Thomas Wictor

Former Associated Press journalist and editor Matti Friedman has written a piece titled “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel.” It’s a good article about how the global press is biased against Israel, but there’s a giant hole in it: Why—of all the nations on earth—has the media chosen Israel as the subject of transparently false, infantile, hallucinatory reporting? The answer is hatred of Jews.

Friedman says this about the moral degenerates who cover Israel.

[International nongovernmental organizations and numerous arms of the UN] provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.

In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance…

In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies or to the ham-fisted government currently in charge in this country, but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists.

This isn’t the media “getting it wrong”; this is a global conspiracy against one nation. Again, what makes that nation different from all the others?

Friedman—like so many Israeli and Jewish people I’ve met—can’t seem to see what’s so clear to me: The press hates Jews. Why else would the superhuman care that the Israeli Defense Forces take to avoid civilian casualties be turned into “massacres,” indiscriminate firing,” and “disproportionate force”?

I don’t buy for a second that the press just happened to chose Israel as a convenient symbol of nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism. Here are far better examples of “the world’s ills”:

North Korea
China
Russia
Iran
Syria
Burma
Venezuela
Cuba
Belarus
Equatorial Guinea

Some of the very journalists who’ve reported on actual genocide and wide-scale atrocities are Israel’s harshest critics. These people know that Israel isn’t a fascist, bloodthirsty, ruthless country. So why do they lie?

Because they hate Jews.

The BBC’s Orla Guerin covered the wars in Libya and Syria.

The Libyan Civil War of 2011 killed as many as 29,000. Not only that, all sides committed every atrocity in the book. Summary executions, torture, bayonets up the rear, people forced to eat rotting dog meat, and blacks being put in steel containers to die of heat exhaustion and thirst. I don’t remember Orla Guerlin expressing the sort of hammy outrage she did in this utterly phony report.

There was no carnage. None. The Israelis fired a tiny missile called a Mikholit at two terrorists on a motorcycle, far from the school grounds. Everything Orla Guerlin says in this report is a lie. You can see for yourself that nobody in the hospital parking lot is injured, and the child with a “chest wound” was not being given oxygen as Orla stood next to an empty bed. Death did not “rain down on children.”

In Syria, Orla has seen the regime of Bashar al-Assad rain death down on children in the form of barrel bombs: improvised aerial munitions made from water heaters and filled with explosives, rocks, nails, ball bearings, and steel shards.

THAT is the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas. The white smoke is concrete dust from collapsed buildings full of people. So far as many as 200,000 have been killed. Both sides commit unspeakable atrocities, including the torture and butchering of children.

And what about the Islamic State? It’s gone back to its roots. Mass beheadings, mass throat cuttings, mass rape, sex-slave markets, and heads on pikes.

Any grim reporters intoning about that? Nope.

But let Israel carry out THE MOST BLOODLESS MAJOR MILITARY OPERATION IN HUMAN HISTORY, and all the same journalists who are blase about hundreds of thousands being murdered in hideously unspeakable ways are suddenly glopping their counterfeit sanctimonious rage all over us.

Today an Israeli told me that due to my always being prepared for conflict, maybe I’m an Israeli after all. It’s an interesting comment because one of my favorite film directors is David Cronenberg.

He’s said that the recent explosion of Jew-hate has made him acutely aware of his Jewish identity.

I think circumstances have forced it a little more out in the open. We all know about the Holocaust and that it’s never really gone away. There’s just been an incident here in Canada. A radical Muslim preacher had a regular show on VisionTV, a television network devoted to religion. Every week he’d give his sermon, saying Jews are parasites, the Holocaust was divine retribution, and ultimately all Jews will be annihilated. People started saying we don’t think this should be on the air in Canada, so they pulled him off, and then they were going to put him back on because he’s highly respected. Meanwhile the guy issues a statement saying, “I’m not anti-Semitic. Everything I say is just prophecy. It says in our holy book that the Jews will be annihilated. It’s not that I don’t like Jews.”

So in [my film At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World] it was interesting to think for all these people who would like there to be no Jews. Let’s propose we’re down to the last Jew. What does America think, and what does popular media culture think? [W]ill this yearning for extermination of Jews really make much of an impression? Or will it be a moment of dancing in the streets in certain cities of the world, and then what?

The current biggest provider of snuff pornography is the Muslim extremist movement. Remember when Al Goldstein from Screw magazine offered $50,000 if someone could bring him a real snuff film, and no one could? Now they’re everywhere, and most involve beheadings and throat slitting, and once again, as in Eastern Promises, it’s very sexual, very intimate. And needless to say, very disturbing.

I can tell Mr. Cronenberg the world reaction to the death of the last Jew. We’ll see a lot of this in the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe, and other regions characterized by failure and tribalism.

The western media will pretend it’s a great tragedy, but inside they’ll be doing this.

What you need to remember is that every western journalist knows the real story, but they choose to report lies instead. They’re as dedicated to your destruction as the terrorists they love.

My unsolicited advice is to treat them the same way you treat terrorists.