Media outlets around the world covering the conflict between Palestinians and the IDF often, by omission and commission, present the terrorists and IDF soldiers as morally identical. They leave out crucial details, put great emphasis on others that make the IDF look bad, and get the sequence of events wrong, so that IDF raids to arrest terrorists are presented not as a response to Palestinian terrorism but, rather, as the cause of Palestinian attacks. More on this skewed coverage can be found here: “No Moral Equivalency: Palestinians Try to Kill Civilians, Israel Kills Terrorists,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, Algemeiner, June 27, 2023:
Just after 4 PM last Tuesday, 20 loud gunshots shattered the usual quiet in the central West Bank community of Eli, in what turned out to be yet another deadly assault on innocent Israeli civilians.
According to local officials, two Palestinian terrorists armed with automatic weapons entered a hummus establishment near the settlement’s entrance, murdering three people, as they sprayed bullets at restaurant staff and customers. Another civilian was shot dead while filling up his car at the adjoining gas station.
On Tuesday night, the slain victims were named: Elisha Anteman, 17, from Eli; Nahman Mordoff, 17, from Achiya; Harel Masood, 21, from Yad Binyamin; and Ofer Fairman, 63, from Eli. At least four others sustained various degrees of injuries….
Meanwhile, the Hamas terror group promptly praised the attack, and identified killers Muhannad Shahada and Khaled Sabah as members of its Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Local media noted that the two were imprisoned together three years ago in the Hamas wing of Israel’s maximum-security Megiddo prison.
Amid the first funerals for victims on Tuesday evening, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh announced that he had met with senior military officials in Iran, including Revolutionary Guards Force commander Hossein Salami. In a statement, the Hamas terror chief warned that the shooting outside Eli was “only the beginning,” threatening that the next attack would be “stronger.”
Since the start of the current terror wave some 15 months ago, 56 Israelis have been killed in Palestinian acts of terror, the vast majority being civilians.
The Palestinian terror groups almost always target Israeli civilians. But the IDF, as is well known, is quite the reverse: it makes enormous efforts to avoid hitting civilians. When the Israelis target sites, such as the hideout of a terror leader, or a weapons warehouse, or a control-and-command center, or a rocket launcher, that have been deliberately placed within civilian structures such as a school, hospital, apartment building, or even a mosque, they warn civilians in those buildings to leave, using emails, telephoning, leafletting, and the “knock-on-the-roof” technique. Inevitably, not all civilians get out in time. Some are wounded; some die. But the civilians killed by the IDF are unintended, while the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas or the PIJ or other terror groups — whether from rockets launched into Israel, or from being stabbed, shot, or rammed by a vehicle driven by an individual terrorist — are intended victims.
In a worrying development, attacks in the West Bank have increasingly been carried out by organized and well-trained terrorist cells, in line with the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate’s assessment, made several years ago, that Tehran and its proxies would attempt to provoke a widespread flareup throughout the disputed territory.
Iran has been increasingly involved in supporting terrorists in Gaza and in the West Bank, providing weapons and money both to the PIJ and now also to Hamas.
However, in their reporting on the Eli massacre, several media outlets opted to frame the unprovoked murder of four innocent Jews, including two children, as being a “tit-for-tat” response to last Monday’s IDF raid that targeted members of US-designated terrorist organizations in the northern West Bank city of Jenin.
It’s legitimate for journalists to cite Hamas’ assertion that the well-planned killing spree near Eli was somehow a “response to the crimes of the occupation in the Jenin camp yesterday and the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque [sic].”
But when this false equivalence is presented as fact, legitimate reporting turns into what some have dubbed “terror journalism.”
It is one thing for journalists to report what Hamas claims was the reason for its murder of four Israelis at the hummus restaurant and gas station; it is quite another to suggest that Hamas is telling the truth. Hamas says that these killings were a reaction, to the IDF raid into Jenin the day before, as well as to “the storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque.” But there was no “storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque” to which Hamas was responding. And the attack at the restaurant and gas station near Eli were well-planned, rather than being, as Hamas wants us to believe, an immediate response to the IDF raid into the Jenin camp just the day before.
What the journalists have done is treat the murders of the four Israeli civilians as a “reaction” or “response” to something done by the IDF; the implication is that Israel was the provoking party, while Hamas was merely reacting.
In what was perhaps the most egregious example of this shocking moral perversion, The Australian’s headline described the events in Eli as a “revenge raid.”
The Times of London, for its part, similarly wrote of a “revenge attack by Palestinian militants,” without attributing the claim to Hamas.
Both The Australian and The Times of London describe the murder of the four Israelis as a “revenge attack” for the IDF raid into Jenin the day before, which is what Hamas called it. But the attack was not in “revenge” for the Jenn raid; it had been in the works long before. And had the reporters for The Australian and The Times of London done a little digging on their own, they would have found this out. Instead, they uncritically accepted the Hamas story of a “revenge” attack, which puts the blame on Israel as having started this particular “cycle of violence.” The carefully-planned murders of Israeli civilians was no more a “revenge” attack than was that by the 9/11 hijackers.
PBS Newshour anchor Geoff Bennett downplayed the vicious attack by referring to the victims as mere “settlers.”
Palestinian propaganda has managed to turn the word “settler” into a pejorative. If the four people murdered were all “settlers,” then many have been brainwashed to believe that they were particularly wicked for “stealing Palestinian land” and no one need be too concerned about their deaths. They had it coming. Geoff Bennett knew the negative connotation that comes with the word “settler.” That’s why he went with it.
At the same time, the PBS report failed to mention that two of the slain Israelis were minors, while explicitly noting that “Palestinians are mourning five people killed in [Monday’s IDF] raid, including 15-year-old Ahmed Saqr, whose family grieves.”
Why did the PBS report mention the age of Ahmed Saqr – 15 years – who was killed in the IDF raid into Jenin, but failed to mention that two of the Israelis killed near Eli were also minors? We know that the killing of minors is deemed especially reprehensible. Was that the reason for PBS mentioning the age of the Palestinian boy, but withholding from its report on the four murdered Israelis the same information — that two of the four were minors? And why did PBS add that tear-jerking detail about “his [Ahmed Saqr’s] family grieves,” but say nothing about the Israeli families who grieved their losses? Are they not also entitled to our sympathy?
Crucially, evidence from multiple Palestinian sources suggests that Saqr was part of a group of violent rioters who had thrown rocks at Israeli troops.
All we know about Ahmed Saqr is that he was 15 years old when he died, and his family grieves. We were not told by PBS that he was involved in violent riots, hurling rocks – large enough to severely wound or kill — at Israeli soldiers. Thus his innocence is maintained, and his killing made to seem wantonly cruel. It’s not as if, for god’s sake, that he was that terrible thing — a “settler.”