Geoffff's Joint : News Flash! Foreign Journalist Caught Doing His Job.

geoffff

A Marked Man?

This Italian journalist has said in a line what you need to know about the dead and butchered kids in Gaza. The bonus is an insight into how little the West really cares about them once it is too generally known that their deaths and injuries were from Hamas rocket strikes and mortars, and therefore cannot be blamed with full impact on the Jews.

Nothing kills a Gaza story stone dead quicker than the news that not only did the Jews not do it, not necessarily news to Middle East correspondents anyway who after all are there, but that there is proof out there that they did not. And if they did not, who did? The UN?

Where "out there", they do not care. There is never any curiosity at all about that because there is no story to be found out there.

The best a journalist can do in this situation without outright lying is a "both sides are blaming each other ... " type of story that turns entirely on the pathos of the scenes, often depicted in an obscene detail that the Western media self censors anywhere else but Gaza.

Nine more kids murdered by Hamas and a lot more badly bashed about, among probably hundreds, and the best our layabout media can manage are "both sides are blaming each other ..." stories. Bludgers. Cowards.

Remember the UNWRA school massacre story?

Surely. It was just days ago and it kicked off the most vicious attacks on Israel and, in the case of Mike Carlton, Israel, the Jews, the "Jewish race", the Australian "Jewish Lobby" and whatever other lip sneering euphemism is de jour in those circles.

Turns out the Israelis didn't kill the kids in that school after all.

Hamas did it.

Just that everybody decided it was best to blame the Jews for all the dead kids anyway even though this is a battle and it is in the nature of battles that loose ordinance flies about sometimes killing civilians and very frequently soldiers on your own side. It is in the nature of battles that there is a fog.

Hamas ordinance is the loosest ordinance of all. And they are masters of the world when it comes to fog.

If you relied on the Australian media you would not know that Hamas, or one of its rivals, killed those kids in that incident that was so carefully and painfully recorded that you could not have missed it at the time.

Now that it is known it was not the IDF, and could only have been Hamas firing missiles from across the street, the story is dead. Old news. No reports at all that it was not the IDF, after all. This is not news in Australia

Flash. Arab kids not killed by Israelis.

You know it will never get a run on the ABC.

Remember the Mohammed Al Durah story and the Netzarim Junction blood libel? Probably not. That's the way the Western media wants it or prefers it or perhaps just as things are once it becomes known that the Jews had nothing to do with it,and worse, there is detailed forensic evidence of that"out there" for all to see if they are interested.

No story. Retrospectively there is no story.

It only got worse when it became known the whole thing was a stitched up media fraud from the start of the day to the end of the day by when young Mohammed would have been somewhere safe watching himself on CNN and eating KFC.

And so the story headed for the nearest wormhole in the direction of the next parallel universe. Barely a word survives. Google the subject and the most current gasp is Ed O'Loughlan making a goose of himself back in 2007.

Once the story was huge in the Western and Australian media in what passes for Middle East reporting. Up until about ten years ago the image of that poor kid trying to shelter behind his desperate dad hung over every report out of the region from our fearless, straight calling Middle East correspondents where like John Lyons filing out of Jerusalem, they are safer than if they were in Canberra on a bad winter night.

Much safer come to think of it.

Note to John Lyons.

This is what a real journalist looks like.

Barbati is not a "brave" journalist, or even an especially "honest" one, you might have hoped, for just reporting what he and his witnesses saw, once he was out of harm's way. Just doing his job is all.

It really is a terrible thing there are so few of them. It must take a type of courage we are not familiar with. No point asking John Lyons about that.