Invasion of the Gaza Strip blah blah blah
An Associated Press story just went up saying that Israel might invade the Gaza Strip. The headline trumpets the potential for the IDF to "reoccupy Gaza," but that's because AP writers are mindless drones trained to fixate on anything related to the capital-O "Occupation". The AP's breathless announcement stands in sharp contrast to this morning's analysis from Amos Harel:
The IDF has a contingency plan for ground operations in the Gaza Strip but for now is not recommending a go-ahead to the government. Senior General Staff sources told Haaretz that it was still too early for a head-on clash with the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government. They said Israel was "scoring points" in the international arena in view of its restraint following the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
Now let's play a game of who are we going to believe about the Israeli military. The bright-eyed AP staff writer using a two-year old "Israelis are evil occupiers" template or the Israeli military correspondent? Even if Amos Harel is kind of a softheaded peacenik, at least he's a softheaded peacenik who people in the IDF will talk to.
UPDATE: Forbes.com has Update 3 (!!!) of the reoccupation news. Helpfully, they provide the byline we were too lazy to track down earlier: Josef Federman. That would be the Josef Federman of factual errors and inflammatory comments about the Holocaust fame.
UPDATE 2: Turns out, the most noticable difference between Federman's first story and his updated story is where he moved the little caveat that the reoccuption isn't actually going to happen from the very last sentence to the beginning of the second paragraph. Maybe he read the morning Israeli papers.
UPDATE 3: There is now another "Israel about to reoccupy Gaza" AP story up, except this one's by Steve Weizman and doesn't even have the "but this isn't actually going to happen" caveat. And that's the one that it looks like JPost choose to post up. We give up.
The IDF has a contingency plan for ground operations in the Gaza Strip but for now is not recommending a go-ahead to the government. Senior General Staff sources told Haaretz that it was still too early for a head-on clash with the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government. They said Israel was "scoring points" in the international arena in view of its restraint following the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
Now let's play a game of who are we going to believe about the Israeli military. The bright-eyed AP staff writer using a two-year old "Israelis are evil occupiers" template or the Israeli military correspondent? Even if Amos Harel is kind of a softheaded peacenik, at least he's a softheaded peacenik who people in the IDF will talk to.
UPDATE: Forbes.com has Update 3 (!!!) of the reoccupation news. Helpfully, they provide the byline we were too lazy to track down earlier: Josef Federman. That would be the Josef Federman of factual errors and inflammatory comments about the Holocaust fame.
UPDATE 2: Turns out, the most noticable difference between Federman's first story and his updated story is where he moved the little caveat that the reoccuption isn't actually going to happen from the very last sentence to the beginning of the second paragraph. Maybe he read the morning Israeli papers.
UPDATE 3: There is now another "Israel about to reoccupy Gaza" AP story up, except this one's by Steve Weizman and doesn't even have the "but this isn't actually going to happen" caveat. And that's the one that it looks like JPost choose to post up. We give up.
