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Times Watch for 04/29/03
Eyeless in Gaza
In “Once Neighbors, Now Rival Palestinian Leaders,” James Bennet reports from Gaza on the strained friendship between Muhammad Dahlan, head of Fatah, and Abdel Aziz Rantisi, head of Hamas—making it sound more like a rivalry between two neighborhood bakeries than two terror groups.
The story opens: “In the wretched Khan Yunis refugee camp, their family homes faced each other across the same sandy street. But Muhammad Dahlan cast his lot with Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian movement of Yasir Arafat. Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi joined Hamas. In student politics, rallies and Israeli prisons, the two ambitious, clever men climbed the ranks of their separate organizations.”
It’s disconcerting enough to see the words “Yasir Arafat” and “mainstream” so close together. More disturbing is Bennet’s refusal to characterize Hamas as a terrorist organization. In fact, the word “terror” doesn’t appear in Bennet’s article. Instead he uses blandishments like “conflict” and discusses the problems of the terrorist organization Hamas in a tone suitable for a shareholders meeting:
“Hamas, whose power and popularity have grown steadily through more than two years of conflict with Israel, is suddenly facing hard times and hard choices. The American war in Iraq and the new pressure on Syria have endangered sources of the group's financing and other support. Israeli raids and killings of militants have temporarily thinned its leadership, while Israeli military closures and other restrictions have hampered its ability to strike.”
Bennet also leaves out of his story any hint of the acts these two “ambitious, clever men” have perpetrated.
Rantisi: "I call on Iraq to prepare an army of would-be martyrs and prepare tens of thousands of explosive belts... Blow yourselves up against the American army. Bomb them in Baghdad."
The Jerusalem Post says the “mainstream” Dahlan “was personally involved and/or in charge in most of the battles and heinous attacks in and around the Gaza Strip before and during the current round of war, including the bombing of the Kfar Darom school bus (in which two teachers were killed and three siblings lost limbs, among other injuries).”
In a story on US-Europe discord over how best to facilitate economic growth, James Tagliabue writes: “Ideas about fueling growth could not be more divergent. Europe has imposed on itself a fiscal discipline so tight that it leaves little room for economic pump priming. The United States is back to cutting taxes and running up record deficits.”
“Fiscal discipline” among European welfare states? This we’ve got to see. Tagliabue is attempting to contrast Europe’s responsible concern about deficits with America’s irresponsible tax cutting, but he fails to mention how favorably America’s deficits actually compare to the one’s generated by those “disciplined” European countries.
Figures from the OECD suggest that it’s not America that’s lacking in fiscal discipline. France’s level of government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2001 reached 48.5%, with Germany at 44.8% (the U.S. rate was a comparatively capitalist 32.7%).
As for those “record deficits” in America resulting from those awful tax cuts, financial columnist Jim Jubak of the TheStreet.com asserts: “The truth is the U.S. deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP, is still very modest….The projected fiscal 2004 deficit of $307 billion is only 2.8% of projected U.S. GDP. Japan would kill for that low a deficit, and France, which recently became the third country in the European Union to face fines for running a deficit above 3% of GDP, can only look on with envy.”
Times reporter Richard Berke’s remarks on Sen. Rick Santorum livened up last Friday’s edition of the normally soporific PBS political roundtable Washington Week in Review. When the topic turned to Santorum’s remarks on homosexuals, Berke piped up: “I think this is a ritual in Washington of Republicans criticizing homosexuals, and I don't think it's going to hurt them very much. Barn--remember the Dick Armey quote about Barney Frank calling him, ‘Barney fag’? You've had Trent Lott who said comments. There's a whole history of prominent Republicans who have said negative things about gay people, and they're still in office and they whipped up a lot of controversy, but--but they get support from their conservative supporters.”
E-mail Times Watch Director, Clay Waters, with Times Watch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org