ABC’s skewed reporting of Arab attacks on Israelis is sickening

From The Australian, 26 Oct 2015, by Rowan Dean:

I’VE watched kids holding up decapitated heads, starving babies and swollen corpses rotting in the sun. All while I’m having dinner – during the news. 
 
But I have never seen anything quite as hard to stomach as the ABC’s 7.30 last week. And I’m not talking about the content – which was horrible enough – but, rather, the way in which it was reported.

This was the ABC’s top current affairs program reporting on a terrifying spate of murders taking place in a democratic country not dissimilar to our own. In each case the murderers, many of whom are barely out of their teens, sneak up on the elderly, the vulnerable or the infirm and hack them to death with knives or other weapons.

Sometimes they just run them over.

But that’s not why I had trouble keeping my dinner down. No, what was truly repugnant was the way in which these murderers were portrayed: almost as heroes, engaged in some noble struggle. How could that be?

Well, did I mention the victims are all Jews and the murderers all Palestinian [Arab]s?

Even the segment’s title – “Meet the young generation of Palestinians behind the third intifada” – was a disgrace, sounding like some hip, funky show. 

How would 7.30 have portrayed the Holocaust? “Meet the blond, blue-eyed generation behind Germany’s third and final solution” perhaps?

“So far dozens of Israelis and Palestinians have been killed on buses, at bus stops and at checkpoints. Just hours ago, Israeli security forces shot two more Palestinians after they tried to board a school bus south of Jerusalem,” the presenter said.


To the uninformed viewer, this surely sounds like whatever is happening, the Palestinians are clearly victims and the Israeli soldiers are doing all the killing. Worse, the statement gives the impression that there is a moral equivalence to the actions of the murderers and the security forces protecting lives.

Throughout eight turgid minutes, the show failed to point the finger of blame where it belongs: at those political and religious predators in the West Bank and Gaza who for a generation have tutored and groomed young Palestinians to desire to murder Jews. Muslim clerics in Palestinian mosques have been urging their followers in recent weeks to go out and hack Jews to death in the name of Allah. For the Islamist, the “cause” of “liberating” Palestine is just another facet of jihadist terrorism, the goal being the genocide of all nonbelievers, particularly Jews.

This is cleric Muhammad Salah a fortnight ago in the Al Abrar mosque: “Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews. Allah has brought the Jews … the enemies of humanity. Form stabbing squads … Oh young men of the West Bank, attack in threes and fours. Some should restrain the victim, while others attack him with axes and butcher knives. Next time attack in groups of three, four or five. Attack them in groups, cut them into body parts.” Yep, that’s a religious sermon, Palestinian style.

What is occurring in Israel at the moment is the result of decades of official anti-Semitism, including kids’ TV shows that tutor Palestinian children to murder Jews. Now these same kids are being inspired to get themselves killed trying to massacre innocent Israeli citizens. This is planned, incited murder, a modern pogrom.

In reality, 16-year-old Bayan al-Esseili, one of the young Palestinians described glowingly on the ABC as “friendly”, “gifted”, “affectionate” and “talented” was no different to Farhad Jabar, the 15-year-old Islamist who snuck up and killed Curtis Cheng in Parramatta.

Yet through language, tone, and style the ABC appeared to be somehow glorifying these Palestinian jihadists. We had funky rap music, “cool” interviews, sentimental claptrap about an empty desk at a girl’s school and so on.

Of course the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a political and geographical nightmare. But the blame for the lack of any progress rests predominantly on the side of the Palestinian dictatorships of Fatah and Hamas who have spurned four separate peace offers. This is the same murderous ideology that is seeing “kafirs” butchered around the world.

Evil occurs when good men do nothing. Or when good people obfuscate the true reasons behind those evil deeds. Sickening.