Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East
January 28, 2009
Tom Scott strikes again
The Dominion Post published a Tom Scott cartoon, ( ‘School Daze’ ), that showed three Palestinian children picking their way through a devastated classroom, saying: ‘Before we get on our high horse, remember this was an act of self-defence.’ ‘Yeah, our teachers must have been planning to shell one of their schools.’ ‘Thank God they [the Israelis] never act out of rage or spite.’
The irony, that Mr Scott failed to see, is that Hamas terrorists HAVE been sending rocket attacks into Israeli schools, homes, playgrounds and synagogues for years in acts of terror that demonstrate both rage and spite. KBRM members sent three letters to the Dominion Post in response:
I'd like to see Tom Scott live in the Israeli city of Sderot (population 20,000) for a while and dodge the 6000 rockets that have been fired at it. I'd like to see him talk to Larissa's nine-year-old son, who was traumatised after seeing a Qassam rocket slam into a woman a few feet away, killing her instantly ( Commentary magazine) ). I'd like him to see the empty playgrounds, the bomb shelters, the schools and synagogues hit by rockets. And then I'd like him to make fun of this day-to-day ongoing agony with a Palestinian child saying ‘Our teachers must have been planning to shell one of their schools.’ ‘Must have been planning!’ Yeah, right, Tom.
Rodney Brooks
Tom Scott's cartoon ‘School Daze’, featuring Palestinian children in a ruined classroom, smacks of bias and hypocrisy.
Where is Scott's cartoon portraying the Jewish Israeli children who have endured years of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket and missile attacks on their families, their homes, their playgrounds and schools? Where was Scott's outrage at the 2008 mass-murder by an Arab terrorist of Yeshiva students in Jerusalem and the appalling response in Gaza where children were given sweets to celebrate the killing of young Jewish students? Where is his cartoon about Palestinian children draped in explosive belts, toting machine guns as their parents and teachers fill them with ‘rage and spite’ and train them to hate and kill their Jewish neighbours?
For Israeli children, air raid sirens, bomb shelters, terrorist attacks and missile strikes are part of their daily existence. They live with the knowledge, born of bitter experience, that they are targets of regimes and terrorist organizations that seek to exterminate them, their loved ones and their nation, simply because they are Jewish. Unlike their Palestinian counterparts in Gaza, these children receive little sympathy or compassion from the likes of Mr Scott.
‘Pity the little children,’ Mr Scott, all of them.
Kirsty Walker
Distortion of the facts, sarcastic and biased are the only words that I can find to describe Tom Scott's cartoon in today's newspaper.
Distortion of the facts: Scott sarcastically suggests that Israel targeted the UN school because ‘Teachers were launching rockets.’ The real reason that Scott must surely know is that Israel said that terrorists were hiding inside the school and firing at Israeli towns. Reasonable people accept that this means that Hamas should be held responsible for deliberately drawing their civilians into the conflict. For reasons best known to himself, Tom Scott wants to portray Israel as the aggressor and so has conjured up a pure fiction — the ‘shelling teacher’ allegation
Biased: because the cartoon pretends that Israel attacked out of rage and spite rather than because she was sorely provoked — six years of rocket attacks on her civilians.
I omitted one other word to describe Tom Scott — consistent. There are always two sides to a story. Tom Scott consistently sides with Hamas and doesn't even pay lip service to Israel's right to defend her women and children from an entity that is sworn to her annihilation.
Richard Noar