During last month’s intense eight-day battle with Israel, the military wing of the Hamas government brutally and publicly put an end to Mr. Shalouf, 24, and six other suspected collaborators. The vigilante-style killings by masked gunmen — with one body dragged through a Gaza City neighborhood by motorcycle and another left for crowds to gawk over in a traffic circle — highlighted the pathetic plight of collaborators, pawns preyed on by both sides in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Let's repeat that:
the pathetic plight of collaborators, pawns preyed on by both sides
I will not take the easy way out and term Ms. Ruderon's prose "pathetic", nor even her thinking as such.
But what can be said is that she is inserting her own subjective viewpoint into an analysis. She's opinionating, not reporting.
She could have written that these were Gazan peace activists or Arabs seeking reconciliation with Israel. She could even have intimated that they were seeking to undermine a vicious obscurantist dictatorial regime. Or seeking revenge for acts of cruelty done against their family members or such.
But she chose to go through a private prism of liberalism and worse, to adopt a narrative that any Arab seek to reach cooperation with Israel and assist in eliminating terror is somehow out of character or worse, doing something not natural.
Pathetic?
No, Ms. Ruderon's worldview is wrong and her reporting is biased.
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Was sent this:
The idea that Hamas or Fatah could alienate their own people to the point that they'd volunteer to help Israel is alien to such people.
And of course those Israelis who help the Palestinians against Israel are the most selfless and purest of heart.
Another problem is that the terrorist gangs can call anybody a "collaborator" if he is somebody that they want to get rid for other reasons. They don't necessarily know who the real spies for Israel are. And, for instance, if there is a family or clan vendetta going on, somebody might accuse a member of the other clan of collaborating. Just to get rid of him. And since there are no real trials in Hamastan or Fatahstan, you can never be sure of the guilt of anybody accused of any crime. But Rudoren did not consider that. So she was very very wrong. She is accepting the judgement of the mob.
yes, there are killings on false pretenses. Because suspicion of being a spy provokes communal rejection of the accused, the charge is sometimes leveled at personal enemies and used as an excuse to kill them, Palestinians acknowledge. Early in the current conflict, a PLO operative organized the execution of his wife's former husband. Villagers said the collaboration charge was false and that the killing stemmed from a feud over the woman. The Palestinian Authority did nothing to investigate the case, even though it had banned free-lance executions.
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