Why CNN Can’t See Bleeding Israelis, and the BBC Can’t See Rape Victims Either
Over the last week the current knife incitement intifada continued as Ramadan drew towards its conclusion. Despite the fact that significant terror atrocities were committed against Israelis, reporting in the mainstream Western media (MSM) was minimal.
One week ago an Arab attacker infiltrated the Kiryat Arba home of 13 ½ year old Hallel Yaffa Ariel as she was sleeping and stabbed her to death. The murder was ghastly in its sheer blood-thirstiness. Hallel was stabbed tens of times in both her front and back. Although the local security forces arrived rapidly following the immediate detection of the Arab intruder crossing the security fence, the attack was a frenzy of rage inflicting so many wounds in such a short time. One of the security team members lost an eye during his attempt to neutralize the attacker.
Later that day, two Israelis were stabbed in Netanya, one seriously.
On Friday, the following day, a drive-by shooting attack on Route 60 killed Miki Mark and his wife sustained severe upper body wounds; two of their children were injured as well. This attack also failed to get much attention from the international media. Burying a story in the back pages is a subtle way of making stories invisible to the general public.
There is a fine line between ignoring events and declaring them to be non-existent. CNN crossed that line when they put up a map of recent (Ramadan-inspired) terror attacks which excluded any mention of these attacks against Israelis. (Regarding the Hallel Ariel murder, CNN has a print item on its website, but the video coverage is simply a raw clip from the U.S. State Department briefing—Hallel was an American citizen. None of these recent attacks were mentioned in television coverage.)
“If it bleeds, it leads”, is a media motto, but in this case Jewish blood was not bloody enough, it seems. The fact that the victims in the Kiryat Arba and Route 60 attacks live in Jewish communities in Judea may have something to do with their omission, but the Netanya victims’ omission may go back to CNN’s October publishing of a Middle East map excluding Israel, but including “Palestina”. While CNN later pulled both maps after an outcry, continually reshaping facts until being called out is no way to run what purports to be a news venue. For the record, CNN did cover the June 8th terror attacks in Tel Aviv’s Sarona center, but originally referred in quotation marks to “terrorists”. A current version of the report refers in the opening paragraph to “Two attackers identified as Palestinians”.
What is the big deal if CNN or other outlets ignore stories or deny them airtime? In this world of internet information, anyone can find stories by typing in a few keywords. One problem is that the general news consumer receives the news as it is served, and does not look further. A larger issue is that the MSM uses its sins of omission and commission to create narratives which explain who is the victim and who is at fault. In this case, it is a point of leftist dogma that the “Palestinians” are the victims in all cases, and “settlers” who get killed deserve their fate by virtue of their home address. Often headlines appear which describe terror attacks as “Israelis kill Palestinian”, tidily omitting that the deceased was a terror attacker.
In the wider world, Muslims represent a special victim class, and their victims are also often delegitimized. Let’s see how this plays out.
For example, the white working poor are often deemed the unwashed and undeserving by liberal elites. Erasing them out of “politically correct” narratives represents the same “racial” bias used against Israelis. In an interview conducted at the end of May this year, BBC host Dotun Adebayo interviewed Trump supporter Ryan Girdusky and challenged him on Trump’s proposed restrictions on Muslim immigration, terming this “racist, or at least sectarian”. When Girdusky pointed out that the current terror wave worldwide stems from Muslims, it was de rigeur for Adebayo to dredge up Timothy McVey, the Oklahoma bomber of twenty years ago, as an example that whites can be terrorists, too.
Then when Girdusky pointed out that Muslims were behind the 20-year string of rape crimes perpetrated by Muslim males against white girls in Rotherham, it was time for Adebayo to deny the crimes and shut down the interview.
If the media chooses to shut down discourse and conveniently edit reality, we as a society cannot deal with the real and present dangers of increasing Islamization and the spread of terror. If Muslims are merely the wronged adherents of an inherently peaceful religion—as the left claims—we will never be able to face the threat radical Muslims present to civilization.
Editor’s Note: This kind of mentality was observed and debunked in Helsinki by the then Israeli Ambassador to Finland/Estonia, Avi Granot, that I filmed while attending a seminar at the University of Helsinki where fraud historian Avi Shlaim was the scheduled speaker.
