This just in: nature abhors a vaccuum. Film at 11.
No real news to write about? No problem.
If you're the creative type, you play a game of 'what if' and get someone to comment on it. The result: hot copy ready to serve up to readers.
That's a recipe used to put together the following story. Reporter A has to write about something, but instead starts day-dreaming. What if they put on a peace conference and something concrete came out of it. What if Israel would decide to withdraw from the West Bank? What if...well you get the story.
And so did Report A, who dug up a quote from a ranking Hamas official to comment on the scenario. There were no surpises: the Hamas leader said, in effect, "You leave, we move in". More of the usual in the Middle East from Yahoo News:
A top Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip warned on Friday that the Islamist movement would seize control of the West Bank if Israel withdrew from the occupied territory.Hamas wants land held by Israel? How can that be? The story continues
"Israel says the party in power in Ramallah (Fatah) serves its interests and if Israel withdraws from the West Bank, Hamas will take control. That's true," Mahmud Zahar told a party rally in Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
Little Green Footballs has this to say about the peace conference-party crashers from Hamas:
He called on Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party to "learn the lesson of what happened in Gaza" -- where nearly five months ago Hamas routed the moderate leader's loyalists and security officers in the coastal enclave.
Zahar also said an international meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the United States is preparing to host later this month would fail.
Here’s an alternative opinion from Hamas on the upcoming Annapolis “peace conference” between Israel and the Fatah party, at which Israeli PM Olmert seems determined to make serious concessions on the issue of withdrawing settlements in the West Bank: Hamas says it will seize West Bank if Israel withdraws.
This was a story that had to written--on a slow news day. As a slow news day in the Middle East usually means a day without a bomb blast and death, so that's not a bad thing.
This story could have just as easily been filed under "science" with the headline, "Nature Abhors a Vaccuum".
by Mondoreb
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