Israel's 15 ceasefires

Palestinians broke each one. Former AP reporter says the media enables them.

Hamas-shielding AP inadvertently drew attention to the history of Israel’s ceasefires with Palestinians — pauses in a 76-year war. Palestinians use ceasefires to reload before breaking the truce by attacking Israel again. Israel reloads as well as it plans counterattacks.

AP has sided with the Palestinians for as long as I can remember. For over a decade, its bureau in Gaza City provided cover for Hamas — the latest name for Palestine’s terrorist army. Hamas governs Gaza. The continuing war against Israel has brought Shi’as (who back Hezbollah) together with Sunnis (Hamas) to fight a common enemy — Jews.

In 2021, Israel finally unveiled the ruse, called AP, gave them an hour to pack up and leave, and then destroyed the building. The warning sadly allowed Hamas terrorists to escape as well.

On May 21, 2021, the New York Post reported, “The Associated Press is taking heat for claiming it had no idea Hamas militants operated at the news agency’s Gaza headquarters destroyed by an Israeli airstrike — as US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said Monday he has seen no evidence presented by Israel of the group’s presence in the building.”

Blinken’s words reminded me of Curly saying, “Moe, Larry, I can’t see.” Asked why, he replied, “I got my eyes closed.”

AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt, at the time AP’s president and CEO, disavowed any knowledge of these actions.

The Post said, “But a 2014 article in The Atlantic written by a journalist in the region described a history between the news agency and Hamas and critics took to social media to cast doubt on Pruitt’s assertion.”

AP continues to shield Hamas and not very well. It did a fact-check on a tweet because pseudonymous twits are easier to hold accountable than Hamas terrorists.

AP’s fact-check said, “British newspaper headline about a ceasefire is old and not related to the latest Israel-Hamas war.”

Thank you, AP, for pointing out Israel gave the terrorists a ceasefire in 2006 — the 11th of the 15 ceasefires Israel has granted since 1949 after its two-year battle with the Arab League. Palestinians have broken each one.

But AP continues to side with Hamas and mislead. The one-time respectable news agency said, “Since Israel’s latest war with the Palestinian group Hamas began in early October, Israeli soldiers and Hezbollah militants have traded fire across the Lebanon-Israel border.”

Israel did not start this war. Palestinians did by attacking Israelis on October 7.

Every single target was civilian. Terrorists even attacked a Rave for Peace as Palestinians raped women, tortured the elderly, beheading babies and burning people. The violations of international law make every single member of Hamas liable and its leader war criminals.

But leave it to Barack Hussein Obama to side with the war criminals. He said, “Put yourself in their shoes — look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day.”

But Gaza is a Palestinian state. Israel gave it to them. They are autonomous. They choose a terrorist war against Israel.

Ed Morrissey reported, “Gaza was not occupied and hasn’t been since 2005. Israel and Egypt have sealed its border, but that took place after Hamas won the election in Gaza in 2006 and then defeated Fatah in a quick civil war to seize all power. The border got sealed in order to prevent Hamas from committing acts of war and receiving arms from abroad, while at the same time receiving billions of dollars in aid and water and power from the Israelis.”

There is no rationale — no excuse — no justification for the war crimes of Palestinians but anti-Semites like Obama toss their word salads peppered with words like genocide and colonialism.

Hamas has built 300 miles of tunnels to shield Hamas. Palestinians store ammunition under schools and hospitals to maximize the damage should Israel attack the military targets that civilians shield.

When a Hamas missile hit a hospital parking lot in Gaza, the AP and other English-speaking media immediately blamed Israel for destroying the hospital — even though the hospital was unharmed and Palestinians struck the parking lot.

But as Matti Friedman, a former AP reporter, said, the press always gets it wrong in favor of the Palestinians. Remember that 2014 article the New York Post cited? Friedman wrote it.

Friedman said, “During the Gaza war this summer, it became clear that one of the most important aspects of the media-saturated conflict between Jews and Arabs is also the least covered: the press itself. The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it, a role with consequences for the millions of people trying to comprehend current events, including policymakers who depend on journalistic accounts to understand a region where they consistently seek, and fail, to productively intervene.

“An essay I wrote for Tablet on this topic in the aftermath of the war sparked intense interest. In the article, based on my experiences between 2006 and 2011 as a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news organizations, I pointed out the existence of a problem and discussed it in broad terms.

“Using staffing numbers, I illustrated the disproportionate media attention devoted to this conflict relative to other stories, and gave examples of editorial decisions that appeared to be driven by ideological considerations rather than journalistic ones. I suggested that the cumulative effect has been to create a grossly oversimplified story — a kind of modern morality play in which the Jews of Israel are displayed more than any other people on earth as examples of moral failure. This is a thought pattern with deep roots in Western civilization.”

That thought pattern is suicidal because if Hamas and Hezbollah ever eradicate the Jews, they will turn on other infidels, which include believers of every other religion (including atheist liberals) and their Muslim friends.

I suggest homosexuals look up the word defenestration because Palestinians practice it on gays. Leveling Gaza will help gays by destroying the tall buildings.

AP shielding Hamas is not without precedent among Western journalists. CNN refused to report atrocities by Saddam Hussein when it bragged about having the only Western bureau in Baghdad before the 2003 war to remove him from power. That is how AP operated in Gaza City.

Friedman said, “When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.)

“Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.)

“Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)”

In this war, AP stopped reporting the Palestinian atrocities on October 7 as it now reports only unverified claims by Palestinians

For example, AP reported, “U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken took his diplomatic push on the Israel-Hamas war to the occupied West Bank on Sunday, trying to assure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that the Biden administration was intensifying efforts to ease the plight of Gaza's civilians and insisting that Palestinians must have a main say in whatever comes next for the territory after the conflict.”

Notice it is not called the Israel-Palestine War or Israel-Gaza War. Instead, AP uses the name for the Gaza terrorist army. Why not call it the IDF-Hamas War then?

After Palestinians have broken 15 ceasefires, AP and other propaganda outlets are demanding a 16th ceasefire.

AP doesn’t ride a horse but if it rode in on one, I’d say him too.