* Failure to report how the Saudi, Syrian, and Egyptian media continue to write and propagate the myth that Jews use human blood for their holiday celebrations.
* CNN has reported that 30 Palestinian women have died in labor while being held up at Israeli checkpoints. The story is a complete fabrication, generated from Palestinian spokesperson Nabil Sha’att. To this day, CNN has neither published a categorical withdrawal nor the proven fact that not a single woman had died.
In stark relief, two incidents from last March stand out. Two separate acts of terrorism occurred on the same day — an IRA car bombing in London, and the Palestinian suicide bombing in Netanya. On the BBC, the word ”terror” was used to describe the IRA bomber, but they described the Palestinian by a far milder term — ”militant.” BBC has admitted that it practices a double standard.
But if nothing else in this entire sad and sordid story irrefutably demonstrates the inherent media bias against Israel, it is the Jenin massacre myth on which the herd of ravenous reporters descended with vulture-like hysteria.
Hysterical, hyperbolical Palestinian propagandists shrieked ”Massacre — 5,000 innocents slaughtered.” Finally, when the UN commission declared that only 54 Palestinians had died, and over half of them were armed combatants, the myth exploded. However, few media apologized or retracted the charges of ”genocide,” ”war crimes,” and ”heinous Israeli atrocities.”
Contrast that with a true war crime that occurred shortly after. It is an offense under the Geneva war conventions for armed persons to occupy any church. Yet the whole world sat silently and did not condemn the crime that occurred when Palestinian terrorists in Bethlehem occupied the Church of the Nativity, took its occupants hostage, and refused to surrender to surrounding Israeli soldiers.
Rather, the so-called world community, aided by a silent media, brought huge international pressure against Israel to give up its barricade and let the alleged terrorists go. When Israel bowed to the pressure, there was no United Nations intervention, no Christian church intervention, and no condemnation of the war crimes committed by the terrorists.
Why is this happening? The answer is plain to see. Firstly, too many of the journalists are lazy, or sloppy, or stupid. They are ignorant of the history of the subject on which they are writing. Others are, plain and simple, biased or anti-Semitic. The result is that the biggest casualties of the Palestinian-Israeli war are truth, and the integrity of the media.
Every one of us must do what we can to correct this travesty. It is time to say ”enough!” The solution starts on the campus, in the journalism schools, then goes to the boardrooms of the media owners, and finally — and most importantly — with you, the public.
We must demand that the journalism schools do a better job of teaching integrity more forcibly. Then, we must demand that our media owners invest more money in educating their journalists and media operators.
On the university campuses, we must demand that the administrators of higher education re-take control of the teaching process, to ensure that hate is not taught, propaganda is not preached and that the revered term ”academic freedom” is never used as a license to libel, a podium for propaganda, and an advocacy of hate. And we should withhold our financial support from those institutions that fail this obligation of educational integrity.
And you, the public, must take action against the media wrongdoers. The issue here is not the media bias against Israel. The issue is the media bias, period. If we cannot trust the media in its reporting on Israel, how can we trust it on anything else? And if we cannot trust our media, democracy and our freedom is profoundly threatened.
