THE PRESS AND GOOD NEWS

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas and Saruman look-a-like, is dead courtesy some well-aimed Israeli missiles. This is profoundly good news if you view the Palestinian--indeed Arab--death cults as bad things and civilization as a good thing.

But the press sees things differently, as do the Europeans, who are condemning Israel for taking out a real bad guy.

AP notes Yassin was wheelchair-bound, and that he lived in a "modest house" in a slum. Presto! you have a disadvantaged underdog. AP also notes that Israel and the US regard Hamas, the terrorist group Yassin founded in the 80s, as a terrorist group. Shocking, I know, to call a terrorist a terrorist, but the US and Israel have the gall to do just that. And again presto! you have powerful meanies calling your disadvantaged underdog dirty names. In the frame game, Yassin gets the better treatment by the press.

But what does AP leave out? Well, the story does mention a few raw numbers. Four were killed a a dozen injured in the strike that got Yassin. There have been 112 Palestinian bombings in the current intifida, killing nearly 500 Israelis. The story whitewashes the fact that Yassin had a role in most, if not all, of those bombings. He was a terrorist leader of a terrorist group. The story makes sure to mention that Hamas is angered and threatening to attack Israelis and "cut off Sharon's head." Nice guys. They sound sort of like those goons who abducted and beheaded Daniel Pearl, not that terrorists in Pakistan and the Palestinian territories could be connected in any way. It mentions the fact that Yassin spent time in prison from 1989 to 1994, but leaves it to the reader to figure out why (that he's a serial murderer). It also notes that Israel tried unsuccessfully to kill him in September 2003. There those meanies go again, trying to kill our Robin Hood of the Gaza Strip. The story also leaves out why Yassin was released in 1994. He got out of jail as part of another Israeli deal for the release of two of its kidnapped Mossaad agents (terrorists--my bad, the Jordanian government--had grabbed them to use them as bargaining chips), freeing Yassin to plot more mayhem from his modest house in the slum. Which he did, for nearly ten more years.

The story also leaves out any real facts about Yassin's victims. They have no names, no humanity. They are, to borrow a phrase from Marxists of the past, just statistics. Here are their names.

There were nearly 500 of them, in just the current terrorist uprising. Yassin was a mastermind of murder. The world is better off without him.