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In 1968, at the beginning of the Tet Lunar New Year, the Viet Cong violated a temporary ceasefire by launching a major invasion across South Vietnam. The offensive was a military catastrophe for the Viet Cong; it essentially defenestrated them as a serious fighting force in South Vietnam and ended with them retreating from all captured territory. The military loss, however, wasn’t the real story. The real story was America’s media. Walter Cronkite, America’s most trusted news anchor, was in actuality a partisan Leftist — but he masqueraded as an objective journalist. And so, on receiving news of the Tet Offensive, Cronkite went on the air and proceeded to inform the American people that the war in Vietnam was being lost. He flew to Vietnam to investigate the situation himself. Upon his return, he said this: For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster. The Vietnam War wasn’t lost on the battlefield. It was lost in the hearts and minds of the American people, and it was lost in large part because of the American news media. The American news media has rarely covered itself in glory in covering foreign policy. The New York Times famously covered for Stalin’s Holodomor, his starvation of millions of his own citizens, deploying corrupt and venal Walter Duranty to cover for the evil dictator. The New York Times largely back-paged the Holocaust. The world’s most evil regimes have routinely relied on America’s media to provide them cover. Today is no different. Hamas is an evil, genocidal terrorist group. Yet they receive widespread sympathy because the media create that sympathy. They do so through a variety of methods. Latest Releases: |
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First, and most obviously, they draw moral equivalence between Hamas, which targets civilians for death — both Israeli and its own — and Israel, which seeks to avoid killing civilians when targeting members of Hamas. Take, for example, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer questioning an IDF commander yesterday after Israel hit a Hamas command tunnel network in Jabalia, a major city in the Gaza Strip often characterized by the media as a “refugee camp.” Blitzer repeatedly blamed Israel for the fact that Hamas hides beneath civilian areas. If this were truly a civilian center alone, massive tunnel craters simply wouldn’t be there. The craters are there. So are the dead fighters. But according to Wolf Blitzer, Israel’s legitimate military actions are apparently morally equivalent to Hamas’ slaughter of babies in their cribs. This, of course, follows hard on the New York Times accepting the word of Hamas about military strikes and casualties resulting in a major blood libel in which the entire legacy media parroted that Israel had struck a hospital, killing 500 people. In reality, a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket hit a parking lot near the hospital. SPONSORED
BAD MOON RISING? Too late. The damage was done. Then there’s the second media strategy: misdirection. Comedian Norm Macdonald tweeted in December 2016, “What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?” Macdonald’s joke is actually the media’s strategy for moral equivalence. As anti-Semitism around the world rises — as millions of radical Muslims around the globe, including in the West, march in favor of Hamas — the media are treating Muslims as a victim group. Thus, the New York Times ran an op-ed yesterday, in the midst of the widest global increase in anti-Semitism of my lifetime, decrying the supposed rise in “Islamophobia.” The author was one Rozina Ali, “a journalist who covers war, Islamophobia and the Middle East.” Her article explained, “For those who experienced waves of harassment and government surveillance in the years after Sept. 11, the president’s pledge of 'unwavering' support for Israel set off alarm bells.” Yes, according to this Times columnist, support for Israel is cover for Islamophobia. She also insists, “From college campuses to places of work, people are facing retribution for expressing support for Palestinians that is being misconstrued as anti-Israel or pro-Hamas.” Latest Episode: |
Ep. 1841 - Hamas’ Fifth Column The media continues to prop up Hamas with blood libels and moral equivalence; as Democrats split over whether to bail out Hamas, the Biden administration tries to hold the line; and the Yemeni Houthis declare war on Israel. |
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That is a lie, given protests against Israel began before Israeli counterstrikes and routinely chant for the destruction of the state of Israel. As for Ali herself, her Twitter feed shows on October 7, she did not tweet — but she did retweet a post complaining that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was telling civilians to leave potential war zones. In fact, Ali has posted precisely zero times decrying Hamas’ brutality. But she did find time to retweet posts calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.” Finally, there’s the third strategy: pretending anti-Semitism isn’t a major problem; it’s actually just a side effect of political contentiousness, which really means it’s springing from Israeli policy. The media are in the business of downplaying Muslim and Left-wing anti-Semitism, treating it as mere opposition to Israeli policy (the policy being Israeli survival) or as a ruse. Today’s example comes courtesy of the New York Times. Pro-Israel and pro-Jewish activists around the nation have been putting up posters of men, women, and children kidnapped by Hamas. And anti-Semites have been ripping them down. Pretty clear evidence of widespread anti-Semitism, no? Well, not according to the New York Times: Displaying the posters has become a form of activism, keeping the more than 200 hostages seized by Hamas in full view of the public. But removing the posters has quickly emerged as its own form of protest — a release valve and also a provocation by those anguished by what they say was the Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinians in the years before Oct. 7 and since the bombing of Gaza began. … The battle has inflamed already tense emotions. And it captures one of the most fervently debated questions of the war: Whose suffering should command public attention and sympathy? … In fact, the motivations of those removing signs take a variety of forms. And as unnerving as the removal of the posters has been for some Jews and supporters of Israel, at least some of the people tearing them down are Jewish themselves. Hamas and its allies are relying utterly on the legacy media both in America and in Europe to cover for them — and to provide political pressure on politicians to cut their support to Israel. That’s precisely why Hamas is planting civilians in harm’s way, to maximize the casualties for the cameras, to blame Israel. And the media blame along. We have to ask why. The answer is that the legacy media are salted with members of an international Left dedicated to the proposition that the West is itself fatally flawed and colonialist. All the college radicals grew up and went into journalism. They hire local partisan activists to “freelance” for them, including Hitler supporters to cover the Gaza Strip. They see their mission as the restoration of justice in the universe — justice, of course, meaning the destruction of the West’s power, in the name of the supposedly oppressed of the earth. If the legacy media get their way, the West will fall into disarray. So far, they’re succeeding admirably. Ben Shapiro Top five headlines: |
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