by ROBERT FISK
Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Here we go again. Israel is going to “root out Palestinian terror” – which it has been claiming to do, unsuccessfully, for 64 years – while Hamas announces that Israel has “opened the gates of hell” by murdering its military leader, Ahmed al-Jabari.
Hezbollah announced several times that Israel had “opened the gates of hell” for attacking Lebanon. Yasser Arafat too waffled on about the “gates of hell”.
And we journos are repeating all the cliches we’ve used for the past 40 years.
The killing of Mr Jabari was a “targeted attack” – like the Israeli “surgical air strikes”, which killed almost 17,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982, the 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, in 2006, and the 11 civilians killed in one Gaza house yesterday.
At least Hamas, with their Godzilla rockets, don’t claim anything “surgical” about them. They are meant to murder Israelis – any Israeli, man, woman or child.
As, in truth, are the Israeli attacks on Gaza. But don’t say that or you’ll be an anti-Semitic Nazi.
The new exchange rate in Gaza for Palestinian and Israeli deaths has reached 16:1. It will rise, of course. The exchange rate in 2008-9 was 100:1.
Washington supports Israel’s “right to defend itself”, then claims a spurious neutrality – as if Israel’s bombs didn’t come from the US as assuredly as the Fajr-5 rockets come from Iran.
Meanwhile, the pitiful British foreign secretary William Hague holds Hamas “principally responsible” for the latest war.
But there is no such evidence. According to ‘The Atlantic Monthly’, the Israeli killing of a “mentally unfit” Palestinian who strayed towards the border may have been the start of the latest war.
Independent for more