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Three Top Tactics Used by Media to Distort Israeli Hostage Rescue, Serve Hamas Interests

June 26, 2024/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by NEWSRAEL Telling the Israeli Story

Effective tactics are used by media outlets employed to distort the narrative surrounding Israel’s recent hostage rescue.

Media outlets went out of their way on Saturday (June 8) to make Israel’s heroic rescue of four Gaza hostages look tainted or even immoral, with a reframing that served Hamas’ strategy.

Instead of simply reporting the news — that Israeli hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv had been rescued in a rare and complex operation in the heart of Gaza — media outlets chose to label it as one of the “bloodiest” raids of the war.

They used three tactics to achieve that goal, which effectively turned justice into injustice:

Minimizing the achievement by using the term “freed” instead of “rescued” to describe the hostages
Emphasizing the Palestinian death toll based on Hamas figures
Whitewashing the terrorists’ use of civilians as human shields

The Washington Post, for example, committed two of these journalistic crimes:

Its headline led with the number of Palestinian casualties (without questioning how many of them were terrorists), its sub-header called the operation “brazen” and the lead paragraph labeled the operation “one of the bloodiest raids of the war.”

The fact that the hostages were rescued alive is mentioned only in the second paragraph. And the word “Blitz” is casually thrown into the fifth paragraph, evoking comparisons to Nazi warfare.

But what’s hidden in plain sight is the complete whitewashing of Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields. The article simply mentions that the hostages had been held in “buildings,” omitting the fact that they were kept in families’ homes in the crowded multi-story structures, amid the civilian population.

NPR‘s coverage has similar faults: The Palestinian death toll is used to frame the hostage rescue with descriptions like “the streets were…covered in blood,” and the sites of the hostage captivity are called “locations in Nuseirat in central Gaza” — which could mean anything from tunnels to military compounds.

Did the Washington Post or NPR journalists independently verify whether the blood in the streets belonged to terrorists or innocent civilians? Or is blood used here — as in ancient times — to demonize Jews?

Either way, their coverage whitewashes the terrorists.

Selective Terminology

Reuters, which also called the operation “one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war,” used another tactic while focusing on the Palestinian casualties.

One of its headlines used the vague term “freed,” which can be attributed to the goodwill of the terrorists, instead of the value-laden word “rescued” that may paint Hamas as bad:

BBC did the same, while obscuring the identity of Hamas terrorists and IDF rescuers:

Cognitive Dissonance

But some media outlets didn’t just change words. They descended into a total cognitive dissonance in their attempt to put the onus on Palestinian victimhood.

AP, for example, shamelessly quoted casualty data from the Palestinian health ministry whose reliability had been questioned by the wire service only a day earlier.

And a BBC anchorwoman expected the IDF to warn Gazans ahead of such a dangerous rescue operation:

Similarly, a Sky News anchorwoman gave a platform to Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, and failed to correct him when he called Israeli hostages “prisoners.” She also didn’t remind him about starvation and sexual assault when he suggested that those released in the past had been well treated by Hamas:

And the same network’s Alex Crawford didn’t even bother waiting for more details of the operation to emerge before she labeled it “a massacre”:

The underlying premise of such biased coverage is that Israelis should not fight for their lives because it comes at a cost. They should just sit back and let terrorists slaughter and kidnap their brethren because they run and hide among innocent people.

But media should stop ignoring the increasing evidence of Gazan civilian complicity with Hamas, as well as the fact that Hamas bears responsibility for putting the entire Gazan population in danger since its October 7th attack on the Jewish state.

On Saturday, Israeli special forces undertook a mission in an area that became a legitimate target by virtue of the presence of hostages. As Noa, Almog, Andrey, and Shlomi were rescued after eight months in captivity, Hamas terrorists fired RPGs at them from within the Nuseirat market area. IDF troops responded to save their lives and bring them home.

Any other way to frame it serves the terrorists.

War Causes Israelis to Seek the ‘Hope of Israel’

June 24, 2024/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Religion, Social Issues/by Family Research Council

A Christian ministry that supplies Israelis with New Testaments for free has seen a remarkable rise in demand since Hamas’s October 7 terror attack that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and kicked off both new hostilities with the surrounding nations and a global surge of anti-Semitism. “Israel has prided itself in its ability to defend itself, so October 7 was a real blow to that for people,” said Aaron Abramson, executive director of Jews for Jesus. “I think that’s why a lot of people were starting to sort of dig into those spiritual questions.”

