The media keep repeating the rhetoric of Palestinian terrorist sympathizers
Jack Elbaum
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Last weekend, Israel began a preemptive counterterrorism operation in the West Bank Palestinian city of Jenin. Iran has increased support for terrorist groups in the city in recent years, and it is where a significant portion of terror attacks against Israeli civilians originate. Thus far, the Israel Defense Forces have uncovered troves of explosives from a “terror lab” and taken out numerous terrorists.
The merits of the operation aside, it is worth taking a moment to look at the media coverage of it. Put simply, it has been terrible.
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The Washington Post described the terrorist groups in the city as engaging in “resistance,” a common euphemism used by terrorists and terrorist sympathizers alike. How did a supposedly respected news organization begin using that term? I have no idea.
Not to outdo the Washington Post, though, the New York Times claimed that the motivation of the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which both proudly call for the absolute destruction of Israel and the indiscriminate murder of Jews, is “opposing Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”
But this is an indefensible claim. Islamic Jihad’s manifesto says that it rejects “‘any peaceful solution to the Palestinian cause’ and affirms ‘the Jihad solution and the martyrdom style as the only choice for liberation.’” Meanwhile, Hamas’s founding document reads, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” If one wants something a bit more recent, the co-founder of Hamas said in 2017 that “if we liberate Palestine through the [armed] resistance until the 1967 borders, we will go directly to liberate the rest of Palestine and the territories of 1948, and there will be no negotiations.”
CBS News uncritically included in a headline a wholly unsupported statement from a Palestinian leader that Israel was bombing “innocent people” in Jenin. But Palestinian leaders often label armed terrorists themselves as both “innocent” and “heroic.” After all, the man who made this statement is a member of a political party that facilitates a “pay for slay” pension program for Palestinians who murder innocent Israelis, so I wouldn’t necessarily take his word seriously on this.
Moreover, the operation is a targeted one against the well-known terrorist entities operating out of Jenin, and there have not been reports of any civilian deaths so far in the fighting. This is a miraculous thing when one considers how bloody urban warfare almost always is. There has, however, been significant damage to civilian infrastructure.
What is shocking is not the claim itself but that CBS took it as credible. Failing to even look into the claim is a complete dereliction of journalistic duty.
The Guardian wrote in a headline that Israel has turned Jenin into a “war zone.” But wouldn’t it be the terrorists who use Jenin as a base and make it so that they cannot be controlled by the Palestinian Security Forces that turned it into a “war zone”?
Many more outlets simply reported on the number of Palestinians killed, giving no additional context that would let the reader know they were primarily, if not all, militants. In doing so, they let the imagination take hold and equate military action against known terrorists with Palestinian terrorist attacks exclusively against civilians.
It is equal parts scandalous and unsurprising that so much of the media have decided simply to repeat the rhetoric of Palestinian terrorists during this operation. This is not to say critical reporting of Israel’s actions in the West Bank or its quite right-wing government is not acceptable or warranted. Of course it is. And it is needed when the government does not take sufficient action to stop Jewish terrorists from hurting Palestinians or uses unjustified force, for example.
But that in no way makes parroting terrorist talking points a proper, warranted, or journalistically appropriate thing to do.
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Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.