Dartblog

Daniel Pipes offers some characteristically penetrating thoughts. His first: “Arab-Israeli warfare is not the conventional battle to control territory of old. Since 1982, the primary goal in this theater is to persuade the world of the righteousness of one’s cause. (I.e., who has the more affecting casualties?”

This morning on a drive to Dunkin’ Donuts—the local pâtisserie, an Ocean City staple called Dot’s, is closed for the season—National Public Radio interrupted Maurice Ravel to announce that “Israel’s air strikes continue in Gaza.”

People who volunteer themselves to comment upon the holy land question to the newsmedia are, generally speaking, professional partisans. (The Muslims, who appear to have a far more successful P.R. operation in place, even have professional radio call-in show callers-in. You can discern them from ordinary radio louts easily.) For the analysis provided, the reading public enjoys no practical improvement in a university professor as compared with a military captain of one side or another. What this situation wants is a semiotician, because the whole thing is a symbolic ballet. The polities that control the policies and the militaries of the world’s most significant nations are manipulable. The more the aggressor appears to be Israel, the more phone calls will be placed from dusty corners of State to sandy corners of Knesset. So announcements like “Israel continues attacks” help, even though in this instance it was Hamas whose rocket-fired plie touched off the latest.

“Who has the more affecting casualties?” is a fine way to put it, but not very practically useful. It is about the cadence and the tone of the reporting. In the Western World a convincing balance is struck, and then nudged to favor the Muslim position, frequently for no other reason than the old underdog bias. Of course, some agencies are a little more animated about their preferred party. And others display such a low estimation of their readers that they are completely amusing, such as Reuters’s report of today titled: “Israel rejects truce, presses on with Gaza strikes,” written by some eager one called Nidal al-Mughrabi. Mr. al-Mughrabi never went to kindergarten, by the evidence. If an extant truce is expiring, and one party decides that at the stroke of midnight a ruthless volley aimed at the second party seems to be called for, and the second party takes this as a suggestion that its neighbor has elected not to extend the truce, and so after being hit begins defending himself vigorously, and if the party of the first part, realizing the superior accuracy of his former trucemate’s returns, then holds his hands up to say, “O, ho, ho, no, my friend. Let’s have that truce again,” then it would not be an accurate representation of the positions of the parties to say that that of the second part had “reject[ed a] truce.”

BY THE BYE: It strikes me that, since all of this is going on during Christmas, we might read, in the reporting on the scrap, that it has its tragic and callous transpiration during “the holy octave of Christmas, the second-most sacred period in the Christian calendar” or something like that. But the AP Styleguide does not, as I recall, make mention of holy days appertaining to Christianity, relevant though they are to the events along the Jordan River. Those days are but holidays. How fleeting is success!