The thing about Hamas – not much with the subtlety:
The political program of the proposed Palestinian unity government does not include any explicit or implicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist, Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip stressed on Tuesday. Shortly after the agreement over the formation of a national unity government was reached, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah officials had said that, as far as they were concerned, Hamas had indirectly recognized Israel.
They explained that the political guidelines of the proposed unity government, which endorsed the decisions of the 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, were tantamount to recognizing Israel’s right to exist. However, a statement issued by Hamas on Tuesday stated: “The political program of the unity government does not contain any explicit or implicit recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Nor does it include any concession on Hamas’s principles and positions. Hamas will continue to abide by its own program, especially regarding the resistance and the refusal to recognize Israel.”
Question: how long do you think you have to read this morning’s LA Times story – this is a story that sub-headlines with “a proposal by Hamas and Fatah to form a unity government may not be enough for America to resume aid”, and that drops “suffering in the Gaza Strip” in graph 1, “US official said they want avert a humanitarian catastrophe… but” in graph 3, and “a new transatlantic rift” in graph 4… how long do you think you have to read in this 21 paragraph story to get to the news that Hamas won’t stop trying to destroy Israel? Keep in mind that Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel is the reason that the US is skeptical about resuming aid – which means you need that information to make any sense of the article. Also keep in mind that all surveys ever taken show that the vast majority of people never get past the first few paragraphs (vast majority being upwards of 90%).
Answer: paragraph 18, over 85% of the way down. And the paragraph itself is a thing of beauty:
But Hamas has no plans to recognize Israel, its spokesmen said. Instead, the government is expected to stake out a nuanced position that implies acceptance of a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict – and therefore of Israel – without saying so explicitly.
See? It’s not a genocidal position – it’s a nuanced position. Wrap your mind around the sheer terrorist-appeasing myopia that it takes to write “Hamas has no plans to recognize Israel… [but will imply the] acceptance of… Israel” – and not just to write it, but to imply that that’s as reasonable a diplomatic position as any for a genocidal terrorist organization to take. Multiple layers of Los Angeles Times editors looked at that paragraph and thought “hey, that is a nuanced position. Print it!”
So we’ve got burying the single piece of information that you need for the article to make sense and we’ve got ‘that’s a really nuanced contradiction you have there, Mr. Hamas terrorist’. Looks like we’re just missing one last thing to make this a perfect article about the Middle East. For those of you who missed the paragraph 18 answer above, this is your chance to make it up. Take a guess.
Yes, it’s our old MSM friend “misleading the reader about Palestinian history:”
The agreement serving as the basis for the proposed government tacitly recognizes Israel by calling for creation of a Palestinian state along borders predating the 1967 Middle East War, meaning in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital.
Now if you were to point out that this is a very misleading sentence, because actually there was no such thing as a Palestinian state before 1967 (as everyone who’s not an LA Times reader knows, the West Bank was Jordanian and the Gaza Strip was Egyptian), you’d be accused of paranoia. Because obviously, the authors meant the pre-1967 Israeli borders, and the fact that the phrase “Palestinian state” occurs in closer proximity to the phrase “borders predating… 1967″ (which might lead to misunderstanding) is purely a grammatical accident. Which isn’t all that unreasonable, since this is paragraph 19 and so the authors were probably still getting over the trauma of having to tell the truth in the paragraph above it.
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