John and I started Power Line 21 years ago this coming Memorial Day weekend to support the United States and Israel in the war on terrorism. The United States has made great progress in the war. We don’t worry much about terrorist attacks on the United States nowadays. Osama bin Laden is pushing up daisies. China has become our principal national security preoccupation.
In the case of Israel, Iran has become the locus of evil and is in the process of surrounding Israel with terrorist forces aiming for her destruction while it readies itself to drop the big one. It hates Israel more than it loves its allies in the territories adjacent to Israel.
Israel has been under attack this week by the genocidal terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The genocidal terrorist group Hamas is letting PIJ operate while it sits this one out.
PIJ is an Iranian-backed terrorist group that shares Iran’s goal of extirpating Israel because it is a Jewish state. However, you’d never know it from reading the newspapers. The Associated Press has abandoned the use of the word “terrorist” and therefore refers to PIJ as a “Gaza militant group.”
The AP stylebook prescribes that “the use of the word terrorism or terrorist” is to be attributed to authorities with respect to specific actions (i.e., not to be used except when authorities use the words) and is otherwise only permissible “when talking about historical events widely acknowledged as terrorist actions.”
You don’t want to be too judgmental. You don’t want to pick a side, even when it’s your own. You want to adopt an abstruse terminology that obscures who is who, what is what, and what is happening.
When the terrorism is directed against Israel, additional considerations come into play. In a bitter column today Melanie Phillips explains the media front of the war on Israel:
The Gaza rocket attacks are a double war crime. They target Israeli civilians while using Gaza’s population as hostages and human shields. More than 100 rockets have reportedly fallen short and landed inside Gaza, with Israel claiming that they killed four people, including three children….In their coverage of Israel, many Western journalists behave like sheep following the dominant Western narrative.
On this point, Richard Goldberg notes the lengths to which the Israel Defense Forces have gone in the current hostilities, as always, to avoid civilian deaths while PIJ remains in “double war crime” mode.
Per IDF press briefing: An Islamic Jihad commander taking orders from Iran was driving around Gaza using his family as a human shield while directing attacks against Israel. Israel waited until he left the vehicle to take him out and spare his family. Draw your own conclusions.
— Richard Goldberg (@rich_goldberg) May 11, 2023
I only observed this week that Fox News has fallen into line with the AP stylebook. For example, Fox News has posted the story headlined “Gaza militants fire wave of rockets into Israel after strikes kill top terrorist leaders” and Bret Baier read a story last night on Special Report referring to those “militants.”
That is beyond disappointing.
FOONTOTE:. I’m sorry that Fox News has killed Tucker Carlson’s show. He is an incredible talent with a unique voice. However, something beyond stylebook issues affected Tucker on Israel and the Jews. Jonathan Tobin reminds me:
He hosted BDS advocate and rabid antisemite Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame on his show. Though in a sign that Carlson knew that platforming hate for Israel would go over poorly with a conservative audience that loves the Jewish state, the two managed not to mention it in that interview.
I wrote about this myself:
Far worse, was [Tucker’s] bizarre defense of rap star/fashion mogul Kanye West, now known as “Ye.” Carlson devoted an entire hour to an interview with West but then deceptively edited out some of that disturbed figure’s anti-Jewish rants so as to make him appear more reasonable.
End of footnote.
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