Wednesday 28 January 2009

FREEMAN CENTER BROADCAST- January 28, 2009
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'TIME Running Out' against Israel'

Shevat 2, 5769, 27 January 09 11:57
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
 
TIME cover page TIME cover page
 
TIME (IsraelNN.com) TIME magazine has been a constant critic of Israel since the eve of the war in Gaza, when it blamed Israel for shattering hopes for peace while claiming that bringing quiet to the Middle East is "simple" if the Jewish State would return to its 1949-1967 borders.
 
Its reporters and bloggers have continuously portrayed Israel, which it granted the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, as the villain that retaliated with "disproportionate" force.
 
The magazine was pessimistic about Israel from the outset of Operation Cast Lead and through the ceasefire. On the eve of IDF retaliation for massive rocket strikes on southern Israel, TIME writer Aaron J. Klein (not to be confused with Aaron Klein of WorldNetDaily) wrote, "Israel will need to move carefully. Air strikes that kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians are only likely to fuel support for Hamas and ramp up international pressure to end the operation quickly."
 
He concluded by implying that Israel's actions, and not Hamas's rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, "shattered…hope" of American officials who he said urged Israel to refrain from attacking before President Barack Obama took office.
 
The following Day, December 29, Tony Karon predicted in TIME that Israel would suffer on the diplomatic front. He, too, concluded "Hamas has good reason to expect that Israel's military campaign will be limited."
 
It's Israel's Fault

Israel was implicitly blamed by TIME for ending the June 19 ceasefire, which preceded the war. The magazine told its readers worldwide that Hamas rocketfire "was widely interpreted as a bargaining tactic aimed at securing more favorable truce terms, particularly lifting the economic siege."
Two days later, the magazine, after having diminished the chance of a ground assault, quoted unnamed defense officials that chances for "a successful ground assault would have been higher if it had been launched earlier in the bombing campaign, not several days into it."
 
TIME writer Scott MacLeod wrote the same day, "After too many Israeli invasions and incursions and bombing raids to count over the last six decades, somehow it's hard to be optimistic that the latest one will finally silence the Palestinian bombers and rocketers so Israelis can live in peace." It was not clear to which invasions he was referring since 1948.
Without referring to eight years of escalating rocket attacks on southern Israel which claimed the lives of ten Israelis, MacLeod offered a parting shot to immediate past United States President George W. Bush. "His legacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the scene of dead and wounded on the streets of Gaza," he wrote.
 
Klein continued the pessimistic tone the following day, quoting "Israeli military sources… that they believe Hamas's military capabilities have hardly been dented."
 
U.S. to the Rescue

On December 31, the fourth day of Operation Cast Lead, Klein brought out Israeli writer and pacifist David Grossman's article in The New York Times calling for an Israeli unilateral ceasefire and added, "I agree with him."
He also called for America to come to the rescue because "the only solution to the situation in Gaza - if there is one - is intense, patient, long-term negotiations mediated by the United States."
 
Both Karon and Klein on January 3 asserted that Defense Minister Ehud Barak and outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were refraining from ordering troops into Gaza because they knew that the IDF is unlikely to destroy Hamas and is afraid of "getting dragged into a quagmire." However, events proved that the IDF had outsmarted both Hamas and TIME, feigning procrastination while surprising everyone with a ground assault.
The following day, MacLeod chipped in with a harsh analysis that the rise of Hamas was a direct result of the Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and Gaza since 1967.
 
"Decades of military occupation and spread of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories provided the fertile ground for the rise of the radical Islamist faction Israel now seeks to crush," he wrote.
Without citing the PA's rejection of peace offers in the late 1990s and continuing Israeli concessions in negotiations with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, MacLeod re-wrote history. He alleged, "Israel's failure to finalize a historic deal with Yasser Arafat's nationalist party, and refusal to even continue peace talks for seven years, made it inevitable that Israel would face continual conflict with Palestinians, with Hamas increasingly in the forefront."
 
The Land Belongs to Arabs

A TIME blog by Joe Klein on January 6 maintained, "The Palestinians have a legitimate historical beef. The land was theirs. Even Hamas has a legitimate beef: the Israeli constriction of traffic into and out of Gaza." He made no mention of legal documents that Jews bought land in Gaza before 1948 and did not cite the 2005 Disengagement program that ended with the destruction of all Jewish communities in Gaza and the withdrawal of the IDF from the region.
 
TIME's Tim McGirk followed with a statement that Israel must deal politically with a PA government that includes Hamas and that "Israel eventually will have to pull back to the 1967 borders and dismantle many of the settlements on the Palestinian side, no matter how loudly its ultra-religious parties protest. Only then will the Palestinians and the other Arab states agree to a durable peace. It's as simple as that."
 
MacLeod continued the theme, informing readers that the Saudi Arabian 2002 initiative that Israel return to its old borders was "a sincere effort to end a conflict that has caused needless destruction throughout the region for decades."
As the IDF began to take control of most of Gaza, Joe Klein advised on January 19, "The current ground campaign seems destined for failure, according to Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a very astute observer of military actions."
 
Klein concluded that "Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal or at least one it can credibly achieve."
As the Cast Lead campaign proved successful, he then condemned the Israeli government for allegedly damaging the United States position in the Middle East and claimed "that Olmert, Livni, and Barak… have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends."
 
The magazine's reporter Andrew Lee Butters criticized Israel for keeping journalists out of Gaza, one of the moves that kept news of critical military maneuvers from reaching Hamas. "Israel's decision to keep the Western press out of Gaza may also have backfired, because it's given a monopoly of coverage to the more inflammatory reporting of Arab satellite television stations such as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiyya, which maintain bureaus in Gaza," he said.
 
Twists on Ceasefires

Days before Israel declared a ceasefire, Karon again blamed Israel for the violence, asserting that "even before the Israeli invasion began in late December, Hamas had offered to renew its six-month ceasefire with Israel on condition that the border crossings from Egypt and Israel into Gaza be opened."
 
Without mentioning more than 50 mortar, sniper fire and rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel during the first five months of the truce, he wrote, "Those crossings have been closed as part of a strategy of imposing economic deprivation on the people of Gaza in the hope that they would turn on Hamas."
 
After having repeatedly called for a ceasefire, TIME's Tim McGirk last week questioned its longevity because "it may be only days or weeks before the Islamists or one of the myriad militant groups in Gaza decides to take revenge for the Israeli assault and again start firing rockets into southern Israel.
 
"A unilateral ceasefire practically guarantees that Israel and Hamas are destined for another bloody brawl. And once again, the victims will be the Palestinian civilians whose streets and homes in Gaza are turned into a battleground," he concluded, again without mentioning eight years of attacks on southern Israeli civilians.
 
He concluded that if a Hamas rocket lands in "a crowded Israeli schoolyard, what then? How will Israel respond? There is not much left in Gaza to destroy.
 
Shmuel Rosner wrote earlier this month in Haaretz, "TIME has an agenda to sell – and insinuating that the ball is in Israel’s court is the only way to sell it."
 
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Posted by Britannia Radio at 22:44