Whitewashing terrorists’ speech

I really do wonder, sometimes, why the AP constantly quotes Chipmunk Cheeks. They don’t pretend he wants peace, but they do have a much softer spin on what he actually said. Note the headline, which makes you think the article is about the end of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. No, it’s not. It’s about calling the Arab world to war against Israel. But that’s not how the AP wrote it up.

Lebanese Hezbollah: Peace talks with Israel ‘dead’
Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah leader has praised an Arab decision to halt peace talks with Israel, saying the only option remaining is armed resistance against the Jewish state.

A little bit of looking around in other news sources finds that once again, the AP is whitewashing the anti-Israel line of Israel’s enemies. Here’s what Nasrallah actually said:

Lebanon’s Hezbollah called on Arab states on Thursday to abandon peace talks and join the militant group in its fight against Israel, after negotiations foundered over Israeli settlement building.

“Come to the path of resistance and the choice of resistance,” the leader of the powerful Shiite movement, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a televised address…

“Be honest with your people and confess to them the truth — the possibility of a settlement is over,” said Nasrallah, whose movement fought a devastating 2006 war with Israel.

“We have no choice to restore our land and dignity… but through resistance,” he added, drawing chants of “death to Israel” from the tens of thousands of faithful who had gathered in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs of the capital Beirut.

What is especially lacking from the AP news article is the definition of “resistance”—that is armed attacks against the Jewish state. Once in a while, you’ll find that definition in a news article. But the media narrative carries the Arab point of view, so the words “resistance” or “armed resistance” are used, instead of, say, “war”—which is actually what “resistance” means.

You also don’t see Hezbollah described as a terrorist group, because hey, terrorists against Israel are just “militants”—because the word has been redefined by the media.

Hezbollah calls for war. The AP calls it “resistance.” What else is new?