Stories like this are extremely frustrating. While I’m not one to “blame the messenger,” not getting the story right has extremely negative consequences:
“During this six-week period of ‘relative quiet,’ however, some 17 Palestinians were killed and at least 59 injured by Israeli occupation soldiers and settlers, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The dead included Mahmoud Kabaha, a four-year-old boy, who was sitting in the back seat of a jeep with his family at a checkpoint when an Israeli soldier shot him dead– in a spray of bullets that the army simply called an ‘accidental burst of gunfire’ (Associated Press, 7/25/03). Virtually none of the major U.S. news reports on the August 12 bombings alluded to the Palestinian death toll in this period, leaving out a key piece of the story: For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the violence had never ceased; while the Israeli attacks had decreased, there had never been anything like an Israeli cease-fire.”
This double standard leads Americans to blindly support Israel in its insane policies, and for American politicians to say incredibly stupid things. When Mayor Bloomberg says: “Anybody who sees the young babies [hospitalized] your heart had to go out, and you have to react and say we are not going to sit back and let our children be massacred and injured. This is just not acceptable in the civilized world,” he seems to be justifying Hamas’ behavior.