Palestinian Incitement Gets An Assist From The Media--Again

Yochanan Visser, director of Missing Peace Information an Israeli public diplomacy organization, writes about the role the media plays in the perpetuation of the Palestinian terrorist attacks against innocent Israeli civilians--men, women and children:

After the news broke about the Itamar murders we saw government officials issuing the usual calls for international condemnation of this barbaric act.

On Sunday the Israeli government declared that it would establish a special team that will monitor Palestinian incitement.

Nothing however, has been said about the other source of incitement that caused the dehumanization of roughly half a million Jews.


Even on the day that the five members of the Fogel family were buried, a large part of the foreign media continued its demonization campaign against the Jews living across the Green Line.

The New York Times and the Washington Post reported that ‘five settlers’ had been killed. The BBC buried the news in an article about new ‘settler homes’ and Sky did not even report the news for 48 hours.

Countless are the examples of the foreign media using only Palestinian sources for stories about ‘settlers’.

Just last week it was widely reported that ‘6 Palestinians were shot in clashes with settlers’. Thanks to a well known Israeli blogger, in this case the truth came to light.

The Palestinians initiated an attack on a Jew and were wounded in the ensuing clash with the IDF.

This kind of reporting has created the picture that all Jews on the West Bank are extremist criminals. The fact that the overwhelming majority of those people are working, studying and law abiding citizens who succeeded to establish some of the finest communities in Israel, is even in Israel hardly known.

The demonization campaign against Jews living across the green line should have been addressed a long time ago. Now the decease has spread to the state as a whole and threatens our very existence in this country.

This belittling of Israeli tragedy is not a new phenomenon.

Back in 2004, in response to another in a long line of murderous attacks by Palestinan terrorists, Soccer Dad wrote about an Unspeakable Cruelty--and he was not referring to the terrorists:

The New York Times reported that the Hatuels were a "settler family." Sorry. That's wrong. They were a family of people. They're people not settlers. And they were brutally murdered. They were people. The Tzurs were people. The Kahanes were people. The Dicksteins were people. The Horowitzes were people. They are people and they were murdered. Where they live is irrelevant to the fact that they were killed in cold blood.

It might be easier to refer to victims of Arab violence as "settlers" because it provides a comforting context. After all the Arab violence is based on a religion based hatred. Many in the west don't understand such things. Many in the west want to believe that such violent hatred doesn't exist. Many in the west want to believe that all differences are resolvable through negotiation. To believe that the motivation of the terrorists is simple antisemitism defies a western outlook. "Settlers" provides a mean for understanding the motivation. After all if the people don't belong in "Palestinian lands" they are provoking the Palestinians. They are putting themselves in danger. Thus the word "settler" doesn't just place blame on these peoples' deaths on themselves; it absolves the murderers.

If "settlers" dehumanizes Tali Hatuel and her four daughters - Hila, Hadar, Roni, and Merav it is merely doing rhetorically what their murderers did to them physically.

With this latest Palestinian terrorist attack--and its reporting by the media--we have seen once again how the media bends over backwards to protect the Palestinian Arabs from the fallout of the actions of their own.

All that is asked of them is that they report on the victims of that terrorism accurately and fairly.

Technorati Tag: Palestinian Terrorism and Media Bias.