The Jan. 22 front-page photo caption of the Hamas militant (titled "Youth Movement") — about U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon's visit and the sympathy toward fallen Palestinians — has broken new moral ground in the show of unbalanced reporting regarding the situation between Israel and Gaza.
The Israelis took eight years to respond to shells falling on their cities on a weekly basis, and the government has a right to defend its citizens. Can you imagine Tokyo's response if Seoul or Beijing sent even one missile into the country?
Careful examination of the facts would show that the Hamas extremists use the innocent Palestinian people as human shields for their illicit operations, thereby increasing the death toll from any amount of force the Israel Defense Forces commit. The Japan Times has always prided itself on accurate and fair reporting, but recent accounts of the casualties in Gaza have not been properly fact-checked. Media outlets have taken the word of Hamas as to the number of dead and wounded and not examined the figures for themselves. It has now been shown that Hamas has been exaggerating the number of casualties for the benefit of the press, who has reported the information verbatim instead of holding to normally high journalistic standards.
Israel is fighting to protect its citizens from an enemy who does not believe in its right to exist, and has been doing so for the past 60 years. There is common wisdom these days that says if the Arabs all put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons there would be no Israel.