CNN center newsroom. Photo: Altair78.

The recent conflict between Israel and Hamas came to a head Wednesday when the IDF confirmed it had killed Ahmed Jabari, commander of Hamas’s military wing, al-Qassam Brigades. On the Israeli side no tears were shed. This was a man who had terrorized Israeli citizens for at least the last decade. More rockets were fired indiscriminately from Gaza in response, and Israel went on the offensive, attacking terrorist targets from air and sea. Yet, if you looked at the below tweet from CNN International, you would be hard pressed to conclude that a complex series of events had led to the current state of affairs.

It is so one-sided, it is so poorly framed, that one would be tempted to excuse CNN; perhaps the 140 character limit had simply been met. But on further review they had only used 50 of their allotted 140 characters. Plenty of room still to balance the story. Or perhaps somewhere on their twitter feed they had made mention of the fact that four more rockets had landed in southern Israel just this morning? Nope, no mention of it. Or that 50 had been fired into Israel Wednesday night alone. Nope, no mention of it. What they did mention was a slideshow of photos depicting Gaza residents only 2 hours after the aforementioned tweet:

By the way, this slideshow made it into the lead story on CNN.com, a lead story that conveniently buried half way down the page the fact that the Iron Dome defense system had intercepted 17 rockets already today and that at least 130 rockets had been fired indiscriminately into Israel since Saturday. Oh, and it simply ignored the 50 rockets lobbed at Israel today.

The French writer Emile Zola wrote a famous letter, J’accuse, in 1898 in which he accused the French Government of unlawfully jailing the Jewish Army General Staff officer Alfred Dreyfuss for espionage. Though eventually exonerated, at the time there were at least a few questions as to Dreyfuss’s guilt. What to say, then, when the evidence is so blatantly obvious?