The Post Attacks Israel While Reporting Jerusalem Terror Attack

A Washington Post report on an April 14, 2017 Palestinian terror attack omitted important context about the international community’s anti-Israel bias. In so doing, the paper used the occasion of a terrorist attack to gratuitously attack the Jewish state.

In a dispatch (“Woman fatally stabbed in Jerusalem amid Good Friday gatherings,” April 14, 2017), Post reporter Ruth Eglash detailed the fatal stabbing of a 21-year-old British exchange student, Hannah Bladon, by a Palestinian attacker named Jamil Tamimi. Bladon was murdered while she was riding the light rail in Jerusalem.

The Post described the incident as “the latest in a spate of stabbing, shooting and vehicular attacks by Palestinians over the last 18 months.” But then the paper alleged:

“Israel has been accused internationally of being too heavy-handed in response to the attacks, which have left nearly 50 Israelis and more then 200 Palestinians dead. Israel says most of the Palestinians killed were attempting to carry out attacks against Israeli civilians, soldiers or police officers.”

The report does not specify what “internationally” means. Presumably it means the United Nations, which includes countries such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iran, oppressive regimes whose track record of singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium is well established.

According to U.N. Watch, a non-profit organization that monitors that international body, in 2016, the U.N. General Assembly adopted 20 resolutions condemning Israel and only 6 against the rest of the world combined: Bashar al-Assad’s regime that uses poison gas on its own citizens only received three and North Korea and Iran, only one each. As CAMERA has noted, the U.N.’s own Secretary General recently admitted that his organization has an anti-Israel agenda.

Contrary to the claim pushed by The Post, Israel has been praised for exercising extraordinary judiciousness in its counter terror efforts. As the former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, noted, among others, “the Jewish state has gone out of its way to avoid unnecessary casualties when fighting terror.” Indeed, following the Israel-Hamas War in 2014, a multinational group of former top military professionals concluded that “Israel not only met a reasonable standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard (“Israel ‘exceeded legal standards’ in Gaza conflict, group tells U.N.,” The Times of Israel, June 3, 2015).”

The Post report on the Jerusalem attack also omitted important information regarding the Palestinian leaderships’ role in encouraging anti-Jewish violence. The paper claims that the so-called stabbing intifada that began in October 2015 “contrasts with the first and second intifadas of the 1980s and 2000s, which were centrally organized and included mass unrest.” In fact, the violence began after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas exhorted on official PA TV on Sept. 16, 2015: “We welcome every drop of blood that is spilled in Jerusalem.” The terror that followed, while differing from the previous intifadas in scope, nonetheless received support from Palestinian officials.

As CAMERA has highlighted, The Post failed to report Abbas’ incitement at the time (“The Washington Post: Palestinian Anti-Jewish Violence is an Israeli ‘Sensational Charge,’” Sept. 16, 2016). Now, it seems that amnesia has settled in.