How A False Mythology Is Created By The Media, UN

The combination of media bias and incompetence is so pronounced that it generates a mythology that buries the facts and the truth in a dark, deep journalistic sinkhole. This is most easily seen in the reporting coming out of the Middle East in which the media has willing allies in the United Nations and major nations across the globe in demonizing Israel and legitimizing the forces of genocide and terrorism.

This column will try to cut through some of that bias, incompetence, and media mythology to get a better picture of the current Israel-Hamas conflict. But you will note that the facts and the truth almost speak for themselves when any fair-minded person looks at the facts instead of the biased, dishonest, and fraudulent journalism and the anti-Israel, anti-American pronouncements of the corrupt United Nations.

Here are some of the most fundamental building blocks of that mythology and my attempt to get closer to the truth and the facts.

MYTH: Israel should make peace with Hamas and start with an immediate cease-fire.

How can you make peace with a terrorist organization dedicated from the moment of its inception and in its founding documents to your extinction? Hamas’ founding documents makes it clear that it wants to kill all the Jews and obliterate the state of Israel. And since Hamas’ inception, its leaders have constantly reiterated that fundamental genocidal objective. So I would like one of these media mavens, United Nations commissioners, or peace-loving politicians to send me a draft of the terms of a peace treaty with a terrorist organization that is totally dedicated to the other party’s extinction. Regardless of the language proposed, the real intent of any such document could best be stated as follows:

Hamas hereby agrees to cease rocketing Israel and cease making war against Israel until the moment is right for its obliteration. We agree to let Israel live in peace, until we think we have the military power to drive all the Jews into the sea.

Any peace treaty with Hamas would be a foolhardy venture, as would any cease-fire. Any such agreement would only give Hamas a chance to rearm, acquire more powerful rockets, and probe for Israeli vulnerabilities. Any such peace treaty or cease-fire agreement would simply prolong the suffering and carnage and would be counterproductive to real peace.

As often as media mavens cry peace, peace, any reasonable man knows that Hamas is already in a genocidal war with Israel, and will only be over when Hamas is eliminated. A peace with Hamas would make about as much sense as a peace with Hitler might have made in 1942. It’s time to get real.

If there is to be pressure for peace, it ought to be exerted on the other Arab nations in the region and the Palestinians. It ought to be exerted on the U.N. and the international community to end its love affair with genocide and terrorism.

MYTH: Israel’s response to Hamas terrorists’ rocketing is disproportionate and unreasonably deadly to civilians.

This is the purest form of truth flipped on its head and then driven six feet into the ground. When a nation is threatened by genocidal terrorists and maniacs, who are eager to slaughter anyone in their way — including their own people and their own children — any nation is entitled to defend itself with the full power of its military.

Neither common sense nor international law somehow limits the response to a tit-for-tat or to a response that does not kill civilians. If you require a civilian-casualty free response, you could not fight any war and could certainly not win any war.

This is doubly true when the enemy uses civilians as shields and sets up military forces and munitions storage depots in and around mosques, schools, and residential areas.

Those who criticize Israel’s response are really trying to deny its right to self-defense. What’s more Israel goes out of its way in extraordinary ways unknown to the history of warfare to protect civilians.

I would criticize Israel for being too soft in battle and leaning over backward too far to protect Palestinian civilians — so far that it endangers its own military and sheds its blood to try to prevent the civilian casualties that are the responsibility of Hamas and only Hamas.

When you phone your targets in advance so they can evacuate and when you drop leaflets warning of a forthcoming attack (as Israel does), you lose the element of surprise and you needlessly endanger your own forces. When a tiny nation has to fight a hundred years’ war against genocidal terrorists and maniacs, it threatens its own survival when it sacrifices its own military to prevent the casualties, which Hamas has actually intended to build into the struggle. There’s no reasonable way to protect civilians that Hamas uses as shields and puts directly in the line of fire.

I’d also fault Israel for exercising “restraint” for years, as Hamas has been terrorizing civilians since 2005. Doesn’t that show that if anything Israel did not overreact but underreacted?

Incidentally, if a madman has a knife at your throat, do you want the police to carefully weigh a proportional response? Perhaps try quiet negotiation. And then put a knife to the madman’s throat. You know what you want. But these peaceniks would criticize the police for shooting the madman dead on the spot. That would be excessive force, right?

MYTH: The pronouncements of the United Nations have to be taken seriously as it represented an impartial voice of international opinion.

It would be nice if was true, but the United Nations has historically been nothing more than a propaganda agent for the Palestinians.

The United Nations is in the business of condemning Israel, and is unwilling to condemn even its terrorist enemies. Despite its endless parade of condemnations of Israel, it has never had time — not even once — to pass a resolution condemning Hamas terrorism. In its infamous resolution calling for a truce, it never even mentioned Hamas or terrorism. When it comes to advocates of genocide, terrorism and murder, the United Nations can best be thought of as the famous triple monkeys that are deaf, dumb, and blind … to the genocidal enemies of Israel.

The examples of the anti-Israel bias of the United Nations are many and varied, so I’ll limit myself to one more. As Mitchell G. Bard points out in his “Myths and Facts Online — The Gaza War” at www.thejewishvirtuallibrary.org, “U.N. representatives in Gaza are not impartial observers; they are individuals there specifically to aid the Palestinians and are naturally sympathetic to their cause. U.N. operatives in Palestinian territories have often been found to be apologists for terror with an animus toward Israel. Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on Palestinian territories, for example, has a long history of venomous anti-Israel remarks.” I would say Mr. Falk, a former professor, is a man with a Princeton background but with the conscience and character of a Yasser Arafat or a Hamas terrorist.

