By Barry Shaw
NETANYA, Israel — The old argument used to be that Palestinians were fighting and demonstrating to achieve a state of their own, and that it was Israeli obstinacy that was fermenting Arab violence against Jews. On top of that, a misinterpretation by much of the media positioned Palestinian rage being caused by excessive Israeli military attacks against defenseless Palestinians. This was also known as “disproportionate force.”
Why wouldn’t a put-upon population rise up in anger when they are so “oppressed” and “occupied,” so they say.
When I put pen to paper to expose the Jew hatred at the core of the Palestinian cause in my book Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism, I did so to expose the facts and anecdotal evidence that this perception was dangerously flawed and the real burning rage behind a violence that has been going on for a hundred years was primeval anti-Semitism.
Though many were in denial, preferring to reference Israeli policies not in line with conventional left-wing Western thinking, the overwhelming weight of in excess of three hundred pages of undeniable incidents, together with the eruption of anti-Jewish tirades during the numerous pro-Palestinian demonstrations and such expressions by some European politicians during and after the 2014 Gaza conflict, made the thrust of my book resoundingly relevant.
If further evidence of what lies at the heart of Palestinian thinking and planning was needed the outpouring of Palestinian anti-Jewish rhetoric, incitement, and the deliberate hunting and targeting of Jews for knife, gun and rock wielding Palestinian attacks should leave nobody in any further doubt about what is at play here.
Despite the stark reality that the Palestinian cause was never about creating a new and peaceful state that would instantly solve all the problems of the Middle East but rather about killing Jews and destroying the “abomination” of a Jewish state,” a tiny island of progress in the midst of a radical and bloodthirsty Islamic region, many leading politicians and a media in denial still hold to the mistaken notion that only by granting a volatile Palestine statehood will the area calm down.
If there has been any recent abomination it has been with the government of South Africa officially welcoming Hamas leader, Khaled Maashal, on the same day that this internationally designated terrorist organization announced it would initiate renewed suicide bombings against Israelis.
Following the declaration from Palestinian Authority head, Mahmoud Abbas, that “every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood as long as it’s for the sake of Allah” and that this blood must be spilled because the Jews were desecrating the Islamic holy places “with their filthy feet,” a lie so preposterously dangerous, hordes of knife and rock wielding Arabs went in search of Jewish victims.
Israelis, tense with the expectations of knifing attacks on the streets of their towns, were subjected to world headlines defining them as the perpetrators and Palestinians as the innocent victims.
The Reuters bureau chief, Luke Baker, falsely tweeted that undercover Israeli police threw stones at Israeli security forces and incited Palestinian youth to do the same. This was repeated by AFP and EuroNews.
You will find most media headlines leave the identity of the assailant anonymous as in “Jerusalem bus and car attacks leaves dead and wounded,” or “Jerusalem attack kills three,” or The Independent’s headline that reads as if Israelis were doing the attacking when, in fact, they were the victims of Palestinian Arabs attacks, “Israel attacks” Guns, cars and knives are the new weapon of war in Jerusalem.”
You would never know that all the attacks were executed by Palestinian Arabs and all of the victims were Israeli Jews.
So incensed was Lord Michael Grade, former chairman of the BBC Trust, that he wrote a letter of complaint slamming the BBC correspondent, Orla Guerin, for her misreporting of the ongoing violence carried out by Palestinians against Israelis. He was upset by her “equivalence between Israeli victims of terrorism and Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli security forces in the act of carrying out terror attacks.”
His letter follows an appalling BBC headline which described a Palestinian youth who carried out an assault that killed two Jewish men, seriously injured a woman and wounded her two year old son thus, “Palestinian shot dead after Jerusalem attack claims two.”
The twist of this headline leads the BBC audience in to falsely believing that the Palestinian was the innocent victim of a Jerusalem attack by known assailants. Nowhere in this headline would an audience know that Jews had been murdered in a vicious attack.
So egregiously frequent have these incident of untruthful reporting been that a frustrated Prime Minister Netanyahu asked BBC’s Lyse Doucet at a Jerusalem press conference, “Are we living on the same planet?”
When much of the Western media choke on identifying the victims of Palestinian violence as Israeli Jews you know there is a serious breach of trust at play that must be addressed.
Sadly, these headlines are commonplace as editorial discretion repeatedly tilts a bias that fails to allow the truth and honest reporting to shine through.
One of the truths is that there is a deliberate Palestinian policy to incite their followers to attack Israeli Jews and deny them any rights–not to sovereignty, not to heritage in Jerusalem, not even to life.
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Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’ www.barrysbooks.info He is also the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies.