Yet in this ritualized reporting, journalists once again missed the real story, which is much messier, confusing, harder to photograph and difficult to report. The real headlines should inform readers that the Palestinian Authority is disintegrating, Palestinian political culture is imploding, Palestinians are turning on one another. While the struggle among suicide bombers, Israeli soldiers, and the civilians caught in the crossfire has a clear script, the multi-dimensional civil war among rival Palestinian factions has no clear story line.
Imagine the reaction had Israeli mobs murdered two Egyptian soldiers on the Gaza border, murdered Yasser Arafat's cousin in his own home, or trashed the house of the Palestinian interior minister. Try to envision what would happen if there existed a group of Israeli terrorists with a long track record of bloody attacks, ideologically committed to negating Palestinian rights and addicted to anti-Islamic rhetoric, running for the Israeli parliament, let alone poised to win a serious share of the vote.
Headlines would blare. CNN, BBC, and CBC would file special reports with fancy graphics. The United Nations, the European Union, and most of the nations around the world would condemn Israel for its anti-Palestinian brutality. Jews themselves would wring their hands, pound their hearts, and slap their foreheads worrying about what their people had wrought.
Instead, the power of Hamas, despite its lethal ideology, is growing in the Palestinian territories. People barely remember that Palestinian gunmen in Gaza shot and killed 65-year-old Moussa Arafat after storming his home in September, and a sustained internet search did not uncover the names of the two Egyptian soldiers killed and the 30 others wounded when hundreds of Palestinians mobbed the Rafah crossing, egged on by about 30 armed men from the supposedly mainstream al-Aksa Brigade.
According to Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly On Line, some Egyptians did mutter about the double standard. Abbas El-Tarabily, editor-in-chief of the opposition daily Al-Wafd wrote that, "if the two Egyptian victims had been killed by the Israelis, strikes would have taken place across Egypt and the whole issue might have been taken up with the UN Security Council."
Is Canada becoming cool?
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