The pro-Israel bias in Western reporting makes the media utterly complicit in Israel’s war crimes, writes Jonathan Cook, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya — it’s unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead — is being barely reported by the Western media, even though it was videoed from at least three different angles and a reporter from the main U.S. news agency Associated Press witnessed it.
AP’s news feed is accessed by all Western establishment media, so they all know.
[AP’s report includes a video of a fourth body thrown by three Israeli soldiers from an adjacent rooftop.]
Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, [or refrain from describing them as “war crimes” even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. (Or perhaps more accurately — even more so when there is definitive proof they occurred.)
Remember, that same media never fails to highlight — or simply makes up — any crime Palestinians are accused of, such as those non-existent “beheaded babies.”
AP itself treats this latest atrocity in the West Bank as no big deal. It reports simply that it may be part of a “pattern of excessive force” by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.
That comment, without quote marks and ascribed to a human rights group, is almost certainly AP’s preferred characterisation of the group’s reference to a pattern not of “excessive force” but of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
AP makes sure to give Israel’s pretext for why it is committing war crimes: “Israel says the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy.”
But it forgets yet again to mention why that “militancy” exists: because Israel has been violently enforcing an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for many decades, in which it — once again illegally — has drafted in an army of settler militias to drive out the native Palestinian population.
AP also forgets to mention that, under international law, the Palestinians have every right to resist Israel’s occupying soldiers, including “militantly.”
Western governments might characterise Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers as “terrorism,” but that’s not how it is seen in the international law codes that Western states drafted decades ago and that they claim to uphold.
It’s also worth noting that the local Palestinian reporter who witnessed this crime had his report rewritten by “Julia Frankel, an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem.”
As is true with many other Western outlets, AP copy is editorially overseen from Jerusalem, where its office is staffed mostly with Israeli Jews.
AP headquarters in One World Financial Center in lower Manhattan. (Ken Lund, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 )
With little doubt, Western news outlets privately rationalise this to themselves as a wise precaution, making sure copy is “sensitive” to Israel’s perspective and less likely to incur the wrath of the Israeli government and Israel lobby.
Which is precisely the problem. The bias in Western reporting is baked in. It is designed not to upset Israel — in the midst of a “plausible genocide,” according to the World Court — which means it’s entirely skewed and completely untrustworthy.
It makes our media utterly complicit in Israel’s war crimes, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.
UPDATE:
Very belatedly, the BBC has reported this on one of its news channels. Note, it adds an entirely unnecessary disclaimer that the footage hasn’t been “independently verified” – whatever that means.
There are now at least three separate videos, all taken from different angles, showing the same war crime. Even the Israeli military has confirmed the incident happened.
The BBC also assumes the three Palestinians are dead. There is absolutely no reason to make that assumption: it violates the most basic rules of reporting.
And the anchor, clearly nervous about how she should refer to the men being pushed off a roof, ends by observing that the footage is “another example of the tensions and the many fronts on which we see Israel fighting.”
No, it’s another example of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes, and the media trying to deflect attention from that fact.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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