Gail Vida Hamburg Propagandizes for the Palestinians

Last night on the Huffington Post, the latest Palestinian propaganda op ed was published, titled This Year in Palestine. Written by a reporter named Gail Vida Hamburg, it's a whitewashing of the Palestinian cause, focusing on those Palestinians who maintain a non-violent objective and ignoring those Palestinians who are inconveniently not so peaceful.

Hamburg leads off with a lie by omission of epic proportions:

"In 2003-04, after Israel began construction of its 425-mile security fence in the West Bank, a Middle East Affairs listserv I belonged to at the time started circulating news tips, alerts, and sources for those of us interested in developing stories.
One news alert was a catalog of hardships faced by Palestinians as a consequence of the fence, culled from various news sources. Farmers on the West Bank were angry that they could not lead their sheep to pasture or harvest their olive and guava trees because Israel's new fence separated them from their land."

She then quotes a Palestinian farmer complaining about the fence.

Hamburg does get points for calling it a fence as opposed to the other terms the Palestinians use for it, but she loses a lot more by completely omitting any mention of the reason the fence was built. This is a classic Palestinian propaganda technique: talk a lot about how the Palestinians are suffering, say nothing about what they did that might have lead to their suffering. A journalist would mention the reason the fence was built, a propagandist would not. It seems Ms. Hamburg has left her journalistic integrity on the bench when she wrote this article.

Next, Hamburg confronts why America didn't sweep in and deliver the Palestinians from their suffering:

"As easy as that seemed, we in America didn't have "the bandwidth" to take this on. We were trying to make sense of our own confounding adventure in Iraq -- bomb a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 to avenge 9/11, and seed democracy there, for freedom to bloom like cactus flowers -- in the manure of 48-hour mushroom clouds and loamy yellowcake from Niger."

 I'm glad someone is still willing to self-flagellate for Iraq, but even if America wasn't in Iraq, we still wouldn't be charging off to help the poor suffering Palestinians. We know how they partied on 9/11 and only 15% of Americans sympathized with the Palestinians in 2003. America is not going to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians and we have no reason to. Simply "suffering" isn't good enough, there are millions of people suffering all around the world, and most of them are suffering more than the Palestinians.

Hamburg then recaps the plot of Five Broken Cameras and ends her piece. So let's talk a little bit about what didn't make it into "This Year in Palestine"

All the rocket attacks into Israel from "Palestine" including one that killed three people.

Human Rights Watch issued a report criticizing Hamas' criminal justice system, saying it had " arbitrary arrests, torture and unfair trials".

There was a sharp rise in honor killings in the Palestinian-controlled territories

Unsurprising that those things weren't mentioned.