The Associated Press Lets the Mask Drop

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

 

In May of this year, long after he had passed on every opportunity to correct whatever misapprehensions he internalized about Israel’s pager operation against Hezbollah operatives, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani demonstrated his commitment to his preferred falsehoods.

 

During a meeting with Muslim constituents, Mamdani reflected on “Israel’s blowing up of thousands of pagers across Lebanon,” thus “killing scores of Lebanese civilians, including a young girl by the name of Fatima, who picked up her father’s pager in an act of love and lost her life.” The reflection was prompted by his recollection of a meeting similar to the one in which he was participating — a gathering of Muslims in the city in which pagers were not allowed as a paranoid precautionary measure. “We know that to be Muslim in public life in this city, and this country, is to face these kinds of responses,” Mamdani continued, “to be called a terrorist, no matter where it is, where you go.”

 

“Scores” of civilians did not die in Israel’s pager attack. Indeed, not even a single “score’s” worth of noncombatants perished. Of the grand total of 42 deaths that resulted from one of the most discriminating military operations in modern history, twelve were civilians. Most of the Hezbollah terrorist operatives in possession of the pagers — and they were all terrorist operatives, insofar as the rigged devices were military communications equipment provided to individual fighters by their superiors — were wounded in the attack. Just 1 percent of the pager explosions killed anyone, and only 0.4 percent of the detonations killed civilians.

 

There were, of course, tragic stories, like Fatima Abdallah Jaafar’s. Tragedies happen in war, and aggressors who shield themselves with civilians invite more than their fair share. Hezbollah, a State Department–designated terrorist group with American blood on its hands, eagerly joined in Hamas’s indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilian population centers shortly after the October 7 massacre. It executed those attacks all but unmolested for nearly a year, all while these rigged pagers were deployed and ready to go, until the summer of 2024. Only then did Israel debilitate thousands of Hezbollah fighters by targeting their pagers and walkie-talkies and executing pinpoint penetrating strikes on its leadership in buried bunkers. When the prospect of widespread carnage was at its lowest, the Israel Defense Forces entered southern Lebanon with the aim of clearing Hezbollah from Israel’s northern borders — borders that had been largely evacuated since 10/7 under a constant rain of rocket and mortar fire.

 

Inverting the roles of victim and victimizer here compels those who are doing the inversion to engage in so much elision that the act is indistinguishable from lying. The sins of omission compound to the point at which reasonable observers are obliged to conclude that they’re being sold a bill of goods. We know why Mamdani is engaged in this sordid campaign. His goal is to popularize the anti-Israel narratives to which he is partial, which he presumes will make his policy preferences — engineering a schism between the U.S. and Jerusalem, among them — more feasible.

 

Since the Associated Press has now engaged in the same elision and moral inversion of which Mamdani is guilty, we can conclude that the AP shares his policy objectives.

 

With Mamdani-like indifference, the AP published a hand-wringing exposé about the suffering that Israel inflicted on Hezbollah and the souls caught in its orbit. “Human rights and United Nations reports, however, say the attack may have violated international law, calling it indiscriminate,” the AP noted — a claim that says far more about the observational capabilities, or lack thereof, of the U.N. and “human rights” groups. Ten months later, the “survivors,” which the AP acknowledges are “likely” Hezbollah members or the “dependents” of terrorist operatives, “are on a slow, painful path to recovery.”

 

The reporters who interviewed “Hezbollah officials or fighters or members of their families” noted that they had all “lost fingers,” had shrapnel “lodged under their skin,” were blinded, or had lost an eye. A handful were civilians — collateral damage resulting from their proximity to known terrorist operatives. The vast majority of the wounded were affiliated with the Iran-backed terrorist group illegally occupying Lebanon.

 

The sprawling profile is replete with what the reader must assume are supposed to be sob stories. Take, for example, 23-year-old Mahdi Sheri’s harrowing experience. A “Hezbollah fighter,” he “had been ordered back to the frontline on the day of the attack.” The pager went off as he looked at it, leaving him blinded in one eye. “He can no longer play football,” the AP mourns. “Hezbollah is helping him find a new job. Sheri realizes it’s impossible now to find a role alongside Hezbollah fighters.”

 

That’s not a story of woe. It’s a report on a Hezbollah terrorist who was taken off the battlefield — advancing Israel’s security objectives — who nevertheless lived to tell the tale. Even the AP’s effort to present the minors who were wounded in the Israeli operation as sympathetic victims exposes Hezbollah’s moral culpability. Twelve-year-old Hussein Dheini, whose face was disfigured in one of the explosions, now struggles to read and regulate his breathing. But he is only in that position because he served in Hezbollah’s “youth movement” — the so-called “scouts,” in which young children are taught antisemitic conspiracy theories and trained to engage in terroristic direct action, like mass shootings and suicide bombings. The boy’s father owned the pager that permanently injured him, but he was not insulated from Hezbollah’s terrorism. He was being actively groomed for future terrorist activity.

 

These are examples in microcosm of why the pager operation was a spectacularly successful, and spectacularly moral, enterprise.

 

Israel didn’t have to invest untold resources and years of spy craft into the effort to establish dummy corporations that would sell Hezbollah the instruments of its own destruction. It could have relied on conventional military assets to deter Iran’s terrorist proxies and slaughter them wholesale when deterrence broke down. Israel has had to be cleverer than that — mostly for the benefit of Western audiences, who, as the AP illustrates, do not care in the slightest that the tactics in which Israel engages are not comparable to those of the terrorists with whom it is at war.