If you checked out the news in non-Israeli newspapers last week, you will be quite aware that the EU called “For Israel to dismantle all checkpoints in the West Bank” and that the EU called for “Israel to lift the closure of Gaza.” If you read the BBC, at the end of an article about the (poor things) 23 militants that were killed in Gaza last week you also learned that “an agricultural worker was killed in Israel by sniper fire from Gaza.” At least get it right, people, he was a tourist from Ecuador who was spending a couple of weeks volunteering on a kibbutz to learn about kibbutz life. The U.N. with a bare mention of the rockets and mortars falling as thick as rain forcefully condemned Israel for attacks on militants in Gaza and urged Israel in strong language to “avoid creating a humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. A lot of newspapers carried as headlines, Abbas’ claim that Israel was conducting a “massacre.”

Nowhere did you read during the three days that such headlines listed above were appearing that, during those same three days more than 130 Qassam rockets hit the Israeli city of Sderot. Also during those same three days, more than 80 mortars were fired from Gaza into Israeli civilian communities along the Gaza border. Nowhere did you read that, in addition to the 19 year old Ecuadoran tourist who was killed by sniper-fire, snipers fired repeatedly at civilian targets or that Hamas issued a statement calling for constant sniper attacks against Israeli farmers and farm workers. Nowhere did you read that, in just the past year alone, Palestinian militants have launched considerably more than 1,000 rockets targeting the civilian population of Sderot.

Nor, if you tot up the number of all those injured from flying shrapnel and debris in Sderot over those three days, do you read that 60 civilians were injured and required medical treatment, including several children hospitalized with serious injuries.

Yes and lacking this context, if you read the newspapers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Australia or anywhere else, you might agree with the U.N. assessment that Israel is imposing an “arbitrary” closure on Gaza and doing it for pure mean pleasure. You might well agree with both the U.N. and Abbas that Israel should stop this “massacre” of the armed Palestinian terrorists who were among the very ones shooting these 210 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian targets and who murdered an innocent tourist.