VICTOR SHARPE: TERRORISTS AND THE MEDIA MAKE PERFECT BEDFELLOWS
http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2014/07/23/terrorists-and-the-media-make-for-perfect-bedfellows.html
Terrorism needs its poison spewed to as wide a viewing audience as possible.
This still begs the question: how can people of principle and truth respond so lamentably towards those who wave their automatic weapons and fire deadly missiles through the orb of the blue sky, bringing down passenger planes or indiscriminately attempting to destroy cities?
The New York Times, or the Guardian in London, have long been propaganda organs for terrorist organizations, wittingly or unwittingly. The result is the same. The victim suffers and the victimizer is feted. In the July 20th edition of the conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, Noah Pollak writes:
“Something important is missing from the New York Times coverage of the war in Gaza: where are the photographs of terrorist attacks on Israel, and pictures of Hamas gunmen, tunnels, weaponry, and the use of human shields?
“It appears the Times is silently but happily complying with a Hamas demand that the only pictures from Gaza are of civilians and never of the terrorists. The most influential news organization in the world is thus manufacturing an utterly false portrait of the battle – precisely the portrait that Hamas finds most helpful: the blatantly false image of embattled, victimized Gaza civilians under attack by a cruel Israeli military.”
Indeed, there are no images of Israelis under rocket attack, no images of grieving Israeli families and damaged Israeli buildings, no images of heavily armed Hamas gunmen or rocket attacks on Israel, no images of the RPG’s and machine guns recovered from attempted Hamas tunnel infiltrations into Israeli villages. So far, some 80 tunnels have been located running from Gaza into Israeli territory.
Practically all the cement and concrete that Israel unknowingly allowed into Gaza, in the expectation that it was being used to build schools, hospitals and homes, was diverted by Hamas solely for the construction of sophisticated tunnels through which terrorists could infiltrate into Israel or hide their vast arsenal of Iranian supplied deadly missiles. A report about Hamas tunnel attacks on Israeli civilians, bizarrely contained not a single picture related to those attacks though many appear throughout the internet and in other publications.
The Times is guilty of the sins of omission as well as of commission. For instance, it does not report what appeared on Al Jazeera’s own blog (hardly a friend of Israel) that a breakdown of casualties in Gaza among the Arabs showed most of the dead were in fact combatant age males; not women and children. The analysis revealed that 82% of the dead were men with 50% between the ages of 18 and 28, while 66% were between the ages of 18 and 38.
Terrorists have been deliberately firing from the Al Wafa hospital in Gaza in the hope that more Palestinians will be killed as human shields – a Hamas crime against humanity. The hospital premises were being used as war rooms and command centers by the terrorist groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But look in vain for balanced reportage about this Palestinian atrocity in the New York Times.
The same one-sided narrative of Israelis as attackers, Palestinians as victims, have filled the pages of the New York Times. It is no wonder that a famous talk show host calls them the “New York Slimes.” Indeed, a check of the Twitter feed of the Times photographer in Gaza shows not a single image that portrays Hamas in a negative light. It’s nothing but alleged civilian victims of the IDF without a murmur of them being forced by Hamas to be cannon fodder and human shields for the jihadi gunmen.
Maybe all of this is an illustration of just how biased against Israel the über liberal Times has become – so biased that Times photographers and editors are simply blind to any image that doesn’t conform to their view of the war.
Hamas, the junior branch of the infamous Muslim Brotherhood, has published media guidelines instructing Gazans and journalists to always refer to the dead as “innocent civilians” and to never post pictures of terrorists on social media.
Hamas is currently preventing foreign journalists from leaving the Strip, in effect holding them hostage. These journalists must be terrified – and they also must know that the best way to ensure their safety is to never run afoul of the terrorists in whose hands their fates lie. So they are forced to demonize Israel while ignoring the incessant barrage of Hamas missiles striking Israel’s population centers and its main international airport.
It would appear that Hamas’s media instructions have been heard loud and clear at the New York Times, and the response is craven obedience. But the Times also isn’t bothering to inform its readers that the images they’re seeing of Gaza are only the ones Hamas wants them to see.
Indeed, many of the pictures that emanate from Hamas are of victims killed in Iraq or Syria or from footage taken many years ago and purported to be of the situation in Gaza today. It’s time for the Times to tell its readers exactly why they are being presented with such a distorted picture of this war.
And it is not only the Times that is aiding and abetting Muslim jihadists, tragically most of the mainstream media is guilty of the same offence: creating among the uninformed public a picture so thoroughly distorted and manipulated that it must make the very angels in heaven weep and give the ghost of Nazi propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, immense pleasure.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several published books including The Blue Hour and Politicide
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