An excellent piece today by James Lileks, The Bleat, led to this brotherly exchange:
Younger
The one question I have regarding the Jenin "Refugee" camps is how come there are houses there if its a refugee camp? When one thinks of refugee camps, you think of tents and no running water and certainly no terlets. You think of long lines of skinny people waiting to get a small cup of wheat paste and a sip of Camel-pissed water.
I think the press uses this term because it makes the situation look and sound much worse than it is: "Isreali tanks roll into refugee camp" sounds much worse than "Isreali tanks go into neighborhood to find cowardly terrorists so they don't kill any more innocent civilians".
The left is mad at Isreal for destroying the HOUSES of a REFUGEE camp? As Tom Hanks said in Big "I don't get it".
Elder
Excellent look at the way that most of the media uses the words refugee and refugee camps to garner sympathy for the Palestinians. The majority of them probably aren't doing so consciously to demonize the Israelis, it just makes for a better story line.
I've written before about a particularly disturbing pattern I've noticed in the reporting on the Church of the Nativity battles which once again surfaced last night. I actually heard an ABC news report say that "hundreds of Palestinians have taken refuge(that word again) in the church some of whom the Israelis claim are Palestinian gunmen." The image that line projects is of a bunch of civilians cowering in the church in fear of the Israeli tanks outside that surely will grind them under their treads if they dare leave with a few Palestinians with weapons among them. In reality the church was occupied by armed Palestinians who have used it as a haven to escape Israeli capture while at the same time taking pot shots at IDF troops when they get a chance.
Yesterday, fargin' Arafat tried to claim that the Israelis were responsible for desecrating a holy place by surrounding the church, a ludicrous statement that ignores the fact that had the Palestinians stayed out of the church in the first place the Israelis would have left it alone. Another news story I heard described a Palestinian in the church being killed by "Israeli gunmen" as if the Israelis were a bunch of outlaws running amok shooting up the town. To not recognize that the IDF is a highly trained, professional, and uniformed military force fighting against terrorists who use the civilian population as cover is to deny reality.
