Showing posts with label Lee Habeeb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee Habeeb. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
Hamas’s Co-Conspirators Western media are acting as the distribution arm of the terrorist organization’s snuff film. By Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven
Aftermath of an air strike in the southern Gaza Strip.
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It was a law designed to prosecute organized-crime outfits that were harming innocent civilians and businesses and in some cases strangling entire American cities. It was called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the law was passed in the early 1970s. It helped put an end to an era of sprawling organized-crime families, to the Mafia as we knew it.
Most Americans know the statute’s acronym, RICO, and that it allows prosecution for racketeering activity performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. Such activity may include illegal gambling, bribery, kidnapping, murder, money laundering, counterfeiting, embezzlement, drug trafficking, slavery, and a host of other unsavory business practices. If a criminal enterprise commits murder and extortion, members from top to bottom can be prosecuted as if they committed the crimes themselves.
As we watch media accounts of Israel’s military move in Gaza, it is worth thinking about RICO. And it is worth thinking about the media’s role in the overall strategy of one of the world’s most dangerous and evil criminal enterprises, Hamas. Much of the Western media is acting as Hamas’s air force in a battle plan that actually includes — by design, on Hamas’s part — the very kind of reporting the world is witnessing on TVs and smartphones and in newspapers around the world.
Hamas knows that much of the Western media will spin the narrative in terms of moral equivalency, at best, and, at worst, as a narrative about Israel as occupier and the Palestinian residents of Gaza as innocents — about Israel the Goliath, and Gaza Palestinians the David; about Israel the guilty power, and Gaza Palestinians the innocent casualties.
But those casualties in Gaza are not innocent. The deaths of all those women and children are not collateral damage but part of a deliberate plan — not of Israel’s design but Hamas’s.
Indeed, dead Gaza children are the goal of the Hamas campaign – more than dead Israeli children, which is a part of the Hamas Covenant.
The truth is that dead women and children in Gaza are the lifeblood of the Hamas campaign. The slaughter of their own innocents is a public-relations tactic to gain sympathy from Western media. The very same media are either predisposed to side against Israel for any reason or incapable of distinguishing between good and evil.
The latter does Hamas’s bidding by perpetuating the myth that there are two morally competing visions at war in Gaza.
But anyone with any sense knows there is no real moral equivalency between the government of Israel and Hamas. How can that be when there have been recent reports that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are transporting themselves around the streets of Gaza in ambulances packed with children? Israel, on the other hand, sends its soldiers into the streets of Gaza at great risk, and does so to mitigate civilian casualties. Israel goes to great lengths to spare innocent lives, dropping leaflets, where and when they can, warning the people of Gaza of impending strikes.
What’s Hamas’s response? So determined is Hamas to give media the story the media crave, its leaders convince their own people to ignore the warnings. Indeed, the stark difference between Israel and Hamas was summarized in one perfectly calibrated sentence by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians,” he explained, “and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”
As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in a recent Washington Post column, rarely is the world presented with such striking moral clarity. The Washington Post’s editorial page actually had the guts to call Hamas’s strategy what it is: depraved.
What no one is really pointing out is the depravity of many media outlets for treating this tragic situation as something it is not. It is not a conflict between two legitimate and competing visions of life. Were it not for the Western media’s work in furthering the narrative of disproportionate retaliation, and moral equivalency, and were it not for the media’s steadfast refusal to face their own complicity in Hamas’s murderous endgame, Hamas would cease its perverse use of children and women as human shields and return to the old-fashioned strategy of using women and children as human bombs.
Even the most committed Hamas apologists can’t excuse such activity. Blaming Israel for the dead children of Gaza is a much easier moral lift.
The truth is that few in the media are pointing out their own complicity in Hamas’s overarching strategy. But then again, the media are not very good at turning the cameras on themselves — or at asking themselves hard questions. Like it or not, Western media are the point of the spear in Hamas’s plan to delegitimize Israel and destroy it. And yet the media act like innocents, as if they were witnesses rather than enablers.
One thing is certain. It’s a long-running reality-TV series Hamas is producing and directing in Gaza. It is supplying real-life victims and choreographing their deaths. And the Western media are covering the story without conveying the stark reality of the degree to which it is scripted. Indeed, the Western media are playing precisely the role that the leaders of Hamas hoped they would play, acting as the distribution arm of the terrorist organization’s snuff film.
