Inside Hamas’s rats’ nest and why the merchants of terror want babies to die

27/07/2014 00:00

By Hugh Ash

IT took two days for carrier pigeons to deliver news of Wellington’s rout of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 – ‘a damned, near-run thing’, admitted the gumboot general – to London.
   In stark contrast, today’s battles are played out ‘live’ before a worldwide audience, tooled up with hi-tech gizmos, commentary too often provided by rookie correspondents parachuted in, having read the Janet & John primer to Middle East conflicts on their flights over.
   But so horrendously tragic are images of the unfolding carnage, alone they are worth a thousand words, even if they conceal a hundred lies. Or, as a German reporter on the scene noted tellingly, ‘The viewers see everything, yet understand nothing.’
   Because, epitomised by Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, the vast majority of coverage is slickly choreographed, as a TV cameraman friend told me in 2012, having covered Operation Pillar of Defence, the previous Israeli incursion into Gaza to root out the Hamas terror-merchants.
   ‘Your local ‘minder’ – an embedded Hamas PR – tells you where to go, what to film,’ he explained. ‘Since you also need a permit from them to work, don’t get the idea you can roam around freely.
   ‘So, it’s all carefully contrived and tightly controlled. One day it’s ‘Go to a hospital and film the injured children’; next you’re ‘advised’ where a stack of apartments has been hit, even if the damage is a Hamas ‘own goal’, caused by a misfired rocket.
   ‘They’ll say ‘Pick out a child’s toy or battered shoe…great colour!’ But don’t – don’t! – show any of the hordes of young men, scurrying around with AK4s, hijacking civilian ambulances or setting up missile-launchers in mosques or next to schools. If you do, your footage will never see the light of day.’
   Hamas runs its PR machine with ruthless efficiency.
And its greatest weapon is Gaza’s innocents – the old, the infirm, women, but preferably kids – who are expendible cannon-fodder in the ghastly name of jihad…the ‘dead-baby strategy’, as one commentator labelled it.
   Even donkey and dogs are used as suicide bombers and foreign journos human shields, according to a Japanese news crew.
   So the higher the body count, the greater the joy expressed by a gang of cynical, Islamo-fascist fanatics, their minds warped by a 7th Century, death-cult credo. As Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, spouts from the safety of his bolthole in Qatar, ‘We love death more than the Israelis love life.’
   Shamefully, the UN’s Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA), is complicit in the bloodbath, because twice within days they’ve been caught red-faced, when stores of rockets were found in UN schools. More shamefully, UNRWA returned them to their rightful owner – Hamas.
   Meanwhile, the usual, hypocritical Left-whingers in the Western Press salivate over every Hamas porkie, like the absurdities that ‘the fighting all started when Israel retaliated’ and Israel’s response in defending its people within the legitimate rules of warfare is ‘disproportionate.’
   It’s understandable ordinary folk can be temporarily seduced by Hamas’s odious PR, but only those afflicted by crass gullibility or driven by an atavistic hatred of Jews really buy this devious bile long-term.
   Incidentally, ‘proportionality’ emphatically does not demand casualties must be equal on both sides or that an army use less force than needed to obtain its objective, just because the other side is weaker.
   At least The Times rumbled the diabolical charade, stating, ‘The deaths of Palestinians, many of them children, are the direct and predictable outcome of Hamas’s tactics and its use of civilians as, in effect, human shields. Instead of providing good governance and economic development, anticipating statehood, Hamas practises theocratic thuggery. Palestinians are paying an unconscionable price.’
   In contrast, Israel is continually held to a higher moral standard than any other nation by the pious Left, so the inevitable tragedies laid at the feet of Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in the fog of war are immediately branded ‘war crimes.’
   Yet – according to Colonel Richard Kemp, a former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan – the IDF does ‘more to safeguard the rights of civilians in combat zones than any other army in the history of warfare.’
   Unlike the Israelis, NATO troops in Afghanistan (civilian death toll: circa 23,000) and Coalition forces in Iraq (civilian death toll estimate: 140,000) never phoned ahead to give building occupants 15 minutes warning before they attacked, then aimed a smoke grenade on a target property before commencing to strike five minutes later. Last week Israel even suspended hostilities in three, Egypt-brokered truces, only for Hamas to breach them all with more fusillades from its stockpile of 8,000 missiles.
   Yesterday – the 19th day of the conflict – Israel agreed a 12-hour humanitarian truce, but baulked at US Secretary of State, John Kerry’s terms for a seven-day ceasefire, saying they was ‘too tilted towards Hamas’s demands.’
   The Jewish state’s key concern is Hamas’s $multi-million labyrinth of sophisticated tunnels – some large enough for trucks to navigate – which burrow deep into Israeli terrority and were build with concrete America insisted be allowed into Gaza for ‘civilian purposes’.
   Already 24 tunnels have been identified and intelligence from Hamas prisoners has revealed a mega-plot for waves of terrorist cutthroats to use them to infiltrate kibbutz settlements and villages, striking during the Jewish high holy days in September in a mini-reprise of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
   Kerry’s proposals would have banned Israel from destroying the remaining tunnels and left Hamas with a whip-hand to continue subterranean raids, one of which killed six IDF soldiers.
   So, after his failure to pave a ‘peace road’ between Israel and Mahmoud Abbas’s West Bank Palestinian Authority (PA) – talks collapsed when Abbas invited his arch foes, Hamas, into a ‘unity government’ – America’s premier diplomat now faces an even thornier quest: getting a vicious terrorist entity to see sense and agree ‘quiet for quiet’ with the democratic state it has vowed to annihilate.
   If Kerry achieves that, in my book he can plait fog.