This is what the article said: "The Beersheba bombings shattered a nearly six-month lull in suicide attacks that had Israelis daring to think it was pretty safe to go about their lives once again as normal."
There are two points in response to that. First (as usual) Reuters has put a false frame on the story, which is not that the bombing had stopped, but now it started again and the Israelis were wrong in their thinking.
The attempts at bombing have gone on daily, if at a somewhat lower and more fatigued level than two years ago; it's just that the combo of the Security Fence, IDF raids, and GSS intelligence have been enough to prevent successes, until now. This was no surprise at all to the Israelis, who have no illusions that they can stop everything. But Reuters and all the other news agencies do not regard attempted suicide bombings as news and give the Pals a free pass on those, so the continued attempts have simply been air-brushed out of the account.
Second, I would agree that Reuters did not show a strong pro-Hamas bias in this particular article, though they often do. There was a mild "gosh, Hamas showed them" bias, which I assure you is absent when the Israelis kill a Hamas leader.
But only a mild bias or even no bias at all can be offensive, when the subject matter is the deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians. Think of the case of an axe-murderer at a kindergarten; you really would expect the reporter to express some horror of the murders, not to go on neutrally about the skill of the murderer in taking only one stroke to decapitate each child and his cleverness in eluding the police.
But Reuters, who long ago decided that Hamas' techniques are legitimate as far as they are concerned, never expresses any horror about the death of children - unless they are Palestinian children. Israeli children are just casualties of war to them.
This is very important point in the WOT - are terrorist techniques acceptable and legitimate, or are they war crimes? It is a big advantage to the terrorists if they are legitimate, and this is an advantage that Reuters gives them every day., |
