ITAI’s Special Bulletin X

ITAI’s Special Bulletin X

By: Joseph Puder

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

One of the problems in the Western world is that the media in the US and Western Europe would go to great lengths to be politically correct, rather than being accurate. It is vividly demonstrated in the way the media has chosen to describe Hamas - a terrorist organization par excellence if ever there was one. Moreover, both the United States and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, but you would rarely find that description in the leading US newspapers, or the electronic media, the exception being Fox-TV.

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocketed Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip. They have simultaneously destroyed the separation fence and crossed into Israel in order to deliberately murder Israelis, mostly civilians who were sleeping in their homes. They attacked towns like Sderot, Ofakim, Netivot, and kibbutzim such as Kfar Azza, Nir Oz, Beeri, Netiv Ha’assara, and others, dismembering babies, burning entire families alive, raping, and murdering girls in a music festival. In total, they murdered 1,400 Israelis, wounded almost 6,000, and took about 240 Israeli hostages to Gaza tunnels, including babies, elderly men and women, children, and young women whom they had raped.

The Associated Press defines terrorism as the “calculated use of deadly violence, especially against civilians, to create terror to disrupt and demoralize societies for political ends.” And yet, the same news AP service has chosen to describe the Hamas terrorist killers attack on Israel as a “military operation.”

The New York Post (October 11, 2023) pointed out that the New York Times was quick to seize upon a more politically correct description of Hamas. Initially, the New York Times described Hamas as “terrorists” but then reverted to calling the Hamas terrorist killers “gunmen.” The Washington Post (October 10, 2023) designated Hamas terrorist killers as “militants” The Chicago Tribune described the mother and daughter from Evanston, Illinois, as being taken as hostage by “Hamas operatives,” not by terrorists.

The electronic media is in lock step with the print media. It follows the same reluctance to call Hamas what it is, a terrorist organization. Instead, it prefers the less offensive designation of “militant group.” ABC-TV headline on October 10, 2023, read, “What is Hamas? The militant group behind surprise attack on Israel has ruled Gaza for years.” National Public Radio (October 12, 2023) described Hamas this way: “The surprise attack on Israel on October 7 has brought the militant group back into the spotlight.”

The dictionary defines militant as “combative and aggressive in support of a political or social cause, and typically favoring extreme, violent, or confrontational methods.” It does not say anything about the terror and murder of the innocent.

The American mainstream media often struggles to define terrorist atrocities by the barbarians who commit them. Instead of actually presenting terrorist killers the likes of Hamas as such, they use instead euphemisms as MSNBC-TV uses, to describe Hamas terrorists as “fighters and militants.” Normal fighters and militants do not murder women and children, moreover, when it comes to Israel there is a clear double standard. Hamas atrocities were as gruesome as those of ISIS, perhaps even more so, since they have decapitated babies, and raped young girls after shooting them. And yet, ISIS was painted as merciless killers, while Hamas, which shares the same extremist and genocidal ideology, is treated as merely fighters for a cause. The cause is the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.