Hamas refuses Egyptian help...

... so as to play the victim card. And the media is complicit in the duplicity:

Some say Hamas doesn’t care about their people. The evidence suggests far worse. They actively seek the victimization of their own people. Indeed, the enormous resources they have expended on the constant, if largely ineffective, barrage of rockets on Israeli civilians is actually quite staggering. Not only have they lavished much of their meager resources to this vicious and gratuitous activity, but, as a result of those attacks, guaranteed that their borders would be closed and their people would continue to suffer — hostages to their hatred. Thus, the phony excuses offered for the border snafu disguise something far more sinister: Hamas wants the crisis; they want civilians dying dramatically in wretched hospitals.

On the face of it, it seems absurd that a government would actively victimize its own people. What advantage in making an already miserable people suffer even more? There are two major explanations here. First, Hamas, like many other Palestinian groups, is addicted to violence against Israel. Anything they can do, no matter how small, to make Israelis suffer, they will do, whatever the cost. As the Israeli satirical program, Eretz Nehederet (like Saturday Night Live) had Hamas leader al-Zahar explain to Ehud Barak, “Kassams are like cigarettes … you can’t just quit all at once.” Thus, they have spent virtually all their resources on smuggling and firing weapons while their people suffer their government’s neglect and Israeli retaliatory blockades.

But the second explanation is far more disturbing, because it involves the media. Hamas only gains a real advantage to having Palestinians suffer if they, who do so much to inflict that suffering, can blame it on Israel. It would be absurd for Hamas to stand in front of the world and say, “Look at how much we make our own people suffer; join us in hating Israel.” So the game is intensely hypocritical. It depends on getting public opinion, both in the Arab-Muslim world and in the West, to accept a scapegoating narrative — the Palestinian Guernica — that deflects responsibility.

And the pathetic thing is that it works. In the Arab world gory images of dead and wounded play round the clock, inciting furious demonstrations. But, alas, it also works in the West. And it works primarily because of the behavior of the Western media, who systematically frame the conflict in terms of the Israeli Goliath and the Palestinian David, who do not hesitate to challenge Israeli spokesmen, interrupt them, contradict them — but who fail to do anything of the sort with their Arab interlocutors.

This sort of thing is the norm... so typical... yet far too many in the West buy into the lie, especially the religious left.

Moral clarity that only the morally bankrupt are missing.

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[Bob Sykes]

There is no such thing as a "religious left." All people claiming that title are in fact secular humanists. Just scratch any random Episcopalian/Anglican. None of them ever heard of Jesus or Yahweh.