Abramson described a “kind of hopelessness” afflicting Israelis, as they survey their bleak security and foreign policy outlook. “If you can’t put your trust in maybe, let’s say, a political solution, you can’t put your trust in like a military solution, or if you can’t put your trust in an economic solution, then where do you put your trust?” he asked.

At least some Israelis are now turning to the “hope of Israel, its savior in time of trouble” (Jeremiah 14:8). That “hope of Israel” is Jesus Christ, as Paul preached (Acts 28:20). According to Jews for Jesus, they have received 1,230 Israeli orders for New Testaments in Hebrew since the October 7 attack, a little over nine months ago. That’s about 230% as many New Testament orders as they received in 2021, when Israelis ordered 700 New Testaments throughout the entire year.

It’s nothing new that devastating tragedies provoke people to consider their spiritual state. In the U.S., church attendance spiked after the terror attacks on 9/11. What is unusual is for Jewish Israelis to turn to the Christian Scriptures in their search for hope. As recently as 2012, a right-wing Israeli lawmaker made headlines for destroying a copy of the New Testament. Jews reject Jesus as the Messiah, and the New Testament scriptures preach Jesus as the Messiah.

There wasn’t always such a sharp delineation between Jews and Christians. Most of the early church was Jews, and for decades Christian missionaries often taught openly in synagogues (e.g. Acts 19:8). It was only “when some [Jews] became stubborn and continued in unbelief, speaking evil of the Way before the congregation,” that evangelists like Paul “withdrew from them and took the disciples with him” (Acts 19:8-9).

In this, the first Christians imitated Jesus. Jesus was as Jewish as they come, a “son of Abraham, son of David” through both his mother and adoptive father (Matthew 1:1), and there are genealogies to demonstrate this. Jesus’s earthly ministry was first and foremost to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matthew 15:24). Jesus opened his ministry by claiming to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 5:17), particularly the expectation of a coming Messiah (Luke 4:17-21). And, after his death and resurrection, he explained exactly how he had fulfilled them (Luke 4:27).

In other words, when early Christian apologists set about “showing by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus” (Acts 18:28), they were using the books we now call the Old Testament. Their interpretation was informed by the new work God had done in Christ, but the proof was all there already. In fact, the books of the New Testament were only written later, to provide a written record of their argumentation for how the Old Testament expectations and promises of a Messiah were met and fulfilled in Jesus.

The benefit of reading the New Testament (for Israeli Jews, American Christians, or anyone else) is that it provides a clear interpretation of Old Testament passages about the Messiah that would be mysterious, unclear, vague, or completely hidden on their own. The New Testament presents Jesus as:

A new Adam who overcomes temptation and thereby defeats sin and death (Genesis 3:6),
The seed of the woman who will crush the serpent’s head and reverse the curse (Genesis 3:15),
Abraham’s offspring in whom all nations will be blessed (Genesis 12:3),
The beloved son who silently submits to become a sacrifice (Genesis 22:9-10),
The lion from Judah who will reign over the nations (Genesis 49:9-10),
The branch from Jesse who will rule with righteousness (Isaiah 11:1-3),
The kingly son of David whose throne will be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-13, Psalm 18:50),
The ultimate law-giving prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:18),
The faithful, eternal priest (1 Samuel 2:35, Psalm 110:4),
And the servant of the Lord who will both reign and suffer (Isaiah 42, 44, 49, 53, etc.).

How can all these different people, whom God promised to send, be fulfilled in just one man? The New Testament holds the answers. If anything, Jesus is more amazing and fulfills more Old Testament prophecies and types than any summary list I could create. The New Testament untangles the riddles of the Old.

Perhaps most importantly, the New Testament provides clearer revelation of the triune nature of God. Jews will insist — and rightly so — “The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:1). In the first century, they rejected Jesus precisely because he claimed to be God. Yet even in the Old Testament there are hints of a plurality in God (Genesis 1:26-27; 19:24; Psalm 110:1).

