Flat Earth News: “Hamas seized power in Gaza”

Even in this largely sympathetic article by David Rose in Vanity Fair you can’t escape the falsification of history:

The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.

Hamas did not “seize power in a bloody coup détat”; it won power through open elections back in 2006, but because these had the wrong result they were never accepted by the socalled western democraties and in fact the Palestinian people needed to be punished for their errors. From the start the legitamite Palestinian government was undermined, threatened with sanctions and when that did not work, Fatah was encouraged to attack the Hamas government directly, which culminated in the civil war in Gaza in June 2007, which ultimately was caused by us.

The idea that it was Hamas who engineered this civil war, with the fact that they had won the elections and hence were the legitamite government convienently forgotten, is a piece of what Nick Davies calls flath earth news. Something that isn’t true, but is widely accepted in the news media as being the truth because it fits in with the media’s prejudices, because it’s official.