This Week: Reflections on Media Miscoverage’s Reflections on Us
“Only Hamas can stop the bloodshed. But it won’t as long as the media gives it public relations victories every time Israel kills in self-defense.” – Alan Dershowitz, “The Media’s Misplaced Sympathy for the Hamas Lynch Mob,” Foxnews.com, 5/21/18
Sometimes, scenes stick in my head, the latest being this month’s mainstream media split-screening of ceremonies opening the U.S. embassy to Israel in Jerusalem juxtaposed with “Israel Kills 50+ Palestinian Protesters in Gaza.”
Let’s count that scene’s anti-Israel media biases.
[1] Not “Protesters”: Of course, they weren’t “protesters,” and the media didn’t need to wait until Hamas itself admitted as much to know that. The fence-destruction-intending fence-rushing was billed “The March of Return,” and the participants weren’t bashful about what they intended to do once they had breached it. Washington Post, 5/14 [embassy move day]/18: “… to kill, throw stones … kill Jews.” Dore Gold, JCPA, “Hamas, Gaza and The Rush To Judgment,” 5/24/18: “Hamas also provided the demonstrators with maps of how to get to Jewish towns and villages.”
[2] “Israel Kills” Not the Real Gaza Headline: The real headline of what happened in Gaza wasn’t that Israel, confronted with attackers rushing its border intent on murdering its nearby-residing civilians, did what any nation would do. The real headline was Hamas whipping up Gaza civilians into frenzied attempts to do this. Israel had even dropped leaflets [compare Gazans’ burning kites] warning them not to do it.
[3] Media Gave Hamas Act Significance Equivalence of Embassy Move: Bibi was not exaggerating when he told Jeanine Pirro, interviewing him for Fox News, that the United States moving its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was a major recognition of the Jewish people’s historical homeland connection to the Land of Israel, the political and religious capital of which has from King David’s time been Jerusalem. Certainly, the media should have also reported on Hamas that day throwing its people at its fenced border with Israel, but the media’s split-screen and side-by-side-photos juxtaposing of that act with the U.S. moving its embassy wrongly denigrated the Jerusalem embassy opening’s significance, exacerbated by the media’s “Israel Kills Protesters” headlines.
The reason that media bias occurrences like this stick in my head is that the disdain expressed by such slanted news coverage reflects not just on the state of Israel but us, diaspora Jews who view Israel as the three-millennia Jewish homeland that’s uniquely in much of the world’s crosshairs because that’s what it is. It’s incumbent on us not to avert our eyes from “anti-Israel” media bias.