The New Testament presents Jesus both affirming the unity of God (Mark 12:29) and directly claiming to be God (e.g. John 8:58). Other New Testament authors affirm the oneness of God and also Jesus’s equal status (1 Corinthians 8:6; Ephesians 4:4-6; 1 Timothy 2:5; Revelation 1:8; 22:13). These texts have led Christians to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Spirit. Someone who was only reading the Old Testament would not postulate the Trinity because it is not presented clearly there. That does not mean it is inconsistent, only that God reveals himself to man progressively. As he told Moses, “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them” (Exodus 6:3).

What this means is that reading the New Testament can cause Israeli Jews to know God in a way they have not known him before — through his Son, Jesus Christ. That is now the only way anyone can come to the Father (John 14:6). Any time that more people are able to read the Word of God for themselves, we should rejoice.

Granted, 1,230 Hebrew New Testaments is a tiny number to distribute among the nearly 10 million inhabitants of Israel — even if each one is read by five, 10, or even 50 people. This is too small to fulfill Paul’s declaration that “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). Most of the nation “beloved for the sake of their forefathers” (Romans 11:28) remains under the “partial hardening” that will last “until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25).

However, a Jewish rabbi once told this parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches” (Matthew 13:31-32). The rabbi, the Son of God incarnate, continues to build his church, “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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The Shameful Silencing of Foes of Jihad Violence and Sharia Oppression of Women

March 2, 2024/in Courts & Law, Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Politics, Religion, Social Issues, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Jihad Watch

Brendan O’Neill is right: “The intention is as clear as it is repellent: to send the message that it isn’t Islamism that’s the problem – it’s ‘Islamophobia.’” But this endeavor has been going on far longer than the brouhaha over Lee Anderson.

It goes back to incidents such as the British government’s persecution of Tommy Robinson and the banning of foreign foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression from entering the country.

Many, if not most, of the “respectable” critics of “radical Islam” had little or nothing to say about those incidents, and now they, and Britain at large, are reaping the rewards of their cowardice and pusillanimity.

The shameful silencing of radical Islam’s critics

by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, February 25, 2024:

What Tory MP Lee Anderson said this week was dumb. But what the cultural elites are doing on the back of Anderson’s comments is outright sinister.

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They are using his outburst about ‘the Islamists’ having ‘control’ over London mayor Sadiq Khan to distract attention from the very real threat Islamists pose in 21st-century Britain. They are holding him up as oafish proof that the ‘real threat’ is the ‘far right’ and ‘Islamophobes’ – gruff gammon like him – not those mystical ‘Islamists’ people keep banging on about. They are exploiting the Anderson scandal to achieve something they’ve wanted to achieve since the 7 October pogrom and the orgy of bigotry it licensed in Britain and other Western nations – that is, shift the public’s attention away from Islamism and back to ‘Islamophobia’. It is one of the most cynical political manoeuvres of modern times….

And yet, for all their daftness, the reaction to Anderson’s comments has felt wildly overblown. Not to mention transparently self-serving. Political influencers have not contented themselves with criticising him, or branding him a raging Islamophobe, if that’s what they want to do. No, they’ve made him into the archetype of ‘Islamophobic Britain’. They’ve crowned him King Gammon, who merely gives voice to a phobic derangement that is all-pervasive. The irony is too much – they damn the conspiracist mindset that sees Islamists as the puppeteers of public life while promoting their own unhinged theory that actually it’s Islamophobes who haunt every corridor of power.

Khan says Anderson’s blather is symptomatic of a ‘massive increase in Islamophobia’. The Scottish first minister, Humza Yousaf, says Anderson’s comments are proof of ‘how acceptable and pervasive Islamophobia has become in our society’. We now know that ‘Islamophobia is rampant in the Tories’, says the Guardian’s Owen Jones.

This giddy extrapolation from one loudmouth’s musings on a TV show to the end of tarring the entire nation as ‘Islamophobic’ is not only cynical – it’s ominous. The intention is as clear as it is repellent: to send the message that it isn’t Islamism that’s the problem – it’s ‘Islamophobia’. Worse, Anderson-bashers are implying, if not outright stating, that critics of Islamism pose a larger threat to the nation than Islamism itself. Especially its right-wing critics, those ‘far right’ goons like Anderson and Braverman, as they crazily view those outspoken Tories. We are witnessing nothing less than a top-down cultural assault on truth – the truth here being that radical Islam is indeed a major threat to life, limb and democracy….

Continue reading.