MYTH: The media come close to giving a reasonable approximation of what goes on in the Middle East conflict in general and the Israel-Gaza conflict in particular.

By now, people should be aware that in large measure the mainstream media is little more than a conduit for Palestinian propaganda and lies. Here’s one example, again from the excellent and comprehensive work of Mr. Bard:

“France 2, the same television network that broadcast the notoriously inaccurate story about Mohammed al Dura during the Palestinian wars [his death being falsely, repeatedly and deliberately attributed to Israeli fire], broadcast a false report showing dead children allegedly killed in the Gaza fighting. The amateur video of the dead toddlers being laid out on a white sheet was actually shot after they were killed by the explosion of a Hamas ammunition truck during a parade in Gaza in September 2005.

That’s pretty much the perfect symbol of media bias — Hamas slaughters infants and the mainstream media blame the deaths on Israel. There are other examples just like that. There was a famous case involving an infant who had lost its arms when they were severely burned allegedly by an Israeli jet accidentally hitting a Christian residential area.

The Washington Post published this UPI photo of that infant during the first Lebanon war. The photo so enraged then President Reagan that he called on Israel to stop its attacks. When the truth finally was told, it turned out the baby was burned by a PLO attack on East Beirut. Again, the Palestinians maim and disfigure infants and the Israelis take the blame and pay the price. The Palestinian version goes around the world on front-pages everywhere, and the Israeli truth is often ignored or buried on the back pages.

MYTH. Hamas is fighting back in legitimate resistance to occupation.

This is one of the most often told lies by Palestinian defenders and apologists and is wrong on many counts. First, Israel withdrew from Gaza years ago, as a peace-making gesture. In return it got thousands of rockets fired into Israel by Hamas. But that’s not all. Firing rockets into civilian populations is a violation of international law and is not justified by occupation or anything else.

Furthermore, the occupation is often used as an excuse for terrorism. But it should be noted that there were terrorist attacks against Israel by various Palestinian groups long before the occupation of Gaza or any place else. Finally, even when Israel was in control of Gaza, that was not “occupation.” Occupation refers to territory controlled as a result of aggression of an enemy nation.

During World War II, France was “occupied” territory. But when control is taken as a result of a defensive war that is not considered occupation. It is always referred to as “disputed territory.” That is the practice everywhere else in the world, with only the exception of Israel. It seems the media have many special rules and terminology applied only to Israel. Another example, involves self-defense, which is denied only to Israel but fully available to all other nations and people throughout the ages.

I urge everyone not to take my word for this analysis but check the sources and facts for themselves. Then add some common sense and obvious intuition to the mix.

• For example, ask yourself why the U.N. manages to condemn Israel more than any other nation or all other nations put together. Is that little democracy, the cradle of our Judeo-Christian tradition, really the greatest human rights violator in the world — worse than Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, and all the other human rights violators put together.

• Ask yourself why Israel would want war when it is a tiny sliver of a country in the center of billions of hostile Muslim nations, some dedicated to its extinction.

• Then ask yourself, which country really wants peace–Israel that has a great tradition of developing medical advances to help the whole world and other scientific and technical advances, or Hamas that considers the highest achievement blowing out the brains of the babies of infidels?

• Ask yourself why the media seems to love the advocates of genocide and terrorism, Hamas, and seems to hate a little democracy?

• Ask yourself why Israel is blamed for civilian deaths when it takes extraordinary measures to prevent them and Hamas escapes blame, when it uses its own people as human shields and puts its terrorists and its military installations in schools, hospitals, mosques and residential areas?

• Ask yourself who you can believe — Israel a nation that believes if you save one life it is as though you saved the world or Hamas that celebrates human slaughter and turns those who blow up women and children into its martyrs?

Don’t let yourself be victimized by a mainstream media, a United Nations, and many nations that weave a fabric of bias and outright fabrication that generates a mythology that is totally false and totally dangerous to the survival of a free society and to the dispensation of international justice. We can’t make sound foreign policy and other decisions if we are drugged by a dangerous mythology that makes a mockery of truth and justice, turns truth on its head, and seems to revere rather than condemn terrorism and genocide.

I don’t have to give you references to bring you up to date on the Palestinian position. You’ve probably been getting more than enough of the mainstream media and its Palestinian propaganda from such sources as NBC, NPR, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, etc.

But here are a few classics to make sure you get the whole story:

• Mitchell G. Bard, Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab Israeli Conflict.

• Mitchell G. Bard, Complete Idiot’s Guide: Middle East Conflict (4th ed).

• David Meir-Levi, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression.

• Visit: Jewishvirtuallibrary.org.

I’d also recommend you look at some of the media watch dog sites to get a flavor of just how dishonest the mainstream media have become: aim.org, mrc.org, camera.org and honestreporting.com.

Finally, make your voice heard and the power of your dollars felt by canceling your subscription to some of the mainstream media that spew out poisonous propaganda.

I’d start by canceling subscriptions to Newsweek, Time, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times. And just to round things out go to the site maintained by Accuracy in Media, which is leading a boycott against the Times at boycottnyt.com. There, you can sign a boycott petition and get some excellent articles by Don Feder about the biased, dishonest and fraudulent journalism of the Times.

Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.

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