More on the Fence

David Warren shows how the things the media leave out alter our perspective of a situation.

The U.S. and Israel have mortal enemies. Every living American, and Jew, is at personal risk because of it. That much is obvious. But airbrush that reality out of every picture, and a lot of American and Israeli behaviour becomes incomprehensibly malicious.

It becomes possible, for instance, to have an endless argument about whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq, based not on the obvious fact of Saddam Hussein (who wasn't exactly concealing his animus), but rather on various arcane aspects of the interpretation of pre-war intelligence data.

The obscene judgment against Israel handed down on the weekend by the International Court of Justice in the Hague, was built on the same media principle. Israel was instructed to immediately remove the Wall it has been building -- the one designed to prevent Palestinian terrorists from getting at defenceless Israeli civilians.

At the root of the Hague decision -- and the reason why I call it obscene -- was the splitting of a legal hair, down through skull and brain tissue. Israel does not have the right to defend itself against Palestinian terrorists under international law, according to the majority of the judges, because Israel has not recognized Palestine as a legitimate state. Or in its own words, the Court contended that, "as the uses of force emanate from occupied territory, it is not an armed attack 'by one State against another' ."

To call this disingenuous would be too respectful. We won't go, yet again, into the reasons why the Palestinians don't have a state; only remind that they have several times declined a state, when one was offered.