Round Up

Like all war, the campaign in Gaza is hellish. Stop treating it like a PR battle

"One of the strangest aspects of our Western reaction to Israel at war is our tendency to assess who is “winning” and “losing” as if it were a sports contest. This dehumanizes the victims of this war — including the hundreds of Palestinian children who have died as unwilling martyrs to Hamas’ barbaric human-shield military strategy.

It also provides the terrorist group with an incentive to prolong the conflict by sending more missiles at Israeli towns and cities: Western journalists obsessed with the “who is winning” narrative award “points” to Hamas every time that either an Israeli or Palestinian civilian dies. It is a lopsided scoring system that only encourage the group’s nihilistic tendencies. (Israel’s victories meanwhile, are more obscure — because the tunnels being blown up are underground, and Hamas gunmen killed by Israel usually are presented to the world as innocent bystanders.)

A perfect distillation of all this was contained in Patrick Martin’s July 25 Globe & Mail dispatch, “Why Hamas is winning the war” — a sort of point by point rundown on which side is lighting up the scoreboard and how.

To his credit, Mr. Martin is careful to point out that “Israel’s exemplary practice of issuing warnings before strikes on certain neighbourhoods or buildings has given Israel a degree of respect and understanding in the international community, as has Israel’s exposing of Hamas’s technique of using civilians as human shields, a likely war crime.”"

RTWT

Senate Passes Resolution Supporting Israel

"The Senate has passed a resolution that states the Senate’s support of Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas rocket attacks and condemns a biased United Nations report, reports The Hill.

The resolution, passed Tuesday, was passed through a unanimous consent agreement. It also condemns a United Nations Human Rights Council (Emphasis mine) report that stated Israel had committed human rights violations against Palestinian Arabs.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that UN report was “disgusting” and failed to recognize that Israel is defending itself from attacks started by Hamas, a terrorist organization.

“I’ve always been a supporter of the UN but what I saw last week disgusted me,” Reid was quoted as having said of the report. “It was so one-sided.”"

(Harry Reid has an epiphany! Quelle Surprise!!)

I've saved the best for last:

Rand Paul to MSNBC Host: ‘When Your Network Does 24-Hour News Telling the Truth,’ Then We Can Talk

"Melber pressed on: “But when you said, well, here’s where the rules for private businesses are concerning, why not explain that you’ve evolved on that?”

The senator replied that he has been attacked by “half-a-dozen people on your network trying to say I’m opposed to the Civil Rights Act,” while he’s never actually opposed the law. “I’m not willing to engage with people who are misrepresenting my viewpoint on this,” he said. “For people to say that, really, they don’t want to have an honest discussion about it.”

And Melber continued again: “I think the honest discussion is that you said some title of it, Title II and Title VII, that relate to it…”

With Sen. Paul interrupting: “The honest discussion of it would be that I never was opposed to the Civil Rights Act and when your network does 24-hour news telling the truth, then maybe we can get somewhere with the discussion.”"