Ah, these linguistic subtleties!

Did you know that a rocket could break a truce?  I didn’t.  Being neither a scientist nor a weapons expert, nor a member of the MSM, I kind of thought that, absent human intervention, rockets would just lie around inert.  It’s just always seemed to me that, for a rocket to fly through the air and strike something far away, there has to be a human who placed it in a launcher and pressed the button.

Thanks to the AP, which I dare not quote since it will bankrupt me if I do, I’ve now learned how wrong I am.  You see, when I went to Drudge at 11:14 P.S.T. today, I saw a headline that said “Rockets break truce.”  While Drudge may not be an . . . ahem . . . rocket scientist, even he must know that rockets probably don’t have the intelligence to do any truce breaking.  Curious about this peculiar headline formation, I clicked on his link and discovered that AP story from which I dare not quote.  I can tell you however, that the AP was the one who misled poor Matt Drudge by telling him about those rockets, using an even more mangled headline than Drudge’s.

Ah, heck!  I’m going to live dangerously here and actually quote that headline, since it defeats paraphrasing:

Rockets hit Israel, which says truce broken

So, the rockets acted without human intervention but Israel, that spoilsport, is once again backing out of its sacred obligations to Hamas.

It’s only when you read the story that you discover that it was those darned “Palestinian militants” (is that a copyrighted phrase?) that actually launched the rockets that hit Israel.  What’s really funny is that the AP, after explaining that it was humans who were parties to a truce that launched the rockets, injuring civilians, goes on to add that this behavior presents that same truce with “a serious test.”  (Please tell me that’s not a copyrighted phrase either.)

Again, in the “silly me” category, I actually thought truces were binary.  Both sides promise not to fight.  If one side breaks that promise, the truce is gone.  It’s vanished as if it never existed.  It’s dead.  It’s not a truce any more if only one side sticks with it.  In AP-land, however, it appears that a truce continues to exist as to the Israelis, but that the Palestinians may violate it with impunity.

Indeed, in that same faraway AP-land, Palestinian truce violations are probably a good thing, since we here in America like “testing.”  We see tests as a way of proving how well things are doing.  If that truce can survive the Palestinian test of unfettered rocket launches against Israeli civilians, it must be a very strong truce.  It gets the AP seal of approval, that’s for sure.

I’m sick of this whole thing.  Can the reading audience really be as stupid and biased as the AP writers?  Sadly, I’m going to bet that Israel can be even more stupid, since I think it’s going to let the Palestinians pass this test and, in the face of a blatant truce violation, do either nothing or so little in response that it’s tantamount to nothing.