An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Let’s Tell the Truth About Hamas and Gaza - by Sean Durns

Terrorists, it seems, make for poor rulers — a truth that even anti-Israel organizations and the press should be able to understand.

Sean Durns..
Algemeiner..
09 January '20..

It turns out that genocidal Islamist terrorist groups are bad at governing. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. But apparently it is to The Washington Post. The newspaper’s January 2 dispatch decried living conditions in the Gaza Strip, but failed to place blame where it belongs: with Hamas, the US-designated terror group that rules the Strip.

Citing a 2012 UN report, the Post asserted that Gaza would “become unlivable by 2020” if “prevailing economic, environmental, and political trends continued.” It is, the Post said, “a bleak reality facing Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents as they approach a new year and new decade.”

Reporters Miriam Berger and Hazem Balousha highlighted some of the issues facing Gaza: a sea filled with sewage “pumped in because there’s not enough electricity and infrastructure to run Gaza’s war-torn sewage system”; the “hospitals, schools, and homes” that are “similarly running on empty, worn down by the lack of clean water, electricity, infrastructure, and jobs or money.”

“Barely anyone,” they write “has enough clean water to drink.” The Post quotes some Palestinians. The newspaper also uncritically cites the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN itself. Contravening standard journalistic practices, no Israeli official is quoted.

Yet, many of the Post’s sources have a documented history of bias. And important facts and context are omitted in the article.

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Sean Durns is a Senior Research Analyst for the Washington, DC office of CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.