I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Sympathy For Israel? Time To Restore “Balance”!
Print This Post
Email This Post
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes across in the context of the story being reported.
Among them is the New York Times, which—in its initial report of the massacre cached on Saturday night (click on the thumbnail at left to view Google’s cache of the story)—somehow found room to include these outrageous paragraphs:
Tensions in the West Bank have been worsening lately. Jewish settlers from the extreme fringes of the settler movement attacked Palestinian property in the northern West Bank in response to recent action by the Israeli security forces against illegal settler structures in an unauthorized outpost. This practice of revenge attacks has recently been condemned by Israeli military and political leaders, including Mr. Netanyahu.
The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, cited reports from Palestinians in villages around Nablus on Saturday afternoon who said that several Palestinian homes had come under attack by settlers.
The Times—perhaps sensing the ensuing firestorm—wisely scrubbed those paragraphs from the final published version of the story.
Time Magazine is another interesting case. They start by describing “the gruesome attack, in which two parents and three young children were fatally stabbed as they slept”. For starters, note the passive tense of the verb; if you follow the link to the original article, you’ll find that it takes until the end of the next paragraph to find out that “Palestinian militants are presumed to have carried out the assault”… yes, presumed (apparently their own publicly issued statement wasn’t good enough for Time).
Then, using a lot of language they lifted from Amy Teibel of Associated Press (who managed to mix all of this in with U.S. criticism of the Israeli construction plan), they reproduced this gem [emphasis mine]:
Israel has long contended that Palestinian textbooks and official media preach hatred toward Israel and that the killers of Israelis are often glorified.
On Sunday, a group of activists from Abbas’ Fatah movement dedicated a square in the West Bank city of Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a female militant who carried out a 1978 bus attack that killed 37 Israelis. Aides to Abbas said they tried to stop the ceremony and the move was not officially sanctioned.
Still, Israel has not produced evidence that incitement contributed to the killings.
Do you understand that last sentence? Because I have a pretty tough time doing so. As The Elder of Ziyon pointedly asks on his blog:
Evidence? Does Israel need to catch the murderer and dissect his brain to prove it to the NYT’s satisfaction?
[Note, The Elder of Ziyon references and links not to the Time Magazine article, but to a New York Time's article written using in fact much of the same language as Time Magazine, as lifted from Associated Press, which leads me to believe that the NYT actually did have that preposterous comment in their version as well as Time, but that they wisely scrubbed that, too, from their final version! A lot of retroactive scrubbing going on at the NYT editing desk!
At least they've been doing some scrubbing, though. Many other media outlets across the country, on the other hand, simply reproduced Amy Teiber's disgusting drivel verbatim without giving it a second thought.]
And, then, there is this doozy from the LA Times, where they flat out say simply that settlements provoke the butchering of babies—as if that’s even a chain of logic that we should ever accept! Simon Plosker of HonestReporting.com analyzes it nicely:
The inhuman act of slitting the throats of a three-month old baby, two small children and their parents defies any understanding or justification for any political cause. But not for the LA Times, which contends that the brutal murder of the Fogel family are part of an ongoing “cycle of violence”:
We’re currently witnessing the cycle in real time. On Saturday, five members of an Israeli family living in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, were killed, including an 11-year-old boy, a 4-year-old boy and an infant girl, presumably by Palestinian militants. In response to this brutal tragedy, the Israeli government announced that it would build 500 more houses in existing settlements in the West Bank. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Sunday that 500 was not enough and that Israel should build 1,000 new homes for every Israeli who is killed there.
Which is worse — stabbing children to death or building new houses in West Bank settlements? The answer is obvious. But that’s not the point. The point is that no matter how abhorrent the murders are, it serves no purpose to aggravate the provocation that led to them in the first place.
So according to the LA Times, baby killing is a natural response to an Israeli provocation, in this case the act of building houses. Is this any different to the vicious rhetoric of Hamas, which justified the murders?
The LA Times asks:
How will building more houses for Israelis in the midst of the West Bank, in settlements that are almost universally acknowledged to violate international law, do anything other than keep the crisis going? Answer: It won’t.
Perhaps the LA Times should be asking how the butchering of babies, which is universally condemned, will do anything other than keep the crisis going? But instead, the paper cares little for placing responsibility for Palestinian actions on the Palestinians themselves let alone dealing with the very real issue of incitement in the Palestinian media and education system.
As for the claim that this brutal act is simply part of a “cycle of violence”, this is a charge that has been employed on a regular basis by lazy media that cannot differentiate between Palestinian terror, Israeli self-defense or non-violent acts of building homes. The Jerusalem Post eloquently debunked this as far back as 2008:
In truth, however, there is no cycle of violence. There is no spiral of attack and counter-attack relentlessly unfolding here.
What we have, rather, on the one hand, is a sovereign nation’s desperate effort to live in its homeland, seek peace with those of its neighbors who will partner it, and defend itself against those who seek its destruction. And, on the other, we have the forces of militant Islam, firing rockets across Israel’s sovereign borders, murdering Israelis wherever they can be found vulnerable, indoctrinating their people with a vicious intolerance of Jewish historical rights in this region, and simultaneously spreading a perverted interpretation of Islam that purports to require each and every believer to carry out personal jihad in the name of God against the infidels – be they Jews, Christians or unbelieving Muslims.
Next up, we have CNN, who headlined its report: “Family members killed in what military calls ‘terror attack’.” As Tom Gross points out on his web site, “in its report CNN referred to the terrorist or terrorists as ‘an intruder’ and neglected to mention the ages of the three children.”
Moving right along, we have the BBC. Tom Gross writes:
Interestingly (and surely there’s no collaboration here), the BBC website also referred to the terrorist as an “intruder” in its report. BBC online said: “The family – including three children – were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home”.
The BBC – which likes to pretend that the Palestinian national movement rarely does anything wrong (only Israelis do wrong) – may be trying to suggest to its audience that the victims died in some kind of failed burglary attempt.
Even more extraordinarily, for the first 24 hours after the attack [it has since been changed, following complaints], the BBC piece was headlined:
Palestinian ‘kills five Israelis’ in West Bank
Can anyone explain the BBC’s use of quotation marks in this headline? Are they disputing the fact that five Israelis were murdered?
After all, the BBC’s own article started: “A Palestinian has killed five Israelis in an attack on a settlement in the West Bank, the Israeli military says.”
The BBC went on to give a lengthy explanation of just how wrong it is for Jews to live in Judea, as if these kids “had it coming”.
As I said before: Israel has no friends in this world. Every mainstream media outlet from the North America to Europe to the Arab world is intent on demonizing Israel in every way possible and when the job gets “complicated” by an “inconvenient” terrorist attack that dangerously courts world sympathy, the media does its damnedest to make sure that “proper balance” is restored and people can not lose sight of how “evil” Israel is.
For this, I hold responsible every idiot who continues to swallow the mainstream media’s drivel, not just the evil, morally bankrupt writers and editors behind it.