Wash Post Blind to “Terror”
Once again, the Washington Post is belittling a Palestinian terrorist attack on Israelis.
The Post’s report on the March 6th shooting at an Israeli religious school (“Gunman Kills Eight at Seminary in Jerusalem,” March 7, 2008) is rife with omissions and distortions.
The headline fails to make clear either that the victims were Israelis or that a Palestinian was the perpetrator. The killer is merely called a “gunman,” not a terrorist, and Hamas, which praised and “blessed” the massacre and which seeks Israel’s annihilation, is sanitized as merely a “radical” group. The article also omits the full name of the group that claimed responsibility for the massacre: “Imad Mughniyeh Liberators of Galilee.” Galilee is part of pre-1967 Israel.
The article also refers to “Israel’s seizure of Palestinian territories in 1967,” obscuring the facts that Egypt started the war by besieging and blockading Israel with the declared aim of destroying the Jewish state, and that the territories were not “Palestinian,” but rather, disputed, and at the time, part of Egypt and Jordan, and included the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, which Jordan seized and ethnically cleansed of all Jews in 1948.
Meanwhile, the story ignores two attacks earlier that day by Islamic Jihad inside Israel’s border. The second attack killed an Israeli soldier who was part of a rescue crew that was responding to the earlier attack. Also, Palestinians fired 7 more missiles at Sderot on Thursday, collapsing the roof of a house and starting a fire. (The New York Times noted these events in its March 7 report.)
While the Post article omits these important points, it goes out of its way to opine that the seminary massacre was “reminiscent” not of the hundreds of similar Palestinian massacres of Israeli children in schools, buses, malls, pizzerias, a disco and an ice cream parlor, but rather, of a rare incident of terrorism by a (deranged) Israeli — in 1994. The Post does not bother to note the distinction that virtually all Israelis condemned the 1994 tragedy, unlike the Palestinians, who celebrated Thursday’s act of barbarity against innocent Israelis.
Stephen A. Silver
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