Many sincere supporters of impoverished Arab residents surrouding Israel paint a sympathetic picture of the victimhood of those people. And reporters fall all over themselves to echo these sad portrayals, projecting "innocent" Arab victims without accuracy or balance. They love to pretend there is no vicious terrorist provocation constantly emanating from those regions, no missiles raining down on Israeli civilians. The terrorists and their many many media supporters have been using lies and deception as the most effective weapon they've been able to field in the long-term, aggressive war they have been waging against Israel and the West.

The press alters our perceived reality when they constantly highlight the death (and purported death) and the misery of Arab citizens while conveniently overlooking the on-going death and misery of Jewish Palestinians who have been suffering from Arab attacks for 125 years, since long before there was even an Israel. Reporters studiously fail to accurately report the origins of each new battle in this long-running conflict. They never point out that each conflict is reignited by Islmo-fascist terrorists trying to kill Jews. They ignore the context of the Arab aggression, that the on-going violence is facilitated, indeed encouraged - by the neighboring despots who have a great interest in fostering continuing discord beyond their borders, and who use the fabricated external Israeli bogeyman to help suppress discontent from within. And they always report as fact the death of Arab civilians at the hands of Israeli military actions, when it later turns out that many of those victims died as a result of other Arabs violence, or as is the case with Al-Dura, were the actors in an elaborate hoax.

Human Rights Watch, while laudably anti-war, has consistently spoken with little regard for accuracy or fairness. Humans are violent. I'm sure that Human Rights Watch would deny that fact, but anybody who has any understanding of history or psychology - or experience with grade school bullies - can't escape concluding that Man has a long way to go before violent homo sapiens evolve to extinction. Given that predilection, HRW becomes Hizb'allah's allies and accomplices to murder when they blame Israel for the violence which was initiated and continues to be provoked by Hezb'allah, the Party of a merciless God, and their numerous terrorist allies. These terrorists see themselves doing God's work, which happens at the moment to be defined theologically in killing Jews and Christians wherever they can, and killing apostate Moslems - that is, Moslems who don't agree with their particularistic theology - whenever time permits. When Human Rights Watch can effectively stop the crazy bastards, maybe I'd have some reason to respect their condemnation of the victims of violence who defend themselves in as moral a way as is possible under vexing circumstances. That is, the Israelis, who are the victims despite the constant negative media portrayal.

Hezb'allah and it's allied terrorist organizations have repeatedly shown a highly sophisticated ability to manipulate (or often merely to blackmail) media and to mislead well-meaning but easily deceived NGO's into demonizing Israel's responses to the fatal provocations conducted by their own terrorist organizations. The most prominent example during Lebanon II was Hezb'allah's show and tell for "journalists" into Lebanon after an Israeli strike. The Hizb'allah guides permitted visits only to sites they had sanitized, permitted photos of prepared "victims", and then hustled the reporters away so they couldn't be too inquisitive. It was only later, after non-compromised journalists reviewed the staged photos, that the frauds and deceptions were exposed. After the staged photos of innocent death got wide circulation, "dead civilian victims" were later shown to be alive and well, but that accurate news never made it to the front pages - and often was not corrected in the media at all. In preparation for staging these photo-ops, terrorists' military equipment was removed from the locations which had been struck by Israel, and only later shown to have been present. But the media reported the scenes as required by their Hizb'allah handler/allies, and the world got front-page, worst-case reports, often untrue, and uncorrected for the most part, and certainly out of context. It was a rare occasion when someone got snared in his flagrant misrepresentation of the news, as deservedly happened to Adnann Hajj, the Reuters news photomodifier. Who knows how much of Mideast news is fabrication? Not just Photoshopping, either. Reporters have repeatedly been threatened unless they and their networks report only what the terrorists demand. The only verity is that news coming from anywhere in the Mideast other than Israel is fabrication.

As a troubling consequence of these and other clever and effective journalistic deceptions, many Westerners join the Arab chorus demonizing Israel. But could anyone possibly believe that Israel would be forced into shooting back at anyone if it weren't for the continuous Muslim killings of her citizens? Cause and effect are victims in this constant, ceaseless assault on truth. Yes, there are many horrible personal tragedies in this relentless conflict - but that is more true on the Israeli side, where the media ignore the victims, than it is on the Arab side, where terrorists use the media to arouse great sympathy for the victims who often later turn out principally to be victims of terrorist actions of one stripe or another. Distortion has become the terrorists' weapon of choice, facts are reworked as expedient to the terrorists' goal of killing all the infidels and returning the Middle East to its 12'th century glory. Israelis, the real victims in all this conflict, are constantly lied about and misrepresented by those who have found that arms alone will not fulfill their dream of Jewish extermination. It is logically absurd to believe that Israel would deliberately kill civilians when their intelligence is so sophisticated that they can tell when mobile weapons are emerging from and returning to underground bunkers. They wouldn't waste firepower on meaningless targets when it is vital for their own citizens' safety that they destroy real ones. Even more powerfully, Israel's moral attitude is such that they actually believe in the concept of purity of arms. Further, they really desire peace, while Islamists are seeking the self-defined glory of murder. Israel's attacks - in contrast to Islamic terrorists - may occasionally result in errors which kill unintended victims, but they don't attack civilians deliberately, nor do they fabricate the appearance of innocence which the Muslim terrorists utilize so cynically to garner world support in their staged photo-ops or in the blaming of deaths caused by terrorists themselves on the Israelis.

In "From Beirut to Jerusalem", Thomas Friedman, hardly a friend of Israel, reports on the case of a clan that wipes out a number of its leaders in such a way as to blame the killings on an enemy clan. That sort of devious, cynical murder of friends for the sake of publicity is precisely what distinguishes the Arab terrorists philosophically from Israelis. It clearly defines a basic, cultural difference that any critic of the news needs to bear in mind when attempting to interpret news data which could well be fabricated. Arab terrorists see murder as God's weapon of choice. Jews see killing as a defensive necessity, embarked upon only when absolutely necessary for self-preservation.

The terrorists have as their tactical plan the deliberate murder of as many Israeli civilians as possible. Since such practice violates Western cultural norms and the Geneva Conventions and UN Standards, they pretend that the Israelis are doing the same thing. Knowing how well big lies worked for Hitler, they perpetuate as many big lies as they can. In this vein, they claim to not hide among civilians when there is clearly established and voluminous evidence that such use of civilian shields is their regular practice. Israel shooting at terrorists hidden among civilians thus becomes a tragic necessity for her own protection, but results in the callous benefit to the terrorists that they can reap huge public relations bonanzas by utilizing further lies to get the world press to condemn Israel merely for effectively defending herself.

The Islamic terrorists and their patron-state masters despise honest news, seeing in Truth a vicious weapon against them. They have learned to rely on carefully crafted and subtly executed lies which have become a powerful device with which to distort local and world opinion and thus drive their malevolent program toward its goal.

The Islamo-fascist terrorists not only mutilate and murder dhimmis, showing the same disregard that Nazis had for their untermentschen - they also mutilate and kill each other in disputes about what avenue of belief in Allah is the only acceptable path to righteousness. They kill their oppressed women for reasons so superficial as to defy belief. Non-Muslims are killed at will in some Islamic countries, enslaved in others, totally banned from still others. This is a fanatical religion (perhaps that is a redundancy?) further polluted by a fanatical corps of adherents. This is Thuggee on steroids.

Arab intolerance is based entirely on an anachronistic culture which devalues human life and degrades and deligitimizes the "other", whether that other is non-Muslim or merely a different sect of Islamic belief. While the Jews are developing cures for cancer, the Islamists are a cancer on the human condition for which there seems to be no cure. When they aren't busy slaughtering the 'other' - and often even when they are - their fratricidal conflicts devastate whole regions and populations in prodigious bouts of religious fanaticism. Such fratricidal conflicts as the one between Iraq and Iran (more than a million people killed, many more maimed) foretell greater slaughters to come as Iran develops the nuclear ability to proselytize that 'there is but one god and "Allah" is His name'. Muslim fanatics are the new alchemists: When confronted with modernity, they turn gold into camel dung. Need I even name the regions they are currently devastating or attempting to devastate? Can you even count the numbers of people enslaved, the numbers murdered, the numbers displaced and starving?

