This is a long excerpt from a very long piece by David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post. I urge you to read the original from beginning to end, because something must be done to increase the effectiveness of the J- [and or Z-] blogosphere. We all work so hard, but our message is not getting out. We are losing the asymmetrical war of words and images.
Editor's Notes: Moral blindness
.... THE VERY nature of the asymmetrical warfare Israel has been made to fight against the Gaza terrorists - as against Hizbullah at the northern border less than two years ago - is that it requires informed and sophisticated reporting in order for the watching world to understand. It requires historical context. It requires knowledge of the processes that gradually unfolded to produce the rocket fire, the Israeli response, the bloodshed.It is, indeed, terrible, that escalated Kassam and Grad rocket fire on Israel in the last few days has produced large numbers of Palestinian civilian fatalities. But that is the accurate equation: Cross-border Palestinian attacks launched from civilian areas, aimed at Israeli civilians living inside their own sovereign territory, produced an Israeli military effort to thwart those rockets in which Palestinian human shields were killed.
Last week was not a case of Israel mercilessly and deliberately killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians. Yet that is how it was widely depicted. That is how it has been widely perceived.
And as a direct consequence, more and more people in this region and around the world are more hostile to Israel today than they were a week ago, more disgusted by us, more convinced of our guilt and more, in some cases one fears, determined to act violently against us.
More and more people are urging Israel to negotiate with the extremists organizing the rocket-fire - to legitimize Hamas, and thus strengthen its hold on Gaza and embolden it in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the people of Sderot are sinking into hopelessness and Ashkelon has become the new front line.
What an extraordinary success for Hamas. What an extraordinary incentive to keep on firing.
IT IS not easy to effectively articulate the wider narrative over film and pictures of bloodied Palestinian children, wailing Palestinian parents, ground-churning Israeli tanks and ear-splitting Israeli firepower.
But Israel maintains its criminal strategic insistence on barely trying - refusing year after year to invest the necessary resources and effort in competent public diplomacy. There is, of course, no commercial Israeli satellite TV station, broadcasting in English and Arabic. The state's foreign language overseas radio broadcasts are dying for lack of funds. The prime minister sails blithely on with his single English spokesperson.
.... Meanwhile, too much of the international media insistently allows its footage to tell its story, rather than placing that footage in context. Too many correspondents employ reportage that amplifies but does not explain.Too little effort is dedicated to getting the pictures that would help tell the fuller story, the root story - the footage from the Hamas training camps where the rocket-crews are "inspired" to hatred, and from the schools where tomorrow's Kassam cells are indoctrinated with the perverse "imperative" for personal jihad, to kill and be killed in the name of God.
AND WHAT happens over time is that those fair-minded international policy-makers and opinion-shapers who do understand exactly who here is the victim and who here the victimizer get pummeled into submission by the sheer weight of awful, bloody, unexplained footage. And they become defensive and apologetic and ultimately fall silent.
And with time, the more moderate leaders in this region can no longer safely attempt to foster warm or even chilly relations with the Jewish state, because their hostility-filled populace won't allow them to, and they risk destabilizing their own rule. So they too fall silent, or worse.
David Horovitz likely doesn't realize the extent to which this is affecting us inside America.
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