Israel and Gaza: A litany of media distortion and smears

THE media war against Israel is nothing new. Many of us have grown accustomed to the nauseatingly slanted and biased reporting.

Still, the recent coverage of the Gaza border episode, has taken this obsessive hostility, and grotesque failure to uphold professional standards, to new heights.

The fashionable and reflexive anti-Israelism, full of distortions, smears, and inaccuracies is sickening.
There is no nuance, no effort to understand the Israeli position.

What we get is a double-standard, a different benchmark that is applied to fit a pre-designed narrative whereby inconvenient truths about the Palestinians and Hamas are routinely scrubbed away.

One thing is for sure: the Australian public is not getting the full story.

Committed to a malicious tale where Israelis are overwhelmingly the brutal oppressors, some journalists, who should be devoted to reporting the truth, weaponise their tools of the trade to show how uniquely bad Israel is.

They have become actors rather than observers, uninterested in verifiable evidence, contradictory information or analysis.

Driven by ideological considerations, they have erased the line between facts and opinion, and in the process have handed a propaganda victory to Hamas.

That there is little self-reflection or introspection by the press corps about this continual misleading of consumers is deeply concerning.

I stopped counting the number of reports that failed to mention one word— Hamas— an Islamist, terrorist group, whose founding charter calls for the annihilation of the Jews and whose human rights violations are well-known by journalists.

There was no contextualisation of what the ‘Great Return March’ was really about, no explanation that Hamas had carefully orchestrate that day in advance, or that it urged participants to bring a “knife or a gun”, in order to kill civilians and kidnap soldiers.

Most readers would not have been told that Hamas directed the ‘peaceful protestors’, armed with firearms and Molotov cocktails, to become martyrs, storm the border and ‘eat the livers’ of Israelis, as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar admitted.

Most would not have been alerted by the media that the Israeli military dropped thousands of leaflets, warning the Palestinians not to attempt this assault.

In essence, this was a suicide-mission by combatants, used as cannon fodder by Hamas, though Australians would have been forgiven in thinking this was just like any peaceful, grassroots demonstration in the park.

Hamas, who knew that the casualty figures would be the centre of coverage, cleverly manipulated the media who played along in advancing their lies and agenda.

Hamas was counting on the fact that the more Palestinians died and were injured, the more sympathy it would arouse in the media who are easily duped, and who never fail to place the blame squarely on Israel’s shoulders.

And this murderous strategy, this cynical stunt of sending children towards a militarised border, paid off in spades as reporters provided legitimacy and credibility to this scripted charade.

Can you imagine Al-Qaeda, or ISIS getting a free, run in the media like Hamas does?

What other nation would allow thousands of rioters, lobbing kites with fire-bombs over the wall, and clutching axes, to storm its border and not expect the army to defend its citizens?

Only when it comes to Israel, is a warped moral equivalence drawn between terrorists and those protecting their own people from harm.

Consider, when was the last time you saw a news report that referred to the murder of Israeli civilians in a terrorist attack as a massacre?

Yet, when Israeli soldiers defend the border it’s a war crime and a slaughter of innocents.

But it’s not just the reporting, but the interviews with the usual band of Israel bashers whose version of what was happening had little resemblance of reality on the ground.

And so, the image painted and fixed in viewers’ minds is that Israelis are the embodiment of evil, shooting deliberately to kill, and the Palestinians are the ‘freedom fighters’ and passive victims.

Ask yourself: Why does the press readily accept and omit to tell us that the death toll statistics it often quotes are from the Gaza Ministry of Health which is controlled by Hamas?

The media goes right along with that deceit, knowing that such disclosures might take the shine off their ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ reporting and disrupt their traditional “Israel story”.

It’s even more annoying when we, as taxpayers have to subsidise the diet of misinformation.
So, why should we care?

First, despite the emergence of social media and alternative news sources, the mainstream TV, radio and newspapers are still influential in shaping and framing the public’s opinion on this issue.

When journalists portray Israelis as the perennial wrongdoers and as a symbol of the world’s ills, when they leave out rational justifications for Israel’s actions, when they hide the true face of Hamas, what they are saying to their audiences is that Jews are the ultimate representation of cruelty and savagery.

The cumulative effect is that Israelis are depicted as the classic villains in this morality play, solely responsible for the pain and misery of the Palestinians.

And this, feeds the growing hostility towards Jews in the real world.

We should spare a thought for the young Jewish students at public and private schools who had to show up to class during that awful week, only to be attacked and maligned because they either supported Israel, have family in Israel, or professed any association with the state?

It is for this reason, and others, that we should challenge the reporters and editors and insist that they set the record straight and stick to the facts.

And yes, the lopsided coverage will never be perfect. But that should not stop us from trying.

DVIR ABRAMOVICH is chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission.

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