Does anyone believe Hamas would be doing what it has been doing in Gaza if the media revealed its insidious modus operandi? The truth is that Western media have in large part been acting as co-conspirators in Hamas’s deadly endgame masquerading as an avoidable tragedy.
Sadly, it is the people of Gaza who are paying the price of this deadly alliance, along with the innocent civilians in Israel who want only to live in peace.
— Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content at Salem Radio Network. Mike Leven is the president and COO of the Las Vegas Sands and a member of the Job Creators Alliance.
Most Americans know the statute’s acronym, RICO, and that it allows prosecution for racketeering activity performed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise. Such activity may include illegal gambling, bribery, kidnapping, murder, money laundering, counterfeiting, embezzlement, drug trafficking, slavery, and a host of other unsavory business practices. If a criminal enterprise commits murder and extortion, members from top to bottom can be prosecuted as if they committed the crimes themselves.
As we watch media accounts of Israel’s military move in Gaza, it is worth thinking about RICO. And it is worth thinking about the media’s role in the overall strategy of one of the world’s most dangerous and evil criminal enterprises, Hamas. Much of the Western media is acting as Hamas’s air force in a battle plan that actually includes — by design, on Hamas’s part — the very kind of reporting the world is witnessing on TVs and smartphones and in newspapers around the world.
But those casualties in Gaza are not innocent. The deaths of all those women and children are not collateral damage but part of a deliberate plan — not of Israel’s design but Hamas’s.
Indeed, dead Gaza children are the goal of the Hamas campaign – more than dead Israeli children, which is a part of the Hamas Covenant.
The truth is that dead women and children in Gaza are the lifeblood of the Hamas campaign. The slaughter of their own innocents is a public-relations tactic to gain sympathy from Western media. The very same media are either predisposed to side against Israel for any reason or incapable of distinguishing between good and evil.
The latter does Hamas’s bidding by perpetuating the myth that there are two morally competing visions at war in Gaza.
But anyone with any sense knows there is no real moral equivalency between the government of Israel and Hamas. How can that be when there have been recent reports that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are transporting themselves around the streets of Gaza in ambulances packed with children? Israel, on the other hand, sends its soldiers into the streets of Gaza at great risk, and does so to mitigate civilian casualties. Israel goes to great lengths to spare innocent lives, dropping leaflets, where and when they can, warning the people of Gaza of impending strikes.
What’s Hamas’s response? So determined is Hamas to give media the story the media crave, its leaders convince their own people to ignore the warnings. Indeed, the stark difference between Israel and Hamas was summarized in one perfectly calibrated sentence by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians,” he explained, “and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”
As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in a recent Washington Post column, rarely is the world presented with such striking moral clarity. The Washington Post’s editorial page actually had the guts to call Hamas’s strategy what it is: depraved.
What no one is really pointing out is the depravity of many media outlets for treating this tragic situation as something it is not. It is not a conflict between two legitimate and competing visions of life. Were it not for the Western media’s work in furthering the narrative of disproportionate retaliation, and moral equivalency, and were it not for the media’s steadfast refusal to face their own complicity in Hamas’s murderous endgame, Hamas would cease its perverse use of children and women as human shields and return to the old-fashioned strategy of using women and children as human bombs.
Even the most committed Hamas apologists can’t excuse such activity. Blaming Israel for the dead children of Gaza is a much easier moral lift.
The truth is that few in the media are pointing out their own complicity in Hamas’s overarching strategy. But then again, the media are not very good at turning the cameras on themselves — or at asking themselves hard questions. Like it or not, Western media are the point of the spear in Hamas’s plan to delegitimize Israel and destroy it. And yet the media act like innocents, as if they were witnesses rather than enablers.
One thing is certain. It’s a long-running reality-TV series Hamas is producing and directing in Gaza. It is supplying real-life victims and choreographing their deaths. And the Western media are covering the story without conveying the stark reality of the degree to which it is scripted. Indeed, the Western media are playing precisely the role that the leaders of Hamas hoped they would play, acting as the distribution arm of the terrorist organization’s snuff film.
