Cynical Nation

Well, that's what they say, anyway.

Two Israeli airstrikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday killed at least eight Palestinian gunmen, part of an intensifying military campaign designed to stop rocket fire into southern Israel.

The first strike came just after noon in northern Gaza, the most common launch site for the homemade rockets that have been landing in southern Israel on a near-daily basis for weeks. Witnesses said two members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of the Fatah movement, were killed.

Ok, the emphasis is added by me here. But keep that in mind when you read the following:

"This Israeli escalation aims to bring the Palestinian people on their knees and to blackmail the government in order to win over political concessions," Ismail Haniyeh, a leader of the radical Palestinian group Hamas who is now prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, told reporters in Gaza before the second airstrike. "We will remain loyal to the rights of our people, and we will not give anything that may harm these rights."

So when rockets are fired into Israel on a near-daily basis for weeks, the rights of the Palestinian people are being upheld. When there's a retaliation from the people those rockets are being fired at, then it's attempted blackmail.

It's not like I expect a government run by a terrorist group to be reasonable, mind you. But it continues to be disconcerting how articles like this, written by American journalists, frame the story. they talk about how children may have been killed by the Israeli strike, but mention nothing of who has or hasn't been harmed by the original Palestinian rocket attacks--in fact, the extent of these attacks is hardly mentioned at all ,except that they have been continual.

Oh well. At least Europe and the US are finally taking a stand on this.