Dead child cradled by Egypt's PM was killed by Hamas!

The Mirror (UK) on Friday published this, as did many other newspapers:

Egypt's Prime Minister wept today as he kissed the forehead of a boy killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza.

And here is how CNN reported the child's death:



CNN takes it as a given that young Mahmoud Sadalha was killed by an Israeli airstrike. Only one problem: he was killed by a Hamas rocket that fell short in Gaza. There is a lot of evidence for this. Read the New York Times' account of his death: 

The Abu Wardah family woke up on Friday morning to word that a hudna — Arabic for cease-fire — had been declared during the three-hour visit of the Egyptian prime minister to this embattled territory. So, after two days of huddling indoors to avoid intensifying Israeli air assaults, Abed Abu Wardah, the patriarch, went to the market to buy fruits and vegetables. His 22-year-old son, Aiman, took an empty blue canister to be refilled with cooking gas. The younger children of their neighborhood, Annazla, in this town north of Gaza City went out to the dirt alley to kick a soccer ball.

But around 9:45 a.m., family members and neighbors said, an explosion struck a doorway near the Abu Wardah home, killing Aiman Abu Wardah as he returned from his errand, as well as Mahmoud Sadallah, 4, who lived next door and had refused his older cousin’s pleas to stay indoors.

It is unclear who was responsible for the strike on Annazla: the damage was nowhere near severe enough to have come from an Israeli F-16, raising the possibility that an errant missile fired by Palestinian militants was responsible for the deaths. What seems clear is that expectations for a pause in the fighting, for at least one family, were tragically misplaced.

The IDF did not launch any airstrikes in Gaza while Egyptian PM Kandil was in Gaza. AP adds: 

Mahmoud Sadallah, the 4-year-old Gaza boy whose death moved Egypt's prime minister to tears, was from the town of Jebaliya, close to Gaza City.

The boy died Friday in hotly disputed circumstances. The boy's aunt, Hanan Sadallah, and his grief-stricken father Iyad — weak from crying and leaning on others to walk — said Mahmoud was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Hamas security officials also made that claim.

Israel vehemently denied involvement, saying it had not carried out any attacks in the area at the time.

Mahmoud's family said the boy was in an alley close to his home when he was killed, along with a man of about 20, but no one appeared to have witnessed the strike. The area showed signs that a projectile might have exploded there, with shrapnel marks in the walls of surrounding homes and a shattered kitchen window. But neighbors said local security officials quickly took what remained of the projectile, making it impossible to verify who fired it.

If it was an Israeli missile, you can be sure that it would have been shown to the media! Furthermore,PCHR, which is keeping track of everyone killed in Gaza (and which admits that most of the dead have been "militants,") did not list Mahmoud Sadalha or Aiman Aby Wardah in their list of victims of Israeli airstrikes, although they even include one person who died of a heart attack.   


Put this together with the fact that Hamas and other terror groups were firing rockets throughout Friday morning while the IDF did not, plus the fact that over 100 rockets have fallen short in Gaza (both usingpast performance and IDF statistics as proof), and the fact that the shrapnel in the video matches almost exactly the shrapnel damage we have seen from rocket fire into Israel, and it is very clear: this child was killed by Gaza rocket fire, not by Israel. 

And every media outlet that irresponsibly assumed that Israel killed him must correct their slander, and also make sure that they don't automatically blame Israel for civilian deaths in the future. 

Write to CNN, the Mirror and every other media outlet that published this lie. This war needs all of us to get involved. Every newspaper is on Twitter, and they read their tweets. 

Melanie Phillips being investigated by police for referring to Arab “savages” who murdered Jewish family

British understatement is a wonderful thing. Here is how Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, introduced a posting on the magazine’s website on Friday: “It’s a funny old world,” he said, “I have now been contacted by two journalists informing me that Bedfordshire Police are investigating The Spectator”. The reason? Because a group called, wait for it, “Muslims4UK” took exception to a piece by Melanie Phillips on her Spectator blog in which she referred to the Arabs who had murdered five members of a Jewish family in Itamar the week before as “savages”.
The story was reported in the media, but if you’d blinked you’d have missed it, and the slant of the reporting was that Israel was at least as much to blame for the killings — due to settlement policy — as the killers themselves. Melanie’s column was a typically robust effort to point out the moral depravity of news outlets such as the Guardian, the New York Times, CNN and the BBC who, if the situation had been reversed — if five Arabs including a three month old baby had been knifed to death in their beds in a lethal racist attack by Jewish “settlers”, for example — would have given it saturation coverage.
So not so much a “funny old world” as a “brave new world”: a prominent British columnist does what prominent British columnists are supposed to do — she attempts to shift the terms of the debate back on to a more rational and principled footing — and the net result is that the police have been called in, with the Guardian newspaper cheerleading on the sidelines, because she has offended Muslim sensitivities.

As Nelson summed it up, the train of events went like this:
“1) Inayat Bunglawala, chair of Muslims4UK, gets angry about what he reads on Melanie’s blog.
2) Complains to the PCC [The Press Complaints Commission].
3) Complains to the police.
4) Phones up The Guardian and says “The PCC are investigating The Spectator!! Story!! Police too!!
5) The Guardian duly writes it all up, on its website.
6) The Independent follows up The Guardian.
7) An inverted pyramid of piffle is thus constructed.”
It isn’t yet clear on what grounds the investigation is being conducted, but you can bet your boots that it is the following paragraph from Melanie’s piece that they are salivating over:
“So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ — because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages — but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick”.
An “Arab massacre”? What, all of them? “Such savages”? So all Arabs are “savages”? Oh, come off it. It is quite clear that she is referring to the “savages” who slaughtered a family in their beds, and it is “such savages” and those who incite them with whom peace cannot be made. It is also clear that in this instance the thrust of the argument is against the New York Times, itself being used as a proxy for the liberal left media in the West, and not the killers as such.
And it is precisely because the multi-culturalist assumptions underpinning the western liberal left media lead consistently to a downplaying or sanitisation of crimes, however appalling, committed by non-white, third-world perpetrators designated as “victims” that Melanie Phillips employs such strong language to jolt western readers out of their dogmatic slumbers. Again, that’s what columnists are supposed to do, and in any other situation this affair would have passed off without notice.
But, as Nelson makes clear, changes are afoot in modern Britain that threaten to rip apart the fabric of one of the world’s most developed free societies: “Freedom of expression is under attack in Britain, from our notorious libel laws to this new phenomenon of police forces being asked to investigate what people put on their blogs,” he said.
And as we know from cases involving Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and others across the continent, all of this is starting to look like a depressingly common feature of the new European politics. To those who value freedom, merely sitting on one’s hands is no longer an option. We all hang together, or we all hang separately, as Benjamin Franklin is said to have averred at the siging of the American Declaration of Independence.
So write to Fraser Nelson at the Spectator, or Melanie Philllips on her blog, and tell them you support their right to be heard. Surely, that’s the least you can do.