Israel Breaking News Video: The Clearest Sign of Media Bias in this Conflict

Israel Breaking News Video: The Clearest Sign of Media Bias in this Conflict

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Click here to watch: The Clearest Sign of Media Bias in this Conflict

Much has been made of the lopsided coverage of the Gaza conflict, with reporters being chastised for allowing either pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian biases to seep through into their reporting and in some cases their tweets and Facebook posts. Questions like, “Does reporting death tolls convey a sympathy for the Palestinians?” float through newsrooms and editorial meetings, with few good, concrete answers emerging, and reporters thousands of miles away in the field unmoved by editorial handwringing anyhow. This is lamentable but in some ways inevitable — the best reporters on this conflict are presumably ones who have a deep understanding of the long history and can therefore contextualize it, but that deep understanding often starts to erode objectivity. But many of the criticisms of bias — some well-founded, some questionable — ignore the most glaring example of media malfeasance that is routinely perpetrated when covering this war, which is either the result of anti-Israel bias or successful Hamas PR strategy. It boils down to three words. Time and time again you hear it on the news when discussing negotiations with Israel: “What Hamas wants…” Hamas wants a cease-fire; Hamas wants the Gaza border blockade lifted; Hamas wants their tunnels left alone; Hamas wants a Palestinian state. All these things may be true of the political arm of Hamas. But rarely is it mentioned in a news report that Hamas’ primary objective, its main goal, what it really wants and what its military arm is designed and determined to get, is the total destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jews.

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It’s a crucial component that’s regularly left out of news reports. But any story that does not mention this among Hamas’ chief demands is not an intellectually honest or complete one. Few in the media seem to grasp this, the effect of which has been to create a gauzy and nebulous moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas that isn’t really there. Those who have understood this have had to assert it vigorously and explicitly (as I am doing here), which only highlights how pervasive the problem is. Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic writes, as if explaining it to a fifth grader, “The goal of Hama — the actual, overarching goal — is to terrorize the Jews of Israel, through mass murder, into abandoning their country. If generations of Palestinians have to be sacrificed to that goal, well, Hamas believes such sacrifices are theologically justified.” It’s truly bizarre that writers like Goldberg need to put this conflict in such stark terms. It’s not as though Hamas has been coy about their desires. In the Hamas Covenant, or charter, written in 1988, it states that its “struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” and calls for the “obliteration” of Israel. “The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” In 2006, Hamas co-founder Mahmoud Al-Zahar said he dreamed of “hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel on it.” Later that same year, Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said Hamas would never recognize the “usurper Zionist government and will continue our jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem.” Hamas has intermittently, when politically helpful, tried to suggest that its enemies aren’t all Jews, just Zionist Jews who, as they see it, occupy Palestine. But it isn’t hard to find contradictions. As recently as 2012, in an August sermon, Ahmad Bahr, Deputy Speaker of the Hamas Parliament, called all Muslims to jihad: “Why? In order to annihilate those Jews.” He goes on, “Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one.” In scrubbing media coverage of Hamas’ true intentions, blatant as they are, the media is giving the impression that Hamas “just” wants a few discrete demands answered like Hitler “just” wanted Poland. It isn’t biased to reflect sympathetically on Palestinian casualties, or even to question Israel’s strategies. But if the media is truly interested in covering this conflict accurately, it needs to start by acknowledging that Israeli aggression and Hamas aggression are not motivated by the same end goals. Israel wants peace. Hamas wants genocide.

Source: NY Daily News

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