By Lev Tsitrin (New English Review)

As the tsunami of Israel-bashing by the press continues unabated, the facts become “curiouser and curiouser,” as Lewis Carrol’s Alice put it. For instance, I did not know that Israel’s restrictions on Gaza’s food have such a wide reach — apparently, Gaza’s hunger now spread to Cyprus, too!

I learned this fascinating factoid from NPR’s On the Media segment  in which “Host Micah Loewinger speaks with Adel Al Salman, a Cyprus-based photo editor for the Agence France-Press.” 7:45 minutes into the segment, Loewinger asks Salman how his job of purchasing pictures for AFP from Gaza photographers affected him personally. Eagerly, Mr. Salman takes the cue: “I lost 15-20 kilos in the last 2 years. Seeing people queued for soup takes away your appetite.” Interestingly, in that interview the word “Hamas” is not mentioned once; nor is the word “hostage.” Neither subject is of relevance insofar as NPR’s Micah Loewinger is concerned — or. needless to say, AFP’s Salman.

This is because their joined task is to prove to listener the monstrosity of Israel, rather than discover which party is responsible for Gaza’s lack of food. Yet all that Mr. Loewinger manages to prove in airing the seemingly piteous story of Mr. Salman’s weight loss that is presumably caused by solidarity with Gaza’s Hamas-inflicted (though Mr. Loewinger won’t tell us) suffering is that  Mr. Loewinger is no journalist at all; his eagerness not to ruin the desired picture with a too-obvious question of how much Mr. Salman’s  weighs now (perhaps he stared out obese and should rejoice at melting down some belly fat) turns him into an all-too-willing, gullible tool of Palestinian propaganda.

The very same perverse eagerness to smear Israel put the now-infamously piteous picture of a malnourished Palestinian child who is suffering not from malnutrition but from a host of congenital genetic diseases, and was accordingly evacuated for treatment abroad, on all front pages as a proof of Israeli cruelty. Oddly, Mr. Loewinger does mention it as MSM’s error — only to repeat it in his own “interview” with Mr. Salman so as to picture him as yet another poster child of Israel’s lack of humanity.

On the Media is not alone in leaving Hamas alone and piling the blame on Israel. Its weekly package of interviews (all critical of Israel, none blaming Hamas) was put together before another horrifying image — that of skeletal Israeli hostage kept in a Hamas tunnel — was released. So, I expected that at least the New York Times — a daily publication — would adjust its blame-Israel stance, perhaps expressing its mea culpa in an editorial titled something like “NY TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD APOLOGIZES TO ISRAEL FOR SMEARING IT WITH GUILT FOR GAZA SUFFERING. WE NOW KNOW THAT HAMAS IS TO BLAME!”

To my surprise, nothing of a kind happened. Instead, the paper dug its heels, even making the usually sensible David French twist himself into a pretzel by producing a tortured concoction titled “Israel Must Open Its Eyes“ — mind you, not “New York Times Must Open Its Eyes” but, perversely, “Israel Must Open Its Eyes“!

A lawyer by training, Mr. French found the task to be not particularly hard. Why is Israel the guilty party and not Hamas? Mr. French concocts this argument: “The dominant power in Gaza is Israel, not Hamas, and Israel, not Hamas, is the only entity with both the power to control aid distribution and the ability to obtain and distribute aid in the Gaza Strip. There is no way for Gazans to feed themselves. They are utterly dependent on Israel, and Israel removed the United Nations from the aid distribution network without replacing it with an effective alternative.”

With what remains of respect I once had for Mr. French, this is nonsense. As he should know full well, Gaza is now divided into two parts: the unpopulated part controlled by the IDF, and the populated one controlled by Hamas. Clearly, Israel does not control Gaza — if it did, there would be no Hamas, and all hostages would be freed. And under the UN distribution scheme, it is Hamas who distributes UN-supplied food, and thus controls the population. Mr. French’s “facts” are no facts at all. It is indeed the New York Times that “Must Open Its Eyes,” not Israel.

Way back when, Mark Twain observed that “man is the only animal that blushes — or needs too.” The problem is, that the people who lie the most and therefore do need to blush the most — lawyers like Mr. French and the so-called “journalists” like Mr. Loewinger — do not blush at all; they are trained in their respective schools to brazenly lie without showing the slightest sign of remorse — as evidenced by the above-discussed indignant effusions which  pour righteous outrage on the victim — Israel — for daring to defend itself, rather than on the brutes of Hamas. Men who do need to blush do not blush. Mark Twain was wrong — and this is very, very sad…