BBC: "Root, Root Root for the Hamas Team...

...if they don't win it's a shame..."

The BBC dares Israel to enter Gaza, and offers all the same dire predictions of the doom that was supposed to undo American soldiers fighting in Iraq, and in Afghanistan:

Israel's move to ground operations in the Gaza Strip gives Palestinian militants their first chance to trade blows on a more or less equal footing with the Israeli army in the current conflict.

... if the conflict transfers to the narrow alleyways of Jabaliya camp, or any of Gaza's teeming urban areas, it will be a different story.

....Hamas has had months to prepare for bitter urban warfare which will give its fighters a chance to inflict casualties on the Israeli military.

So it was an unsurprisingly bellicose Khaled Meshal, Hamas's Damascus-based leader-in-exile, who spoke in an Arabic TV interview before ground operations began on Saturday night..."Soldiers of the enemy... you must know that a black destiny is waiting for you, and you will either be killed, injured or imprisoned," he told al-Jazeera television.

...there is no shortage of weapons in Gaza or people who might want to pick up a gun against Israelis forces.
Standards of training and discipline for the Brigades have been raised recently, and it is believed to have fairly sophisticated communications systems...

One can almost see our fair-haired BBC reporter (Martin Asser) as he penned this report with eyes misting over, wishing he had the courage to take on the horrible, horrible Jews just as his heroes in Hamas are about to. No, he lacks the courage to pick up a gun and fight (best left to others, he knows) but he can do one thing for his heroes in the black masks whom deliberately target women and children: He can write propaganda for them.

And so he has, puffing up his gang of weapons-toting thugs as some type of revolutionary army, trained at the feet of the best terror masters the world has to offer, ready, with dark intent, to slay their enemy - in this case soldiers of a constitutional democracy - and make the streets run red with their blood. Mr. Asser writes not to inform, but in an attempt to scare the Israeli army away from Gaza, so that his beloved militants can rain down rockets upon civilian targets with impunity.

He's a failure, of course. He probably is confusing the Israeli army with the British Navy, who was disgraced by the behavior of 15 sailors captured by Iranian forces back in 2007. Furthermore, his rhetoric about Palestinians dying to "pick up a gun against Israelis forces" goes against decades of historical footage of Arabs meekly raising a white flag and cowering as soon as a bullet is fired. It's wishful thinking on his part.

But again, Mr. Assar, if you feel so strongly that Hamas is going to be the winning team, and are so sure that women and children will pick up weapons and fight hand to hand against a Western army in the streets - well, go ahead and join them.

You'll die a martyr- not to Allah's cause (unless you have already converted?), but a martyr to media blindness. Your contemporaries will write well of your courage (wishing they had the same), and you'll be eulogized heroically by your equally banal replacement.

What say you, valient BBC reporter? Care to put on the black mask, and take your chances?