For those keeping track at home, here’s a quick rundown of how legacy media are referring to the killers sent into Israel by Islamist terror organization Hamas.
The overall picture is depressing: Despite their endless catastrophizing of everything from COVID to climate to pronoun usage and land acknowledgements, when an actual, real-life moral catastrophe arrives, our major press organs finds themselves at a complete loss.
The Times was using the word “militants” as late as Monday.
The BBC, hiding behind a fake veil of neutrality, refuses to use the word “terrorists.”
And that cowardly euphemistic approach has taken hold across the larger media landscape:
The Washington Post: militants.
The Los Angeles Times: militants.
The Boston Globe: fighters.
The Philadelphia Inquirer: militants.
The San Francisco Chronicle: militants.
USA Today: militants.
The Associated Press: militants.
Reuters: militants.
ABC: armed fighters.
CBS: militants.
NPR: militants. (That one your tax dollars helped pay for, America.)
These are crucial shapers of opinion, and all are toeing a disastrous line instead of loudly and proudly calling these monsters what they are.
Perhaps it’s out of woke delicacy: Can’t offend the feelings of the baby decapitators because they belong to a “marginalized group.”
Perhaps it comes from the same specious neutrality the BBC advocates.
(Didn’t progs declare journalistic neutrality verboten sometime in the summer of 2020, anyway?)
The upshot is that the American people are being fed genuine misinformation about the nature of the opponents Israel faces.
Utterly immoral opportunists who attack soft targets, murder the elderly and slaughter rave attendees aren’t fighters or soldiers or militants.
They’re murderers, purely and simply; “terrorists” is accurate, too.
And Israel’s restraint in responding — giving, for example, citizens of Gaza ample warning when airborne attacks are inbound, something unthinkable for Hamas — remains remarkable.
The media needs to tell the truth about Hamas.
Nothing more and nothing less.
