Welcome Back

It is fitting that we resume activity on July 5th, the day after the birth of our nation. Today's post, however, will focus on a region of the world other than the United States.

One of today's headlines in The Jerusalem Post was an Associated Press article titled "Rights group calls for soldiers' release". The end of the article featured the folllowing announcement made by Human Rights Watch: "Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli towns and IDF artillery strikes near populated areas in northern Gaza constituted serious violations of the rules of war and said both sides showed "insufficient regard for civilian life."

Well yes Human Rights Watch how enlightened of you to come to the conclusion that firing missiles into Israeli cities purely for the purpose of mass murder is a violation of sovereignty. Of course a HRW statement placing value on the life of Israelis has to be qualified by a complementary statement reprimanding Israel.

The abovementioned HRW decree equates terrorism with collateral damage in saying that both "constitute violations of the rules of war", in the same breath mind you, without further elaboration. Regardless of the factions involved, the belief that deliberate targeting of civillian life is the same as striking military installations in the midst of civillians is a completely errouneous one. Obviously the loss of even one innocent life is always a tragedy, but civillian death as the unintended consequence of an attack on an armed combatant is distincly different from an attack with the sole purpose of killing innocents. To not realize this basic fact of armed conflict when one's job is dealing with wartime human rights issues is to be completely incompetent and/or completely biased. In the case of HRW it is probably both.

Further telling of the abilities and views of the HRW is the fact that they consider any collateral damage sustained during military operations the fault of the party attacking armed combatants and not the combatants who operate out of civilian areas with the intent of causing collateral damage to their own populations. The fact that organizations such as HRW prostheltyze their relativist view of the the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, makes the terrorist strategy of imbedding military assets within residential areas all the more effective. How noble of a human rights organization to facilitate the loss of innocent life.

**Many of the assertions in this post were inspired by the work of Edward Greenspan Esq. For a more definitive work on this subject please look into his writings.**

Gazastan: The Birth of a Terror Nation

Today Hamas killed or sent into exile effectively every member of the opposition Fatah faction. Any remnant of the "pragmatic" Palestinian Authority in Gaza has thus been eliminated. This story signals the creation of an all terror Islamo-fascist state in the heart of the Middle East. If this is the first time your hearing about this development I'm not surprised. The civil war between Fatah and Hamas has been raging for almost a year and has claimed scores of lives. This vastly important piece of news, however, was denied coverage in the mainstream media for almost its entire duration. The climax today was barely touched upon on the various nightly news programs on the mainstream networks. An Associated Press video of civilians caught in the cross fire was aired for a few seconds and the situation was not elaborated on by any stretch of the imagination on the major stations.

The influence of television is such that the pseudo-news networks can set the standard for what qualifies as a "pressing issue" in this nation. Unfortunately news stations have responded to this power they hold by racing to the lowest common denominator in terms of what can be called information. This nation desperately needs some organization committed to responsible, informative, and accurate reporting.