Kelly Jane Torrance was my editor when she worked for the great Richard Starr at the Weekly Standard. Now serving as commentary editor at the New York Post, Kelly Jane stepped out from behind the curtain to report on “Hamas horrors you luckily won’t see — glimpse of terror too sick for Israel to air.” Here is one section of her column:
It was hard to watch. Harder still for the Israelis. The consul general admitted afterward he couldn’t stay for the whole screening. Another staffer seemed to find most difficult to see and hear some of the same footage I did: A father tries to get his young children, dressed only in underpants, safely to a backyard shelter.
A grenade lands before he can close the door, and he’s dead. A terrorist takes his two boys back into the house, and a security camera captures their devastation. The blast blinded one boy in an eye. The other falls to the ground, plaintively pleading, “Why am I alive? Why am I alive?” (The boys, we’re told, managed to escape — at least physically.)
We see homes in kibbutzim, fields young concertgoers ran through, Israel Defense Forces installations with terrified young women huddling in a room.
Blood. Blood everywhere, trails of it, puddles of it. Burned bodies still smoking. A man with his nose blown off. Headless Israeli soldiers. An elderly woman clad only in her brightly colored underwear never meant to be seen by so many. Piles of bodies surrounded by young men celebrating, chanting, “Allahu akbar!”
Some footage has been geolocated to Gaza. A broken woman is taken from the back of a Jeep, the rear of her pants coated in blood, and brought to the back seat. We can easily understand what’s likely happening to her there. Young men clamor over, trying to get a look inside, some recording with their cellphones. Two older men walk over — finally, this will stop, I almost think. No: They wanted a good look, too.
Women who were raped had their legs broken, consulate staff said. Then they were killed.
Many times I wanted to look away, but I forced myself not to. We journalists had to see what happened so we could tell the world.
Yet here is a line from a CBS News piece written by a journalist who saw the footage in Israel: “In another clip, a militant stands over a man who appears to have been shot in the gut and hacks at him multiple times with a garden hoe.”
The words “terrorist” or “terrorism” don’t appear in the piece. (They don’t appear in the New York Times’ report of that screening either.)
I can tell you it was not “a militant” who “stands over a man.” A group of terrorists argue over who gets to behead the man, a Thai worker bleeding profusely from his stomach but still alive. Someone does repeatedly hack at him with a hoe, trying to behead him. Every single time, the terrorist yells, “Allahu akbar!”
Kelly Jane’s colleagues on the news pages of the Wall Street Journal and news anchors on Fox News are also guilty of the obfuscation of “militants,” but K.J.’s indictment stands. Whole thing here.
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