AP: All the Propaganda that’s fit to print

The AP should change its name to All Propaganda. Witness:

Israeli airstrike kills 2 Gaza militants1
Israeli aircraft struck a Palestinian rocket squad in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing two militants2 as the military prepared to activate a new defense system to shoot down incoming rockets.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group that frequently attacks Israel, confirmed two members were killed in the airstrike, while a third was critically wounded. The group did not specify whether they were in the process of launching rockets3.

Gaza militants, including Islamic Jihad and the territory’s Hamas rulers, had said over the weekend that they would halt their fire if Israel did4. It was not clear whether they were reneging on that pledge5 or whether the air strike hit a rogue group of militants6 ignoring the cease-fire overture7.

By the numbers: These are the three paragraphs that wind up in the “World news” section of your local paper. Let us analyze this so-called objective news report.

  1. The headline: Note that the AP does not hesitate to use the active “Israeli airstrike kills,” and blames Israel in the headline. It isn’t the mystery of the butchery—sorry, “knife attack” that killed the Fogel family. It isn’t “Rockets kill Israeli” headline that are used when the “crude, homemade” kassams kill a civilian. It’s an Israeli airstrike that killed the “militants.”
  2. Again, the AP is totally certain that Israel killed the militants, as opposed to their continued game of “Gee, nobody’s claiming the bomb attack, so we don’t know if Palestinian militants did it” routine.
  3. Note the attempt by the AP to make it look like Israel is the aggressor here (see below). Gee, the terrorists didn’t admit they were trying to murder civilians. Go figure. And yet, Ynet managed to find out that they were, indeed, part of a rocket-launching group, in an article published before the AP release.
  4. Here we have the moral equivalence game again, putting the Israeli response to rocket fire into the same category as terrorists firing rockets, and calling the lack of both a cease-fire—so that when Israel defends itself from terrorists, it is “breaking” the (pick one) calm, lull, cease-fire, relative calm, quiet.
  5. Seriously? How many times have terrorists said they’d stop firing rockets if Israel would stop it actions against them and then immediately claimed that Israel “broke the calm”? The AP is still pretending that the terrorists’ word counts for something? Tell that to the dead and wounded in Israel. But take note that the AP constantly publicizes these “pledges”—only to subtly accuse Israel of being the one that first broke the “calm.”
  6. Islamic Jihad claimed the dead terrorists as theirs. The only reason the AP has to imply the dead terrorists were “a rogue group” is to give PIJ cover for breaking their “pledge.”
  7. See 5 and 6. This is the AP bending over backwards to try to clear the “militants” of any wrongdoing. Gee, maybe they were just on their way to their grandmother’s house, and happened to be struck by a Hellfire missile launched haphazardly by the IDF.

We are also back to the incorrect AP boilerplate about the 2006 Gaza war.

The renewed hostilities have fed concerns of another large-scale Israeli military operation against Gaza militants. In December 2008, Israel invaded Gaza in response to years of rocket and mortar barrages on its southern communities, killing 1,400 Palestinians , including more than 900 civilians, and causing widespread destruction.

Thirteen Israelis also died.

Hamas has admitted that 600-700 of the dead were “militants”. The AP is now passing along incorrect propaganda. And, as always, note the juxtaposition of Israeli and Palestinian dead, as if it’s all about the numbers, and not about the object of Hamas, which is the eradication of all Jewish Israelis.

And last, but not least, here are paragraphs four and five, which also sometimes show up in your World News section of the Sunday paper:

A spokesman for Gaza’s Hamas-run interior ministry, Ihab Ghussein, accused Israel of seeking to perpetuate the violence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had “no interest” in escalating things.

Note that the accuser is Hamas, and the accusation is that Israeli is behind the “violence.” One last time: The terrorists launch rockets. Israel responds by killing the terrorists. That makes the cause the rockets, the effect the Israeli airstrikes. The AP always uses this tactic to make it seem like Israel is the aggressor. Here’s paragraph six, which will absolutely be cut out of the article in the World News section:

“But we won’t hesitate to employ the might of the military against those who would attack our citizens,” Netanyahu added in remarks at the start of the weekly Cabinet meeting.

This is why the world is so against Israel. It is constantly pummeled by the anti-Israel narrative, the Palestinian propagandists and their allies in the world media.

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