The death of any children in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is undeniably a tragedy. But is there a moral equivalence between a three-month-old baby murdered by a terrorist and a 14-year-old Palestinian youth killed by the IDF in the course of throwing a Molotov cocktail? Is there a moral equivalence between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian terrorists?
According to CNN there is:
Now, once more, children on both sides have lost their lives violently, rending hearts and stoking resentment.
One of those killed was a kindergartner, another a baby, both run down by motorists last week.
And on Sunday, Palestinians lay to rest a teenage boy with U.S. roots, whom the Israel Defense Forces shot and killed in the West Bank on Friday, according to the U.S. State Department.
While both children were “run down by motorists,” one of those motorists was a Palestinian terrorist who deliberately set out to kill Israelis when he drove his car into passengers disembarking the Jerusalem Light Rail. The other, according to CNN, was carried out by “an Israeli settler” and deliberate, according to the Palestinian WAFA news agency.
Israeli police believed that it was an accident. What CNN also does not tell you is that the Israeli involved stopped at the nearest Jewish community to report the incident and turn himself in, explaining that he’d left the scene to avoid a potentially dangerous crowd that had gathered there.
Does this sound like someone who deliberately set out to kill Palestinian children?
And is the description of the Israeli as a “settler” deliberately meant to imply a motivation for killing Palestinians?
Likewise, CNN’s reporting portrays Israeli security forces as showing little regard for the lives of Palestinians. Of course the death of Orwa Hammad was avoidable had he not been involved in throwing a Molotov cocktail when he was shot by the IDF. Instead, Hammad is presented as being as innocent as three-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun, who CNN does not even refer to by name in its report.
Braun’s killer, Abdelrahman al-Shaludi was, according to CNN, “gunned down” by police when he attempted to flee. The term “to gun down” means, according to the Macmillan Dictionary, particularly in journalistic usage, “to shoot someone and kill them or injure them badly, especially someone who is not guilty of anything, or who is not carrying a gun.”
Abdelrahman al-Shaludi was not killed in cold blood by Israelis. Neither were Orwa Hammad or Einas Khalil, the five-year-old victim of the hit-and-run accident.
But that’s unimportant for CNN. If Palestinians are undeniably deliberately murdering Israeli children then CNN has attempted to create a false moral equivalence by painting Israelis as equally cold blooded murderers of Palestinian children. Only by achieving this can a helpless three-month-old baby in a stroller be equated with a Palestinian throwing a Molotov cocktail.
