Hamas imposes blockade of Israeli goods to Gaza, global outcry at “humanitarian crisis” fails to materialise

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
16 February '11


http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/hamas-imposes-blockade-of-israeli-goods-to-gaza-global-outcry-at-humanitarian-crisis-fails-to-materialise/

I’m all eyes and ears. Surely it’s going to come from every direction imaginable: saturation coverage on the BBC, leader columns in the Financial Times, op-eds by the dozen in the Guardian, resolutions galore in the European Parliament and the UN, a UK Foreign Office enraged by the cruelty of it all. What on earth have the Israelis done now? Well hold on to your braces, because the blockade of Gaza is back, and, wait for it, it’s now been imposed by Hamas.

Yes, you read that right. Nine months after Israel began relaxing restrictions on exports to the Gaza strip Hamas has re-imposed them. The blockade will apply to all goods that can’t be produced locally or obtained from elsewhere. The reason for the move is partly that like all Islamo-fascist outfits Hamas does not look kindly on things that bear the fingerprint of the dreaded Jew — or as the Jerusalem Post reported it, they’d rather do business with the Arabs — but also it’s because, now that imports are flowing in from Israel, the terror group’s extortion rackets from the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are yielding a good deal less in revenue than they used to.

Surely there’s going to be an outcry! The Gaza “blockade”, let’s not forget, was one of the great humanitarian causes of our time: malnourished children roaming the streets in search of food; babies with jaundice; old women huddled around camp fires because the evil Israelis had cut off the fuel supplies. Believe it or not, a ban on Israeli fuel is part of the new blockade: “Hamas has also stopped the daily fuel supplies it used to receive from Israeli energy company Dor Alon,” the Jerusalem Post reported today. “In the past, Dor Alon used to transfer about 1,000 liters a day to the Gaza Strip for the power station, but now Hamas prefers to receive its fuel from a contraband pipeline it has set up through a tunnel under the Egyptian-Gazan border”.

In all seriousness, the way that this story is handled in Western political and media circles is going to tell us something very significant indeed. Because if, as I strongly suspect, the story is largely (or wholly) ignored the charge of bigotry against the massed ranks of Israel’s critics over Gaza will have been proved beyond the slightest shred of reasonable doubt.

It’s a slam dunk argument: concern for the welfare of the people of Gaza either was the reason for the outrage at the restrictions, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, then it was bigotry. And we will know whether it was or it wasn’t very soon.

NB: So far, the only word about Gaza on the MidEast section of the BBC website is on something I wrote about in the last posting but one — the BBC’s celebration of a Gaza “war crimes” photo exhibition by a photographer whose work has compared Israel to Nazi Germany. But let’s just see what happens….


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