By Ian Tuttle
Thursday, October 15, 2015
On Sunday, October 11, the Los
Angeles Times ran the headline
“6 Palestinian Teens Die Amid Mideast Unrest.” It was, technically, true. But
it left out a few key details.
Try the opening sentence, instead: “Two Palestinian
teenagers were shot to death Saturday in Jerusalem, officials said, after they
carried out separate stabbing attacks on an ultra-Orthodox Jew and two Israeli
police officers.” Among Palestinians, stabbing Israelis is in vogue at present
— as are shooting them, ramming them with vehicles, and bludgeoning them with
meat cleavers, all of which have also taken place in the “unrest” of the past
few weeks. Seven Israelis have been killed and dozens wounded in attacks since
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year celebration, ended on September 15. The
purported reason for the renewed violence is the rumor, despite Benjamin
Netanyahu’s assurances to the contrary, that the Israeli government plans to
reopen the Temple Mount to Jews. But the rash of violence is better explained
by a century-long virus of hatred.
Western media outlets, as this latest flare-up reminds
us, suffer their own mild case of this virus, manifested in their headlines.
NBC News recently published a story entitled, “Dispute Over Viral Video of Shot
Ahmed Manasrah Sums Up Israel-Palestinian Conflict.” What it summarizes is
nothing; what it omits — that the wounded 13-year-old Palestinian and his
15-year-old cousin were shot after stabbing and seriously wounding two Israelis
— is quite a bit. At the New York Times,
there was, “Israeli Police Officers Kill Two Palestinian Men.” (Guess why). On
its website, CNN blared, “Palestinian Youth: ‘Now We’ll Fight,’” with the
subtitle, “Israeli-Palestinian Tensions Escalate with Four Violent
Attacks.” Yahoo News got in on the action with, “Israeli Police Shoot Dead
Palestinian at Entrance to Jerusalem’s Walled Old City,” which is both biased
and grammatically ambiguous. And while no one expects Al Jazeera to be fair and
balanced on this subject, its Twitter tease for a (less egregious) article on a
stabbing that killed two Israelis in early October was nothing short of
extraordinary: “Palestinian Shot Dead after Fatal Stabbing in Jerusalem; 2
Israeli Victims Also Killed.”
Overseas, coverage has been, if possible, worse. Earlier
this month, the BBC titled an article “Palestinian Shot Dead after Jerusalem
Attack Kills Two.” (The tweet advertising the article simply read, “Attacker
kills two in Jerusalem.”) When that headline garnered the wrong kind of
social-media attention, the BBC modified it — “Jerusalem Attack: Israelis
Killed in Old City ‘By Palestinian’” — making use of what can only be called
unorthodox punctuation. Soon, they stripped the quotation marks, then later
changed the headline again: “Jerusalem: Palestinian kills two Israelis in Old
City.” Meanwhile, the Independent
wailed, “Israel Kills Pregnant Mother and Her Baby in Revenge Attacks,” a
curious way of describing “airstrikes in Gaza targeting Hamas weapons
manufacturing facilities,” as the article eventually acknowledges.
Conscious manipulation is on display here — someone at Al
Jazeera worked hard to come up with that misleading tweet — but one senses,
more than intent, the inevitable results of an implacable mindset. The New York Times and the BBC and the rest
see what the Palestinians are doing; but they long ago committed themselves to
making Israel’s legitimacy a matter of debate. They believe that the Jews have
oppressed and occupied and reduced the Palestinians to poverty and despair. In
such circumstances, they think, who wouldn’t lash out?
For nearly 70 years the Left has trafficked in false
moral equivalences between terrorists and those in Israel defending themselves
from terrorism. A responsible media would expose that unconvincing narrative.
The one we’ve got has decided to participate in its propagation instead.
If you need more evidence, just tune in. The intifada
will surely be televised.
No comments:
Post a Comment