With Christmas on the horizon there doesn’t seem to be much good will in the Middle East. Reports have it that the US ordered Israel not to conduct a preemptive strike on Hezbollah in Lebanon. The French navy is not really playing a part in Operation Prosperity Guardian. They object to playing second fiddle to the US, and are currently only escorting French ships. American ships are idling off Yemen, waiting to be escorted. Without other nations providing some additional teeth, America seems unwilling to exercise real force to protect her own interests. This may be why Arab naval forces are unwilling to join. They appear to feel the US is not willing to actually use force to back up its’ position. American military assets are present in the region, but the political will to employ them has yet to show up.
Israel, by way of contrast, is still conducting a war against Hamas. The pace of that war is dramatically lower due to US interference (real and/or imagined).
Hamas is concentrating on the media war. Christmas shoppers find crowds of Hamas supporters chanting slogans that interfere with their gift shopping. The media continue to criticize Israel and ignore Hamas. The casualties in Gaza get extensive mention while those in Sudan, which are far, far, greater, are not mentioned at all. The latest UN resolution centers on providing more aid to Gaza, where Hamas syphons off a large part of it as soon as it leaves Egyptian territory, and the UN has not yet said one word in their various resolutions about the responsibility of Hamas for launching this war, and conducting it in flagrant violation of humanitarian concerns. The media talks about displaced Gazans. There is no mention of a quarter of a million Israelis who have been evacuated from their homes because of Arab terror.
There were accusations of “settler violence” recently. A statistical check of the number of reported incidents of Israelis attacking Arabs during the past year (excluding the war) lists 60 cases. The reported number of cases of violent Arab attacks against Israelis for that same period is over 7000.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised by the heavy bias that I see in CNN reporting, given the large number of Arab world advertisements they air.
Wetherhorn 