Saturday, April 02, 2016

Jerusalem Post has become yet another Israel paper that thinks its main role is to deligitimize Israel


Whereas Haaretz is the standard source of anti-Israel articles used by external media organisations to deligitimize Israel, it seems that in the last two years the Jerusalem Post (once considered 'right wing' and strongly pro-Zionist')  has been desperately trying to outdo Haaretz.

Today's top two headline 'stories' in the JPost are a perfect example. The main 'story' is actually just an opinion piece that uses exactly the same narrative as Israel-haters the world over - drawing a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers. It even uses the standard anti-Israel trick of suggesting that Palestinians only use stones and slingshots (rather than knives and guns) to attack Israelis, emphasizing this in the photocaption which says:
Splitscreen: Palestinian with slingshot at demonstration and IDF soldier who shot dead a wounded terrorist in Hebron
The second ‘story’ with the ludicrous and offensive title "Has Tunisia replaced Israel as the Middle East's only genuine democracy" is piece of pure nonsense based on an article in the Economist –  a magazine that has been at the forefront of pumping out anti-Zionist (and even pure antisemitic) lies and propaganda for several years. Did nobody at the Jerusalem Post check that? Doesn't the JPost have its own writers? And regarding 'democratic Tunisia' perhaps the 'author' should have checked the JPost's own recent articles such as this one; and he has forgotten the fact that Tunisia is known to have the largest proportion of ISIS fighters and supporters in the Arab world (hence the terrorist attacks of 2015). [Update: Here is some real apartheid in Tunisia]

It is a shame that the Jerusalem Post has decided its main role is to pump out propaganda pieces rather than reporting the News. If they focused on the latter they might, for example, have discovered that the Palestinian woman who they lavishly praised two weeks ago for winning the $1 million Global Teacher Prize is actually very proud to have married a man who massacred a group of Jews walking home from synagogue in Hebron in 1980. Instead it took blogger Aussie Dave at IsraellyCool to find that out (it really was not hard; update: see Brian's rant about this)

Perhaps the April Fools article about the Guardian focusing on Israel hatred because it is profitable was not really such a spoof after all. Just as fourth rate Israeli academics can become big stars in the West by promoting anti-Zionism, it seems the same is true of media outlets.

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