Kudos for an excellent, much-needed takedown of that horrid Washington Post headline “Suspect in synagogue crash lost family in Israeli attack on Lebanon, official says.”
Unfortunately, that was not an outlier. It had plenty of bad company in the mainstream media. CNN similarly noted that “a truck rammed a Michigan synagogue.” NPR lamented that “In a small Lebanese town, grief and fear followed the attack,” positing possible vengeance against town expatriates in America. Perhaps worst of all, The New York Times led with “Temple Israel was founded in 1941, dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state.”
So, those earlier Zionists provided all the justification needed for a potentially mass murderous assault on a sacred space with, as CNN added, “more than 100 children” then in it.
Following attacks on Jewish sites worldwide, accounts are now regularly filled with obfuscation and circumlocution, absence of context and suppression of vital detail.
Passive verbs prevail. When reporting serious allegations against Israeli actions, vivid verbs vault. Israel “strikes,” “breaks,” “blocks,” “impedes,” “defies,” “rejects,” amid many other pejoratives. The media are in thrall to the seductively sinister bifurcation of humanity into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Israel’s enemies are pitiful, perennial victims devoid of all agency. They must always be protected against Israeli hyper white supremacist, settler colonialist, genocidal monsters, and, by extension, other Jews.
Such devious “explaining” away of reality only serves to justify and enable increasingly vicious crimes against them, to continue and multiply.
Richard D. Wilkins, Cherry Hill