Biased Media – Blood on their hands

Seeing the atrocities Hamas committed this weekend, killing, raping, and kidnapping Israeli civilians indiscriminately, I can see a direct link between their horrific acts and the slanted media reporting by the ‘civilized’ West. In this article I will show how such reporting feeds and encourages the barbaric behavior of Hamas.

This past Sabbath, over a thousand Hamas militants infiltrated the Southern border of Israel, raiding home after home, attacking innocent, unarmed civilians; entire families – parents, children, grandparents, during their Sabbath and Simchat Torah holiday and executing many of them in front of devastated family members.

Why have they perpetrated such horrific killing, exacting a death toll of close to 1,000 Israelis, injuring 2,000 and abducting over a hundred, mostly civilians? Why did they slaughter over 260 teens at a music festival? What interest does this serve?

Every time Hamas faces a crisis in governing their people, they resort to aggression toward Israel, and shoot rockets across the border. As a result, Israel retaliates, and the media subsequently places images of suffering Palestinians in Gaza on the front page. Yellow journalism? This positive attention validates the Hamas agenda and leads to condemnation against Israel. Additionally, the media attention helps further their demand for financial assistance and political interference from the West, specifically the European Union.

It is very revealing to take a closer look at the various photos chosen to support this breaking story over the past few days. When describing the Hamas attack on Israel, the paper offered generic images of rockets shooting across the sky above an Israeli town. When describing Israel’s retaliation, the newspaper offered evocative images of human suffering; anguished Gazans standing in front of their demolished homes, children sobbing, their personal items littering the ground around them, an injured Palestinian caked in blood. Nowhere do they report the reason for why these buildings were targeted.

The choice of images plays a huge part in the outcome of the coverage and elicits a negative reaction among readers and politicians, towards Israel. This process is not accidental, and it is time that journalists and editors own their complicity in the biased reporting of these events.

What is behind the disparate coverage of the two sides in this conflict? A European diplomat justified his biases and double standard by saying: “You’re one of us; we expect better from you.” Caroline Glick highlighted the obsession Europe has had with Jews and Israel for two millennia. Europe violates international law (UN Resolution 1373 (2001), barring countries from funding terrorist organizations), but holds Israel to imaginary laws and standards. At its core, the problem is in considering Hamas terrorists (as acknowledged by the international community) as helpless actors, who have no agency over their lives. Despite having elected the Hamas militant regime which uses European humanitarian aid to build rockets and perpetrate aggression, the residents of Gaza are not held responsible for their actions.

It is time for us to acknowledge that the residents of Gaza must be held accountable. If the Western media focuses on the Gazan casualties and fails to highlight the current Hamas brutality, instead gaslighting us with the same vignettes of their human suffering, we should point out that they have blood on their hands—Jewish Israeli blood, and American blood, as dozens of American citizens were killed and captured, as well.

It is obvious to anybody following the news that the escalation in Hamas aggressions (often launching rockets), happens to coincide with their failure to govern or with larger world events, in this case the potential of extending the Abraham Accords, which seeks some form of peaceful agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

While the Western media does not control the turn of events directly, their reporting should hold Hamas militants accountable, and thus suppress these media savvy perpetrators who plan these atrocities. By reporting more fairly on the events and using images that tell a more accurate story, they can impact the reaction to these events. In this case, they should start by presenting pictures that portray the barbaric nature of the Hamas murderers, such as the one below in which they are getting high-fives from the masses, while dragging a dead Israeli body through the streets, like a trophy, similar to a deer carcass strapped onto the hood of a truck They should display images of entire families that were executed by Hamas, or show the parading of elderly people, some handcuffed, in the streets.

Newspaper readers and TV viewers would find it harder to sympathize with such barbaric acts, if the stories were accompanied by images that accurately portrayed what took place. This would result in less hostilities and would alleviate the pressure to send aid to Hamas who use it to impose their dictatorial rule over Gaza. Here is an opportunity to correct the historically biased slant of anti-Israeli reporting of the past few decades. Next, the international community must unite against Iran, who’s been using its proxies in the region to escalate conflicts and destabilize the region.