Media: Terror, Terror Everywhere, Except in Israel
The Jewish Press ran a Ben Shapiro piece Wednesday titled “The West Must Stop Pretending Palestinian Terrorism Against Israel is Different From Other Muslim Terrorism Against the West.” In these days of successive terror attacks against civilians in Europe and elsewhere, it’s critically important that Westerners see Israelis as facing the same terrorism threat as themselves. The mainstream Western media has had a hand in excluding maimed and murdered Israeli civilians from being perceived as among worldwide victims of terror, an exclusion weakening Westerners’ appreciation of Israel’s legitimate necessary responses and territorial security needs.
This refusal to portray Jewish victims in Israel as victims of terror is not something new.
After the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., the mainstream media accused Israel of trying to insinuate itself, unsuccessfully, into the “global war against terrorism” by claiming that Palestinian Arab attacks on Israeli civilians amounted to “terror.”
The Baltimore Sun ran a December 1, 2002 (Inq., A2, “Israel Tries To Link Itself With U.S. War On Terror”) article that led:
“Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Israel has been trying to link its battles against Palestinians to the Bush administration’s global war against terrorism. But…Israel has been unable to convince the world that it is fighting the same war as the United States.”
*** Here’s one example [emphasis added throughout] from shortly after the 9/11 attacks of just how malevolently the mainstream Western media mischaracterized one of Israel’s “battles against Palestinians” as something other than a country’s justified response against terror. That week, this media watch called the Western media’s misportrayal of that confrontation the media’s “Assassination of English.”
The 11/24/01 Philadelphia Inquirer ran a 4-column page A2 headline – “Israel Defends Assassination” – over a Knight-Ridder [of less-than-blessed-memory] article that led:
“An unrepentant Israel yesterday defended the assassination of the radical Hamas movement’s military leader, with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres calling Mahmoud Abu Hanuod ‘a professional terrorist’ who was planning more attacks.”
Note that it was the mainstream Western media that labeled this “assassinated” Hamasnik a “military leader,” versus its quoting of an Israeli “calling” him “a professional terrorist.”
So which was he, “military leader” or “terrorist?” Here’s the Jerusalem Post the very next day. This man was wanted by Israel, the Post reported,
“for masterminding the 1997 terrorist attacks in Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehuda shouk and Rehov Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall, which killed 21 people. Security sources said he also had a hand in most of the major suicide bombings this past year, including the June 1 attack at the Dolphin disco in Tel Aviv and on August 9 at the Sbarro pizza parlor in Jerusalem, which claimed the lives of 36 people and over 200 wounded. He was also behind the 1999 suicide bombings in Haifa and Tiberias in which there were no casualties. Abu Hanuod’s expertise was the ability to link bomb makers with suicide bombers. Security officials said that Abu Hanoud had recently dispatched suicide bombers from Tulkarm, but those attacks were foiled at the last minute. He was in the midst of preparing more suicide attacks inside the Green Line, security sources said last night.”
*** Here’s Knight-Ridder itself in its then-owned Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/23/02: “More than 30 suicide bombers have brought carnage to shopping centers, restaurants, discotheques, buses and arcades since a Palestinian revolt began in September 2000. The blasts have killed scores of Israelis and injured hundreds of others. Soldiers and police have foiled dozens of other attacks in recent months, including five in the last week, army spokesmen say.”
*** On June 19 and 20, 2002, the Philly Inquirer headlined two consecutive days of Palestinian Arab bombings of Jerusalem city buses, murdering 25 and wounding 85 Israeli civilians. On the second day, the Inq headlined
“Jerusalem Hit Again – and Militants Promise More”
“ – and MILITANTS Promise More.” More what? More explosions and incinerations of municipal buses packed with civilians, many women and kids. I answered that headline at a [part-of-the] Jewish community protest on the Inquirer’s sidewalk a fortnight later:
We’re here today because mass murderers who pack bombs with nails, screws, rat poison and hate, to murder and maim as many men, women and children as they possibly can, in buses, restaurants, shopping malls, discos, pool halls, parks and a Bat Mitzvah and a Passover seder, aren’t militants, anytime, anywhere. They’re terrorists, every time, everywhere…. [I went on about there not being “millions” of Arab refugees from the 1948 war….”
*** Terror could even strike right next-door to Israel, and be reported as such by the same Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) reporter (Inq Jerusalem Bureau Chief Matza) who called the eleven Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics “killed” by “Palestinian guerrillas” (Inq, 3/14/04). The October 29, 2002, Inquirer ran a front-page staff-writer article on the murder of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan, in which Jerusalem Bureau Chief Matza raised the issues “as to whether it was a result of terrorism,” “the work of a terror group,” and whether “it appeared to be an act of terrorism.”
*** Is it still going on, this Western media labeling of attacks on Israelis as anything other than terrorism, while forthrightly calling terrorism terrorism when it occurs elsewhere in the world?
How about one American newspaper’s differentiation, less than a year ago, of killings of four and five people, respectively, in Israel and next-door Jordan, two days apart?
On Thursday, 6/9/16, A6, my hometown Philadephia Inquirer headlined “Two Palestinian Gunmen Kill 4 at Tel Aviv Market,” sub-headlining “The attack occurred in a popular tourist area. Military headquarters is across the street.” Ironically, two days before (Inq, Tuesday, 6/7/16, A4), it had headlined an “Around the World” AP squib on an attack on Jordan’s national intelligence agency, killing four guards and a receptionist, as “Jordan: Apparent Terror Attack Kills Five.”
Terror, terror everywhere, except when the victims are us.