Does anyone believe Hamas would be doing what it has been doing in Gaza if the media revealed its insidious modus operandi? The truth is that Western media have in large part been acting as co-conspirators in Hamas’s deadly endgame masquerading as an avoidable tragedy.
Sadly, it is the people of Gaza who are paying the price of this deadly alliance, along with the innocent civilians in Israel who want only to live in peace.
— Lee Habeeb is the vice president of content at Salem Radio Network. Mike Leven is the president and COO of the Las Vegas Sands and a member of the Job Creators Alliance.
Arab Like Me Maybe, just maybe, Arabs can break out of their self-destructive hatred and envy. By Lee Habeeb
An Arab American friend of mine who works for a large NGO is a case in point. He is Jordanian, he’s well educated, and he speaks five languages. But mention the word Israel, and watch his blood boil immediately. He will go into a lengthy diatribe about the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians by Israel. When Prime Minister Netanyahu’s name is mentioned, I worry that he will have a seizure on the spot.
Why is this? Why is all of his passion, all of his anger and rage, directed at this one country, this one people?
Why is it not directed at Syria, I ask him? By all accounts, the Syrian government orchestrated the assassination of one of the Arab world’s great men of peace, former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri. And President Assad continues to terrorize his own people.
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Why not at Hosni Mubarak when he was in power? Or Saddam Hussein?
Why not at the ways in which Islam degrades women in the Middle East, trapping them in a life of servitude?
Why not at the ways some Muslims are persecuting Christians throughout the Middle East, as reports pour in about atrocities upon atrocities?
Why not a critique of the Koran itself, which regrettably finds little separation between mosque and state, thus relegating the majority of Arabs to life under theocratic regimes?
Two reasons: fear, and envy.
To the dismay of Arabs around the world, Jewish people turned an ancient piece of real estate in the Middle East into a thriving oasis of intellectual, political, religious, and commercial activity, where people are free to do as they please. One of the oldest places on earth — a place where Abraham walked — Israel is as thoroughly modern as any place on earth, with a functioning government that respects religious and economic freedom.
A young person in Israel can choose to work in some of the best high-tech companies in the world, or can pursue a life dedicated to Talmudic studies. A woman has an equal right to pursue any career she likes, and people of different sexual orientations are not driven underground — or worse.
The fact is, the God-given talents of the people of Israel are allowed to flourish in ways Arabs should want to emulate, and replicate.
This smart, dynamic Jordanian friend instead focuses on border disputes and the acts of the Israeli government. He performs Houdini-like intellectual twists to dodge my questions, which are always gentle, but cut right through to his very clear — and almost programmed — bigotry.
I ask him why he is obsessed with the 1967 border dispute, and not some other border grudge, as it would not take long to find other countries unhappy with the ways in which territories were allocated as spoils of various 19th- and 20th-century wars.
I tell him that using his logic, Mexican terrorists should be blowing themselves up in Houston and El Paso. And they should have his unwavering support to compel America to return Texas to its rightful, original owner.
I now ask Arabs who show such a knee-jerk reaction to Israel a simple question, one that cuts to the heart of all this nonsense: Why do you hate Jews?
They first get angry, but then quickly point out that they have no beef with Jews. It’s Israel they hate.
To which I reply, “If Israel had been handed over to Bolivians or Albanians or Estonians, would you still hate it?”
It is a none-too-subtle question, but it makes the point: Despising Israel the way Israel is despised in much of the Arab world is all about anti-Semitism. And most anti-Semitism anywhere in the world has its origins in envy.
CNN Guest Rips Media For Being 'Used As Dupes' By Hamas | MRCTV
In a surprising segment, CNN’s New Day discussed the role of the media in the Israel-Hamas conflict and whether they are providing proper context regarding the two sides. In an interview with co-host Kate Bolduan, guest Lee Habeeb, columnist for National Review, slammed the media for its biased coverage of the issue, going so far as to suggest that they have acted as “co-conspirators to Hamas.”
When Bolduan asked where Habeeb believed the media was lacking, he argued that “the point of the spear is the media and dead children and dead women...and I don’t believe the media is covering it.” Toward the end of the segment, Bolduan cited Hamas political leader Khaled Mashal, who claimed that the U.S. has now adopted the Israeli narrative. The New Day co-host wondered how it could go both ways. Habeeb blasted the media again:
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