Ok, it is al-Jazira television but the story is nonetheless revealing. It is about the Gaza airport and how Gazans are mining it for building stones, destroying the runways in the process. The reporter, with no hint of actually reporting, seethes with anger and hatred as she blames Israel for everything, never mentioning the virtually non-stop war Hamas has conducted against Israel.

But the good bit is this: the reporter says that Israel has bombed the airport for 10 years, reducing the buildings to rubble. Yet you can see at the beginning that the runways are in superb conditions, with no dents or potholes, and the attractive buildings right behind her are in perfect shape. Clearly, there would be nothing to keep the airport from having functioned, presuming the regime governing the Gaza Strip wasn't firing rockets and mortars at Israel or sending terrorist squads to attack Israel for years.

Note the number 10 years, putting this back in 2000. What happened in 2000? The Palestinian Authority leadership rejected peace and an independent Palestinian state at both the Camp David talks and the Clinton plan, launching instead a massive war of terrorism against Israel that went on for five years. Then, after a short interim period, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip by force and used it as a platform to attack Israel, openly proclaiming that its jihad warriors would wipe Israel off the map and kill the Jews.

Might this have something to do with Gaza's problems?

The specifics of the false claims made on the airport remind me of one of the great scenes of the 1982 war in Lebanon, when an American reporter stood in front of a building, saying it had been destroyed by Israel a few hours earlier when a large tree was growing out of the rubble directly behind him. Most likely, the building had been destroyed in the Lebanese civil war some years earlier.

One of the points that prove media silliness on these issues is that nobody notices this kind of extreme contradiction (dozens of examples can be provided) and no self-criticism, soul-searching or policy changes develop as a result.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center is at

http://www.gloria-center.org