Would those who believe the world is run by Zionism please explain how this BLM-tier agitprop made its way onto—nay, became—primetime CBS?:
It has all the bells and whistles. There are the melanotic, dystopian-future studio anchors. There’s the grave intonation, the “human rights” framing, the clergyman inveighing against disproportionate force, the ideologue “expert” holding forth primly on events she witnessed only seconds of on a janky bystander phone camera (an American law professor, no less, drawing very very serious conclusions in the almost total absence of reliable evidence). The repeated claim in this and related reports has consistently been that Israel is “targeting” journalists. Who the hell uses a euphemism when accusing another of murder? It’s very strange.
I’ve seen as little of this current snafu as the little Rutgers law prof on CBS did, but I’m 100% certain that after years of traversing and reporting from the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akleh’s death came as a surprise to Shireen Abu Akleh. All the reports about her death contain expressions of shock from her colleagues in the West Bank press corps that anything like this could ever have happened—in the fucking war zone of Jenin. These people feel no sense of danger from the IDF, and Israel has conditioned this expectation by protecting them. Obviously, if Israel was “targeting civilians” the Palestinians would be far more circumspect about affronting the IDF. If, indeed, Israel was “targeting journalists” (as the frivolous line now goes) there’d be no journalists in the West Bank.
But the West Bank is crawling with journalists, reporters and camera crews as far as the eye can see, from everywhere in the world. (I was there some years back as an IDF serviceman – it was like being on Cops.) Due to the intense diplomatic and media scrutiny Israel always elicits, the West Bank exists in a kind of fishbowl, where smarmy, collegiate members of the international press corps (many of whom fancy themselves partisans in the conflict) feel just the right ratio of danger to safety—not unlike yuppie patrons of a dive bar in an up-and-coming urban neighborhood. Where else can you stalk an army raid of an insurgent safe-house, filming all the while—as a supporter of the insurgents—and still make the Brasserie for a digestif by midnight?
Relative to other theaters of battle, this state of affairs is unique in all the world. Detroit is not so safe. For journalists to enjoy cover of democratic scruples in Afghanistan or Iraq meant embedding with the occupation force and parroting its side of things, at least to a degree. Lebanon on a good day is no less dangerous for the western press than Gaza is on a bad one. Syria? Forget about it. Those reports get filed from Athens. Ditto the whole of Africa and just about anywhere in the former Soviet space where live fire is being lain.
The distinct motives on either side bear examining as well. What the Israeli army was doing in Jenin was pursuing a band of insurgents (to put it restrainedly) responsible for the murder—the deliberate homicide, with malice aforethought—of women and children. No one who truly believes that Israeli soldiers deliberately kill non-combatants could possibly feel the need to be so coy as to refer to this euphemistically as “targeting.” While we don’t know which side’s bullet ultimately did her in—and if it turns out to’ve been Palestinian you can be sure the calls for “accountability” will abruptly fall off—we do know that Shireen Abu Akleh chose to put herself at the scene of a firefight, as a media partisan for the murderers of children, to slander their pursuers. Not unlike the peaceful protests we see stateside many an election year, these journalists are championing crime, and undermining social order.
Utter Contempt 