeful despite our press moving on given the amazing focus of the world on Israel:

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

Sadly, Israel is a Western democracy and so presumed guilty in any battle with non-Westerners.

Assad--even at 191,000 dead in his war, including repeated use of poison gas (even after sending "all" his chemical weapons abroad under the Kerry-Lavrov faux success) has a credible shot at convincing the West that he is a partner to fight ISIL jihadis in Syria, and nobody would ever accuse him of waging war on "brown people" out of blood lust, or something.

But Israel is in a daily battle with jihadis and despite taking more care to avoid killing Arabs than Assad would ever dream of, the press has decided Israel is the bad guy in this fight.