When it comes to the Palestinian war on Israel, it doesn’t take much to lead an audience astray, to prepare minds with a headline, or a first sentence, in order that they receive a story in a certain way. So many people read no more than the headline, or the headline and first sentence of a story. Minds can be molded early on. Even the choice of a single word can have a great effect. Take, for example, a story that incessantly refers to the Haram al-Sharif instead of to the Temple Mount, which helps buttress the claim to it by the Muslim Arabs. Think of the reporters who insist on avoiding using the toponyms Judea and Samaria, that had been in use for several thousand years, not just by Jews but by the entire Western world, and instead refer to the territory in question as “the West Bank,” even though that place name was invented by the Jordanians only in 1950. Or, what is still worse, consider the many journalists, especially at such outlets as NPR and the BBC, who insist on using the fixed phrase “the occupied West Bank,” which, by dint of that single adjective “occupied,” attempts to deny the legitimacy of any claim by Jews to that land. By describing the West Bank as “occupied” (by Israel), the Jewish state’s is portrayed as merely the “military occupier” of the West Bank, that rightly belongs to another – that is, to the Palestinians. That the territory in question was intended to be included in the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine is never mentioned. Almost no one nowadays — certainly none of our best-known print and television reporters — seems to remember that essential fact in the history of modern Israel.
Rachel O’Donoghue has taken just one small story, that appeared in the notoriously anti-Israel British paper The Guardian, to show just how insidious the choice of words can be. You can find her analysis here: “UK Paper Changes Words to Erase Palestinian Terror, Distort Israeli Actions,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, Algemeiner, April 3, 2023:
Here are the facts as we know them.
On Saturday evening [April 1], three Israeli soldiers were injured in what is believed to be a deliberate car-ramming attack carried out by a Palestinian man, near Beit Umar in the West Bank.
The suspect — identified as 23-year-old Mohammed Baradeya, an officer in the Palestinian Authority (PA) Security Forces — was shot dead at the scene.
The wire agency AFP, which supplies news copy to thousands of organizations worldwide, reported the incident thus:
A suspected assailant was killed by Israeli soldiers after a West Bank car ramming Saturday, the army said, in an escalation that threatens to end a relative lull during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan so far.
The paragraph, while not alluding to terrorism, is clear with regard to the facts: readers are told by the use of the words “suspected assailant,” that the ramming was likely intentional, and in the following paragraph the suspect is identified as Palestinian.
However, the Agence France-Presse story did not include this: he was killed “after the car he was driving slammed into, and wounded three soldiers.” The objects of his attack – those three soldiers – were left out. Furthermore, the AFP story makes it seem that the Israelis are being accused of “escalation” for having killed the “assailant,” when the “escalation” was only on the Palestinian side; the Israelis did not initiate, but were only responding to, an attack.
Yet, when The Guardian reprinted the AFP’s news copy, editors at the outlet made one very small change to the paragraph that profoundly altered its meaning:
A man was killed by Israeli soldiers after a West Bank car ramming on Saturday, the army said, in an escalation threatening to end a relative lull during the holy month of Ramadan so far. [emphasis added]
The recasting of an assailant into simply a “man” renders the paragraph devoid of factual substance — readers are not told the dead man is a suspected terrorist or that he was behind the wheel of the vehicle.
It would have cost The Guardian nothing to simply write this: “The Palestinian driver of a car that rammed into three Israeli soldiers was killed on Saturday.” It makes clear who the assailant was, and where he was – behind the wheel of the car that slammed into three soldiers, wounding all three. Instead, “a man was killed by Israeli soldiers.” Was that “man” possibly an innocent bystander, shot by mistake? We don’t know.
Interestingly, this was not the only edit made to the story by The Guardian.
While AFP’s original headline read, “Palestinian killed after West Bank car ramming as violence rises,” the Guardian editors opted to tie the ramming to another suspected terror attack in Jerusalem, in which a Palestinian man allegedly snatched an Israeli officer’s gun and fired several shots before being neutralized.
Thus the Guardian’s headline, “Second killing in a day by Israeli forces in Jerusalem and West Bank,” distorts the weekend’s events — at a glance, readers are left with the mistaken impression that two innocent (and presumably) Palestinian people were mercilessly killed by Israeli soldiers.
The Palestinian did not “allegedly” snatch an officer’s gun – he did snatch an officer’s gun, and what’s more, got off several shots before being killed himself. There were many witnesses. There was nothing “allegedly” about it..
“Second killing in a day by Israeli forces” is a deeply misleading headline. As Rachel O’Donoghue says, it leaves the impression that the trigger-happy Israelis are engaged in wanton killing of innocent Palestinians. What happened was started by the Muslim Arab who not only snatched a gun from an IDF soldier, but shot several times at soldiers before being shot himself. None of rhis is mentioned in the headline.
The first killing, remember was of a Palestinian who had driven a car straight into a group of Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, wounding three. He was bent on murder. The Guardian chose instead in its first sentence to identify only “a man” who “was killed by Israeli soldiers,” clearly leaving open the possibility that the man whom they killed was an innocent bystander.
The second killing was of a Palestinian who had wrenched a gun away from a soldier and fired it several times when he was killed by another Israeli soldier. It was clearly a life-or-death situation.
Words, words, words. Words chosen, words avoided. The Guardian has for years been doing its damnedest to hide both the reality of incessant Palestinian terror attacks on Israelis, and the constant effort by the IDF to protect the people of Israel. Several of its columnists – Owen Jones, Seamus Milne, and George Monbiot – share a deep antipathy to Israel, and, when he was still in the Labour Party, they ardently supported the insupportable Jeremy Corbyn. Like Rachel O’Donoghue, we can all read the reports in The Guardian (and other papers, to, such as those current bastions of anti-Israel journalistic sentiment, The New York Times and The Washington Post. When we find bias in their reports on Israel, we should not lose heart, but instead make our findings forcefully known both on social media and by communicating directly with the offending reporters and editors who are most responsible for outrageous coverage of the Jewish state.
It’s ironic that The Guardian has become the most prominent source of anti-Israel journalism in Great Britain today. The greatest of all editors of The Manchester Guardian, as The Guardian was originally known, was C. P. Scott, who edited the paper from 1872 to 1929, and was its owner from 1907 until his death in 1932. “Scott of the Guardian,” as he was known, was not just the most famous English newspaper editor of his day; he was also known for his ardent Zioinism. He did more than anyone else to open doors in English political circles for Chaim Weizmann. Who knows? Sir Keir Starmer has cleansed the Labour Party of the antisemitic stench of Jeremy Corbyn and his followers. Perhaps another set of editors and reporters will come along to rescue The Guardian from its current roster of far-leftists who have betrayed the enlightened liberalism of “Scott of the Guardian.”
