Dear World Media,
I know you’ve been very busy with much more important things, like Jews fighting Jews in Hebron (you really love when that happens), or Gaza banks closing due to Israel’s refusal to hand money over to Hamas (funny that you keep missing the part where Hamas smuggles millions of dollars in cash through the tunnels), or writing about Israel’s refusal to allow foreign journalists into Gaza (while ignoring utterly the restrictions the Palestinians have always had in place on journalists, which included kneecapping those who wrote critical pieces about Palestinian leaders), but I thought I would point something out to you that you appear not to notice, except when it kills someone: Hamas has been sending mortars and rockets out of Gaza on a daily basis, deliberately aiming for schoolchildren. That’s right. Every day now, just like before the so-called truce, rockets are falling on southern Israel.
And yet, the world media is more concerned with getting your reporters into Gaza than in reporting the daily rocketing of Israeli towns and cities. You only seem to notice it when Israel kills the rocketeers (and Hamas lies about who was killed), or when an Israeli is killed by a rocket or mortar shell, and even then, you manage to point out that the rockets “rarely” kill anyone. I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the victim’s family.
You constantly repeat the Hamas line that the rockets only “strain” the truce, yet Israeli response to the rockets “violate” the truce. Or you confuse cause and effect, taking the Hamas line that the reason they are firing rockets into Israel is because the IDF went into Gaza to destroy a tunnel, killing the terrorists who attempted to kill them. The rockets, you say, are “in response” to the Israel “raid” into Gaza. And yet, rockets have been raining down regularly during the entire time the so-called “truce” has been in effect, but you brilliant, talented, experienced international reporters can’t seem to add that fact into your reports. Even in an article about Hamas preventing Gazans from performing the Hajj, you pass along that false narrative. You shamelessly conflate the killing of terrorists with the deliberate targeting of civilians:
For the past several weeks, both have violated its terms, with Hamas lobbing rockets into southern Israel, terrorizing and injuring dozens, and Israeli forces carrying out raids into Gaza, killing and wounding militants.
The exchanges began when Israel discovered a tunnel being dug from Gaza to Israel that it believed was to be used for seizing another Israeli soldier — Hamas has already been holding a soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, for more than two years. Israel destroyed the tunnel, killing six Hamas militants in the operation, leading Hamas to accuse it of breaking the truce. It retaliated with dozens of rockets and mortars.
The tunnel was a violation of the truce, New York Times reporter. How is it you start the truce violation with Israel’s action to destroy the tunnel, completely ignoring the terrorists’ actions that caused the IDF equal and opposite reaction? (Yes, that was a rhetorical question. By now, we are familiar with the world media’s blindnesses in the Israel-Palestinian war.)
Only Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, is reporting regularly on the daily rocket attacks, and is actually blaming Hamas, something that Reuters and AP generally don’t do. You blame instead “rogue groups” that Hamas “can’t control.” Interesting that the media organ of one of the world’s most unfree press can still tell the truth about Hamas, while the freest media in the world can’t figure out who is actually responsible for breaking the “truce.”
In closing, world media, I would like to say that I don’t really expect you to change. I don’t even expect you to be ashamed of yourselves for the blatant promotion of a terrorist group that is trying to turn Gaza into another Somalia (and gee, look what Sharia rule got us in that failed state) while ignoring all of Hamas’ crimes against its own people. But I do expect you to understand that I will never, ever give you a pass for your shabby, biased, pseudo-reporting on Israel and the Palestinians.
And in closing: [censored]
Sincerely,
Meryl Yourish
Meryl,
Great post, probably one of your best ever. You concisely communicated so much of what is wrong with the reporting and in the process will probably open the eyes of many people that don’t realize how poor the reporting is on Israel. I have sent this post to everyone that I could think of.
Thanks
It’s like that old guy who used to daven shacharit at the Kotel every day since he was a bar mitzvah.
“How’s all that davening working out for you, Pops?”
“To tell you the truth, it’s like talking to a wall…”
Every now and then, I wonder if the biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is due, not to anti-semitism or anti-Zionism, but rather to racism. There seems to be an underlying assumption that the Palestinians are animals, or perhaps robots. That they respond to stimuli in programmed ways with no hint of free will or moral-agency. Under this view, only Israeli actions can be judged on a moral scale because only the Israelis have a choice — act morally, or don’t. Hamas fires rockets as Israel because that’s what Hamas does. It can’t do anything else. Cows gotta graze, wolves gotta kill, Arabs gotta kill Jews.
The same attitude seems to come into play in conflicts from other parts of the world. If a conflict pits whites against nonwhites, the reporting is obviously slanted to make the whites the villains, but underlying that slant is the same attitude: only the whites can be held at fault because only the whites have a choice. Nonwhites can’t be held responsible for their actions, because they can’t behave any other way. Meanwhile, nonwhite-vs-nonwhite conflicts are simply ignored as unimportant.
If one looks back over the last century or so of history, one might almost get the impression that modern liberalism is a bastard child of 1920s fascism and Victorian-era Western racism. A hideous combination.