The many lessons of Arab fanaticism and their implacable and effective pursuit of their irrational goals, should teach anyone to look at Arab propaganda as just that: Propaganda. It has little or no basis of fact, is not of this world, derives from an irrational though often highly persuasive effort to deceive and mislead generous Western populations into sympathetically, albeit suicidally, aiding in furthering Islamo-fascist goals of world domination. This is a domino theory that you can believe in.

There’s more to life than rebutting the constant flow of uninformed, misinformed, and/or deliberately deceptive attacks on Israel, particularly in the otherwise liberal and progressive media. Talk about failing to learn from history – much of the left doesn’t even seem to know history when it comes to the Arab – Israeli conflict. The anti-Israel crowd seem to mythologize that Israel sprang deus-ex-machina from the loins of those media-controlling capitalist Jews who just took heavily populated, highly developed, fruitful Middle-Eastern land away from the victim indigenous primitives. It would be interesting to speculate on how much of the unstated source of this “liberal” anti-Israel narrative derives from subconscious, cultural assimilation of 2,000 years of official, Western, Church-driven anti-Semitism.

Israel was founded on perhaps 15% of the land originally demarcated to become a Jewish homeland. Britain removed 70% of the promised Palestine Mandate and enthroned a desert sheik, creating Jordan. At the time of Israel’s establishment in 1948 by the UN, the Jews had hoped to be granted more of their historic homeland, but they reluctantly opted to settle for this tiny patch. The Arabs, however, not only didn’t accept Israel - they also destroyed the Palestinian state which had been simultaneously created by the UN. Five neighboring countries invaded both Palestine and Israel, occupying every area they could. Dastardly things were done all around. This was, after all, war, one of man’s crowning achievements. However, it was a war fomented by the aggressor Muslim states, pursued by them, and seemed likely to be successful since they vastly outnumbered the Jews, had air forces and tank forces, which the Jews didn’t, and were further supported by dozens of other Arab states. The Arabs killed one in every one hundred citizens of newly-founded Israel, a huge toll by any standard except the standard just previously established by Hitler.

Some argue that Israel had no right to exist because Jews have no right to live on land they purchased, in homes they bought. Why not? Others hold that Jews have no right to form a democratic government in this UN sanctioned country. Really puzzling. Still others argue that Israel is an imperfect state and therefore has no right to exist. Yet they fail to fairly compare Israeli flaws to the massive failings of her aggressor, totalitarian neighbors. This is a case where moral relativity is illuminating. Why so much focus on victim Israel’s peccadilloes and no concern whatsoever about the massive social injustices of her attackers? And why do some insist that each time the Arabs attacked Israel that it was Israel who was the aggressor?

There are also many people who distort the statistics of Israel’s founding, for example comparing the demographics of Palestine to the Jewish population of Israel, essentially comparing apples to typewriters. But population should be irrelevant in any case. Even the UN holds that freedom of movement is a civil and political right, yet pro-terror advocates rail against the Jews who fled pogroms and Hitler, lawfully bought property and settled in Palestine amongst their co-religionists whose families had remained there since antiquity. Then there are those who hold that supporting Israel is un-American, that our national interest lies in abandoning our sole democratic ally in the Middle East so we can assure ourselves of ample oil supplies. We shouldn’t take a moral stand? Are we not a country which occasionally aspires to noble actions just because they are the right thing to do, or must we merely bend our values whenever we are extorted?

I’m grateful that somehow we manage to get our relationship with Israel right as much as we do in the face of constant carping on the part of the well-meaning misinformed who are fed a constant stream of deception, the most effective weapon yet that the confrontation states have deployed against tiny Israel.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Israel accepted far less than she wanted in 1948 in hopes of a satisfactory life for the remnant of Jews who had no other sanctuary. Middle-Eastern leaders then and now rejected the UN offer, demanding total satisfaction. Perfection. Had they been capable of settling for good, there could have miraculous growth for the Arab citizens of the Middle East over the past sixty years instead of on-going despotism, poverty, violence, famine, disease, and religious manipulation everywhere. But the Arab leaders still demand perfect. They want no dhimmis anywhere in their domain -and certainly no thriving democracy in their midst. Until those Arab neighbors are willing to settle for mere good, people will continue suffering there, and Israel will be forced to continue protecting her people as best she can in the tragic environment such violent Arab intransigence creates.