Thursday, January 24, 2008

THE HAMASPHERE

The BBC commentator described the scene as thousands of Gaza residents swarmed into Egypt (yes, Gaza has a border with Egypt even though the media has been suggesting for months that it is surrounded and blockaded by Israel alone) after the border fence was blasted away by militants overnight as "people power" and it truly was exactly that - the Palestinian version of "people power" meticulously planned and co-ordinated in every detail and pulled off with the help of supporters in the media. Welcome to "people power" in the Hamasphere!

McClatchy News correspondent Dion Nissenbaum has explained the entire border breach scenario had been meticulously planned for weeks. That it was worked in conjunction with all of the other media theatre antics we've seen in recent weeks is evidence that the scenes on the border were not a spontaneous display of "people power" as we know it anywhere else in the world. It was something far more sinister.

The crisis that spurred the border scenes is supposed to be based on humanitarian issues but what sort of people complain that they have no money, no food and no manufacturing power and yet have an abundant supply of explosives on hand to blow up border walls in up to 17 places, to manufacture missiles and rockets in factories (where the power supply is uninterrupted while the authorities shut down the power to hospitals and bakeries) and for those missiles to be fired at civilian targets across the border into neighbouring Israel?

Two days ago when Hamas authorities stage-managed Gaza's "plunge into darkness" for its media dupes, the BBC World News showed footage of a Gaza woman asking in a pleading voice, "why don't they leave us alone?"

A good question but the person who should have been asking it was a woman in Israel's Sderot which has been under a barrage of daily missile fire from Palestinian terrorist groups for years.

If they left her alone, then the woman in Gaza would be free to buy her bread any day of the week.

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