By Barry Shaw
NETANYA, Israel — When people of sound minds display clear signs of deviation from reality it demands of us to examine the symptom and expose the defect.
For quite some time, Israelis and others that have clear-eyed views of the world have been increasingly troubled by leading influence and opinion makers who seem to have wandered off into some unvirtuous virtual world of their own.
From an Israeli perspective, it is a world where the roles of victim and aggressor have been flipped, where the language of legality and illegality has been switched, falsehood is promoted as news, and truth goes missing.
Let’s begin at the top with the much criticized statements made by United Nations chief, Ban Ki Moon, about the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When he said that “Nothing excuses terrorism,” this was simply a throat clearing exercise before going on to do just that, excuse Palestinian terrorism.
While Israel is enduring daily assaults by Palestinian terrorists for six months, the Secretary-General said about the murder of Israelis. “It is human nature to react to occupation…”
No, it is not “human nature” to grab a knife or a gun and go hunting for Israeli Jews to kill, including the targeting of young women and children, and for someone of Moon’s stature to say such things is appalling.
He claimed that Palestinians are provoked by “despair” when the truth is they are driven by the religious imperative and the hope of achieving fame and glory exhorted and incited by their corrupt leadership. It is not “occupation” that incites the violence. It is the continuous Palestinian terrorism and rejectionism that prolongs the “occupation.” How can it be otherwise, the Palestinians have constantly rejected offers of statehood since 1947 and beyond.
Wouldn’t it be more honest to admit that Palestinian terror is not about the absence of their state but the existence of the Jewish state?
Anyone remotely interested in truth can research what is actually said and written by Palestinian leaders to see this is correct. Yet, the anti-Israel campaigning ignores the facts and twists a narrative to suit a bias.
The facts are so clear and indisputable. Israel has not occupied another people’s land because the disputed territories never belonged to any other people. The facts are that the Jews are entitled to hold and settle the territories under spate of international laws and signed agreements including as a legally permitted defense against further aggression and belligerence.
The false narrative of a negative “occupation” has become so prevalent and widespread that it ignores or justifies horrendous bloody attacks against innocent Israeli Jews whose murders and injured are denied mention by much of the Western media as Palestinian terror is tippexed out of their headlines as it was recently by America’s CBS’s “3 Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on.”
This appalling false storyline hid the truth that the three Palestinians attacked and killed a 19 year old girl, Hadar Cohen, and badly wounded another girl. The Palestinians came into Jerusalem on a killing spree armed with knives, rifles and explosives.
It took four attempts, under growing social media protest, before CBS formulated a headline that almost matched what actually happened.
CBS is not alone. The BBC, Sky News, and other mainstream media outlets have been repeatedly guilty of untruthful reporting that regularly block out the fact that it Israeli Jews are being targeted by Palestinian killers.
Why do they do this? Why is it that Jewish victims of Palestinian terror do not exist in the mind of many Western news editors? It is not just the expression “Islamic terrorist” that escapes the Western political and editorial truth test, it is also the words “Palestinian terror” that either cannot speak its name, or can be justified by blaming the victim, Israel.
They do it because this does not fit their mindless propaganda and imagery of Palestinian victimhood at the hands of Israelis.
They fail to adequately report, if they report at all, on the anti-Semitic nature of the incitement campaign that drives crazed minds to pick up a weapon and kill Jews. Editors and diplomats sanitize the Jew hatred and the Islamic exhortations for fear of outraging their readers, viewers, and constituents. This message would damage the progressive secularism of perceived values of human rights that has, for too long, placed the Palestinians as their poster-child idol of their global campaign of sympathy for the oppressed and downtrodden, an image that radically needs to be debunked.
It is appalling hypocritical how champions of the Palestinian cause, under the banner of human rights, turn their backs on the awful human rights record of the Palestinians as documented by the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights which received, in 2015, 292 complaints of torture, maltreatment and physical assault in the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority and 928 in the Gaza Strip at the hands of Palestinian Hamas.
Western media and the international community not only swerve mentioning the Israeli victims of Palestinian terror. They also fail to highlight these crimes inflicted by the Palestinian leadership on their own people. It doesn’t fit their agenda.
As such, they fail in their moral duty to inform and effect change.
When they deliberately ignore the heinous abuses of the Palestinians while, at the same time, foster their demands to pressure Israel and support the creation of a morally degenerate, abusive, corrupt, fractured and undemocratic regime, the Western media and the international community become tainted with the moral decay that is prevalent in much of the Middle East.
By covering up and supporting Palestinian deadly aims they have the blood of innocent Israelis on their hands as they aid and abet a malevolent and murderous Palestinian agenda.
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Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the author of Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism and Israel Reclaiming the Narrative available on www.barrysbooks.info and from Amazon. Comments intended for publication in the space below must be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the U.S.)