Sometimes, anti-Israel bias in the media runs so deep that it necessitates a surgical exposure of the underlying twisted assumptions that fuel it. Unfortunately, the distorted patterns of thought emerging from the Associated Press’s recent coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict merit such scrutiny.
These patterns fall under the general framing of the victim (Palestinians) vs. aggressor (Israel), which can also be seen through the rather infantile categories of those who are idealized vs. those who are demonized.
The idealization category includes the basic premise that Palestinians can’t be held responsible for any evil or violence, while the demonization category is based on the belief that Israel is a foreign element in their territory and therefore carries most of the blame in the conflict.
Related Reading: The AP Skews Reality in Piece on West Bank Violence
Here are just a few examples showing how AP systematically twists the facts to match those premises:
Palestinians not held responsible
When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recently justified the mass extermination of Jews during the Holocaust, various officials and media outlets had no issue seeing his remarks for what they really were: gross antisemitism.
Yet AP absolved him with the following headline, suggesting he was merely (or even wrongfully) “accused” of such despicable rhetoric:
No @AP, these are not “accusations” of antisemitism. Mahmoud Abbas justified the mass extermination of Jews during the Holocaust.
That IS antisemitic.
No other media outlets had an issue calling his remarks antisemitic. Just you. Why is that?https://t.co/z77qV09ISq pic.twitter.com/YBbuKVLQ3F
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 10, 2023
Consciously or not, the journalist/editor who came up with this distortion couldn’t hold Palestinians responsible for any wrongdoing.
It’s even more blatant when it comes to the reporting of actual bloodshed.
In the following example of a report on an Israeli army raid, idealization and demonization join hands. AP cannot properly answer the 5 W’s of journalism (who, what, when, where, and why), because when it comes to Palestinians the ‘WHO’ is obscured: The headline doesn’t say that the Israeli forces killed Palestinian GUNMEN who fired at them. However, in a later version (which failed to correct the headline), AP easily identified a Jewish settler as responsible for “a shooting death” (in a completely separate incident):
It’s rare that the updates @AP make to articles leave the story less accurate than before. 🧵
1️⃣ The headline still ignores that these Palestinians were gunmen and this fact has been moved from the lede to 5 paragraphs in.
2️⃣ Headline misses this was an arrest raid. https://t.co/MCtYvEG2eM pic.twitter.com/QFclcXG1ut
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 15, 2023
The obscuring of Palestinian perpetrators also takes the form of hiding them behind inanimate objects which mysteriously develop violent tendencies. Here, “A West Bank Bomb” hurts Israelis and nowhere does it say that an Israeli was stabbed:
An Israeli civilian is stabbed but @AP‘s headline also focuses instead on the death of the terrorist responsible. https://t.co/yzNNq73kuk pic.twitter.com/yVc7qfzEvT
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 31, 2023
Moral equivalence between perpetrators and victims is another trick:
Would @AP also include the deceased terrorist hijackers in its “on this date” roundup for the 9/11 attacks?
Making an equivalence between terrorists and their victims is never ok.
AP, do better.https://t.co/HryAVbeabI pic.twitter.com/jHB0rVNsd9
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 6, 2023
At its worst, AP completely ignores Palestinian terrorists’ responsibility for four Gaza wars, blaming them on Israeli actions instead:
Hamas, a terrorist org, has said time & again they wish to DESTROY Israel & kill Jews.
The 🇪🇬 & 🇮🇱 blockade on Gaza limits weapons from flowing into the strip.
This ignorant assertion implies Israel fuels violence because of this.
Do better, @AP. https://t.co/oady8iaCcK pic.twitter.com/ylJMGV8FA0
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 10, 2023
Demonization of Israel
How to explain the description of an Israeli minister’s visit to Judaism’s holiest site as “storming the al-Aqsa Mosque”? What is behind the false portrayal of Israel as stealing the “natives'” drinking water?
How has a supposedly respectable wire service been reduced to parroting cheap Palestinian talking points?
Hey @AP, no Jews, including Ben-Gvir, visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque let alone stormed it.
Your failure to properly differentiate between the Temple Mount and the mosque amplifies and gives credibility to Islamic Jihad & other extremists’ inflammatory lies.https://t.co/tg5UgC80ig pic.twitter.com/FhO6BXlCDB
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 2, 2023
Another day, another misleading article about Israel from @AP. 🧵
Contrary to AP’s suggestion, Israel provides water to Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank — this water goes to established communities and not those built illegally.https://t.co/jLjmdDhgCv pic.twitter.com/oNADFeBkf1
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 17, 2023
The answer to all of this is AP’s underlying assumption that Israel is a foreign element that criminally infiltrated the territory, as this shocking paragraph shows:
Is it the @AP or its experts that get so much wrong in such a small paragraph??
🔴 Israeli Arabs vote. Palestinians are disenfranchised by the PA, not Israel.
🔴 The Kingdoms of Israel & Judah existed before “historic Palestine” ever did. That’s where the Jewish homeland is. pic.twitter.com/YAJCTL9vLL
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 6, 2023
But the problem is not the mere existence of underlying bias. All journalists (and humans) suffer from it to a certain degree and should strive to be aware of it.
The problem is that it seems like, for AP, it has become a framework of skewed language and words that are imposed on reality.
The idealization or infantilization of “harmless” Palestinians, coupled with the demonization of “evil” Israel is a flawed perspective that should not infiltrate the reporting of any journalist, let alone a news agency whose words travel across the globe with the power to alter reality.
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