Selective Outrage

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” receive a brand-spakin’ new copy of The Wall Street Journal at our official headquarters six times a week. Frankly, dear reader, we’d prefer to check out the Gray Lady, but since it began charging somewhere in the neighborhood of $583 per month for a subscription (in an obvious concession to the poor people it cares so much about), we headed over to the Journal instead.

Naturally, having given up our New York Times subscription, we’re missing a few things. And, no, we don’t mean Maureen Dowd’s ineluctably foolish drivel. Rather, we’re referring to the larger smattering of stories that pertain to non-economic issues.

Still, the Journal, as a national paper aimed both at the news and financial worlds, keeps us abreast of the major stories each day. And, it must be said, the writers for the Journal are of generally high quality, and make the Paper of Record seem like dross by comparison. Perhaps this partly makes up for the Journal’s rather monochromatic editorial page.

We mention all of this for an important reason: It is through the eyes of The Wall Street Journal that we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” first see the big stories of the day. Among other charms, this allows us to take in each day’s body count from Iraq, which the reporters never fail to mention. Further, this keeps us up with the casualty count in Israel and Palestine, which is dutifully mentioned in each issue.

And yet, oddly, the powers-that-be at the Journal show far less concern about the ongoing Lebanese military operations at the Nahr al Bared refugee camp in Tripoli, Lebanon. As you may well know, the Lebanese army has engaged in a prolonged campaign to root out an al Qaeda-inspired terrorist group in this Palestinian refugee camp, and have taken to methods far less discriminating than those used by the Israeli army in similar circumstances.

Last we heard, the casualty count in this Palestinian refugee camp was rather high—which is unsurprising, given the comparative disregard for civilian casualties shown by the Lebanese forces. And yet readers of the Journal would hardly know about this crisis, since it’s reported on it only a few times, and fails to keep a running tab of deaths. How curious that spats in which Israel is engaged receives so much more attention!

But this is nothing in comparison with the duplicity of the anti-Israel “weblogs.” Take a gander at a vehemently anti-Israel “website,” and nine times out of ten you won’t see much at all about the ongoing conflict in Lebanon. When Israel engages in a careful surgical strike, they trump up nonsense about non-existent Jenin “massacres.” When Lebanon proves far less fastidious in its use of military force, they clam up.

This is merely typical of Islamist apologists. They incessantly bleat about American and Israeli killings of Muslims, but care not a jot about the far more common instances of Muslims killing Muslims.

In short, they care more about scoring propaganda points than in human life.