Operation Pillar of Defense: The Mainstream Media Lies For Hamas

Perhaps its because the election is over and there is no one to “pick on,” so the mainstream media is working hard to sway public opinion against Israel in its battle to stop the Hamas terrorists from firing rockets into her civilian areas.

Between Saturday and Tuesday of last week, Hamas terrorists fired over 150 rockets from Gaza into Israeli civilian areas; this was on top of another 700 rockets launched this year prior to that assault.

On Wednesday, the IDF directed a precision attack on Ahmed Jabari, the head of Hamas’ “military wing” in the Gaza Strip. Jabari was a senior operative of the terrorist group and was directly responsible for executing terror attacks against the Jewish State in the past years.

The mainstream media acted as if they were unfamiliar with Jabari’s history, the weekend of terror coming out of Gaza and in some cases the fact that Israel left the Gaza strip over seven years ago.

Associated Press’ coverage of the incident referred to Israel’s air strike as an “assassination,” that resumption of “Israel’s policy of assassinating Palestinian militant leaders,” pointed out that “Israeli aircraft have previously assassinated the previous commander of Hamas’ military wing,” and noted that “Israeli officials had said that they were considering assassinating top Hamas officials following a wave of rocket fire.”

Camera.org checked the Nexus news database,

“There have been 2,907 AP news stories mentioning one of the two countries along with the word ‘drone’ or ‘drones.’ Of those stories, 208 also mention ‘assassination’ or some derivative of that word. But only one of the 208 stories referred to an American drone operation as an attempted ‘assassination.’ (A May 2003 article stated, ‘The U.S. government last year declared Hekmatyar a terrorist, and in May 2002 a CIA drone tried to assassinate him near Kabul, but missed and killed some of his followers.’) In the nine years that followed, during which U.S. targeted killings increased dramatically, not a single AP article described American drone attacks as assassinations in the voice of the reporter.”

When discussing Israel, the media has its own language, like that term militant. The mainstream media is reluctant to use the term terrorist when discussing Hamas because they really believe one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

As Jonah Goldberg described in his book “The Tyranny of Clichés,” the only people who believe that a terrorist is indistinguishable from a freedom fighter are terrorist sympathizers and idiots.

“Shall we say George Washington, Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi are indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden or Timothy McVeigh? Most reasonable and decent people would recoil at the suggestion that Martin Luther King was a terrorist.”

When it comes to covering Israel (and politics) the mainstream media cannot be considered “reasonable and decent.”

From the very beginning the media tried to imply the Israeli action was not justified. Wednesday morning saw Fox News’ Leland Vitter say the IDF was responding to “low grade” attacks from Gaza. In what world would 150 rockets fired at civilian communities be considered a “low grade” attack?

Even days into the action (on Saturday Night), Long Island’s News 12 was claiming the entire escalation began with the Israeli killing of Ahmed Jabari, totally ignoring the missiles shot into Sderot and Ashkelon.

Ethan Bronner of the New York Times started his November 17th report with a similar claim. “When Israel assassinated the top Hamas military commander in Gaza on Wednesday, setting off the current round of fierce fighting.”

On Friday’s ABC World News, correspondent Alex Marquardt broadcast, without question, a claim by “one of the militant groups behind” the rocket attacks on Israel, that they “wouldn’t fire rockets if Israel wasn’t killing us,” even though almost 700 rockets had already been fired out of Gaza into the Jewish state between January 1 and November 9, before Israel’s recent sustained military campaign began.

Trying to show how “evil” the IDF is, photos of the dead four-year-old Mahmoud Sadallah of Jabaliya, were distributed by the Associated Press, Agency France-Presse and Reuters. All of the photos were sent out with captions stating the boy was killed in an Israeli air strike, despite the fact that news articles by the New York Times and even AP itself made clear that the circumstances behind his death were “hotly disputed,” (as AP put it), and that he may have been killed by an errant Palestinian rocket (as it turns out, he had to be killed by an errant Hamas Rocket).

BBC reporter Jon Donnison, tweeted his 8,000 followers a picture of a dead girl with her little brother crying by her side, and described it as a heartbreaking picture from Gaza. While the picture was indeed heartbreaking, it was from the Syrian civil war, not from the Israeli action to protect herself from Hamas rockets.

Then there is that “good ole moral equivalence lie.” A Financial Times staff-editorial says Hamas bears primary responsibility for the escalation, but the Netanyahu government “must also take much blame for stoking resentment among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for so long.”

The LA Times reported on November 15th: Death toll grows as Israel-Gaza violence escalates, a double whammy arguing a moral equivalence and using the term “Gaza” instead of Hamas or terrorists.

CNN took a similar approach with its headline: Violence flares between Palestinians, Israelis. CNN also ran a background article on Hamas, implying that it had modified its charter, that its charter calling for the destruction of Israel was no longer in place, and it was ready to make peace:

Its original manifesto advocated the destruction of the State of Israel, and called for the raising of “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”

Despite the “hint” from CNN, the original Hamas manifesto was never changed.

These are not all the cases of biased reporting from the mainstream media, nor do they comprise the full list of the most egregious cases. It is simply an alert to fair-minded people not to accept what they read, see, or hear from the mainstream media. They have an agenda to support the Palestinians and to delegitimize Israel at the expense of the truth.

Jeff Dunetz is the Editor/Publisher of the political blog “The Lid” (www.jeffdunetz.com). Jeff contributes to some of the largest political sites on the internet.