The world of lies vs G-d's treasure

(Last update: May 22, 2018)


In the early 1970's, the celebrity journalist Hunter Thompson wrote, "...there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms" (Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing: on the campaign trail '72", Popular Library Edition, 1973, p. 48). That was more than 45 years ago. We no longer speak about journalism with such cynicism.

Today, we are far beyond 'no objective journalism'. With the reporting we have seen regarding the recent May 2018 Hamas-sponsored rioting at the Gaza-Israel fence, we have  even gone beyond last year's favorite journalistic trope--'fake news'. Today, journalism has become --purely and simply--all about lies.

How else do you describe last week's headlines about 60 Palestinians killed during those fence riots on May 14th? What was reported had nothing to do with truth.

The facts told a gruesome story: Hamas officials had sworn to use these riots to kill Jews (see the Daniel Greenfield source, below). Hamas had also said the riots--intended to rip out Jewish hearts--would be 'peaceful'. 

Nobody wondered aloud how 'ripping out hearts of Jews' and 'peaceful' went together. Nobody cared to know.

World headlines--and UN officials--preferred a simpler approach: Israel was killing innocent civilians. Report-after-report repeated that lie. 

Now, just after those 60 had been killed at the fence on the 14th, we got  some truth. A Hamas official said in a TV interview that 85% of those killed that day were Hamas operatives (here).

One inference to be drawn from this claim was that Israel had been right all along--that the riots were 'war against Israel by other means'. The 'peaceful' stuff was a lie.

Did journalists care that Hamas itself had just revealed the truth, that its intentions were to get terrorists through the fence? No. 

The Hamas revelation was simply ignored. The world of news and professional journalism had already made up its collectively anti-Israel mind. To hell with truth. The riots were peaceful. The riots weren't riotous. 

Hamas helped these journalists. The same Hamas official who had revealed that the 50 of those 60 dead on May 14 had been part of Hamas had also said these operatives hadn't been armed (ibid). 

Did any journalist or major news editors ask for any evidence from Hamas to support that claim? No. No one asked. 

Where was the proof these 50 Hamas operatives were not armed? No proof was offered.

No proof was necessary. You see, when it comes to the Arab-Israel war, the accepted journalistic standard these days is, if Hamas says it's true then, by golly, it's true.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights added his own "High" anti-Israel opinion. He condemned the "appalling, deadly violence" in Gaza. But the High Commissioner for Human Rights didn't blame Hamas for those deaths. For the UN, those deaths had nothing to do with Hamas terrorists intermingling with civilians and, using those civilians as human shields, trying to break through a border fence to get into Israel with hand grenades, molotov cocktails, knives, butcher cleavers and hand guns in order to attack and kill Jews. Why in the world would anyone anywhere even suggest such a thing?

Rather, the UN High Commissioner followed the lead of the 'journalists'. He ignored the fact that these 50 Hamas operatives were terrorists. He suggested instead that they were innocents who had been killed by an appallingly evil Israel (Bill Chappell, "With  60 killed in Gaza, UN Rights Commissioner criticizes Israel", npr, May 15, 2018--here).

That's certainly how NPR reported the news that day. NPR, always the eager propaganda shill for Hamas, saw nothing wrong with such a characterization.

Pro-Israel advocates, meanwhile, displayed an unusually sharp outrage at such blindly vicious anti-Israel characterizations. David Weinberg couldn't believe how insane the headlines were. His vocabulary was singular: ...it is, he wrote (here), unmitigatingly maddening to see the West succumb to Hamas' lies. He was infuriated that the West, so supposedly committed to human rights, should be so willing to ignore Hamas' murderous intentions against Israel.

David Collier (here) spoke of how the West has been basically silent in the face a truly genocidal Arab-Arab war in Syria that has so far killed 500,000 people and, at the very same time, appear so loudly on the verge of collectively tearing up because some 50 Hamas terrorists had been killed while cynically using their own citizens as cannon fodder for covering terrorist attacks against Jews.

Daniel Greenfield was, in my estimation, livid as he described, with some sarcasm, how the Gaza fence riots have been treated by the West. Referring to how the West has repeatedly reported the rioters as peacefully demonstrating, he wrote (here):

Hamas supporters in Gaza held the world’s first peaceful protest with hand grenades, pipe bombs, cleavers and guns. Ten explosive devices were peacefully detonated. There were outbursts of peaceful gunfire and over a dozen kites carrying firebombs were sent into Israel where they started 23 peaceful fires. And Israeli soldiers peacefully defended their country leaving multiple Hamas attackers at peace.

"We will tear down the border," Hamas Prime Minister Yahya Sinwar had peacefully vowed. (here) "And we will tear out their hearts from their bodies"...

The Hamas mob chanted, “Allahu Akbar” and the genocidal racist threat of, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud," a reference to the primal Islamic massacre of the Jews".

The world and the UN couldn't report often enough how the rioters at the Gaza border fence with Israel were really peaceful civilians, completely unarmed. The accepted gospel was, these people were just demonstrating their rights to express their free speech in peace and dignity (see the Richard Kemp reference, below). But that was a lie. 

You can read more about that lie from Stephen Flatow (here), Richard Kemp (here), Jonathan Tobin (here) and Adam Levick (here), among others who have been angered by such reporting. 

On the holiday of Shavuot we have just celebrated, we read of the giving of the Torah to the Jewish nation. As HaShem prepared to give His Torah to us, he declared, "...you will be to Me the most beloved treasure of all peoples...you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation"  (Shemot, 19:5--6).

Hamas rejects this idea. Hamas sees the Jewish nation as filth, not holy. Apparently, the West prefers to stand with Hamas, not Israel.

Clearly, it's not a far stretch to suggest that the West sees nothing holy or treasured about the Jewish nation.

Stay tuned. This Western support for what Hamas believes, does and wants, will not be forgotten. 

If you wonder what that means, do yourself a favor. Read the Jewish Tanach.

It's all there.