Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East
January 11, 2009
Michael Laws says ‘Israel is guilty of nothing but weak backhand’
The Sunday Star Times columnist Michael Laws countered some of the blame being heaped upon Israel by such people as John Minto, Catholic priest Gerard Burns who daubed his blood over a peace monument, and MP Keith Locke who accused Israel of war crimes.
‘...Almost without exception, liberals accept that the Israelis are the baddies. They are the ones with the fighter planes, helicopter gunships and tanks tearing through the ghettoes of Gaza. As John Minto opined this past week they are the primary aggressor. Ipso facto, they are morally inferior.
The truth is considerably different. The Gaza Strip is a territory controlled by an Islamic fundamentalist faction that has sworn to wipe Israel from the planet. It has been doing its best by launching rockets at Jewish settlements, arming and directing suicide bombers, and ending the uneasy ceasefire...’ http://www.stuff.co.nz/sundaystartimes/4814924a22678.html.
A week later the SST published the following letter:
Conflict in Gaza
10 OUT of 10 for Michael Laws' column (‘Israeli is guilty of nothing but weak backhand’, January 11). He did not follow the naive thinking of the short-sighted, anti-Israel, pro-Islamic fundamentalist propaganda, nor parrot the diatribe from journalists who suck up to Hamas, regardless of the truth.
Have John Minto and his like thought about the outcome for the rest of the world if Israel is destroyed which is the aim of Hamas? Even Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are probably hoping that Israel can subdue Hamas and Hezbollah, as they also wish to stay free from the fundamentalist Islamic rule of Iran and Syria. And what about the 750,000 Jews who fled Arab lands, leaving all behind, and were absorbed into Israeli society in 1948? They were not kept as refugees or primed to become suicide bombers as were the Palestinians who have been indoctrinated to hate Jews and the West.