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I usually don’t like it when I hear people gripe about the bias that foreign media has against Israel in their coverage.

The people who do that sound like broken records. And they always repeat the same refrain to other people who already feel the same way anyway.

I do agree that there is a definite anti-Israel bias in the foreign press, but not to the same extent that others do. I acknowledge that they give far too much deference to the Arabs while ignoring a lot of terrorism committed against Jews. But people should stop talking like the news networks should spend an hour giving a full history lesson on the conflict before every report.

But sometimes a story is so egregiously covered that it really gets me mad. The coverage of the recent abduction and murder of three Israeli teens is such a time.

Not only did the foreign media basically ignore the whole story for the three weeks while the search was under way for the boys, but it barely covered it when Israeli authorities announced the discovery their bodies last Monday. Not only that, but it went into the usual attempts to find some sort of moral parity between the murders and how the local Arabs are treated.

“Oh yes this is wrong, but isn’t Israel overreacting again?”

“How does Israel expect the Arabs to react when it engages in such overreactions and collective punishments?”

“There must be an end to the cycle of violence!”

And so on and so forth.

When the search was still being conducted and the Israeli families were still holding out hope that the boys might still be alive the foreign reports all centered on the poor Palestinians who always seem to get caught in the middle of the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Why should they have to suffer? Don’t the Israelis know that their actions are only going to cause more terrorism?

By the way, those boys were murdered just after they were abducted. The murderers hid the bodies because they knew that the longer it took for Israel to discover them, then the longer they would be able to cause the country to be turned upside down in a search. They also wanted the boys’ families to suffer as much as possible.

Also, I haven’t seen any coverage of the fact that one of the terrorist murderers who Israel released earlier this year after John Kerry twisted Netanyahu’s arm to do so just to get Abu Mazen to agree to come to the table for talks murdered more people on Pesach this year.

After the bodies were found someone murdered an Arab teen from East Jerusalem. He may have been burned alive.

Now the Israeli police have detained six suspects on suspicion of that murder and are saying that the people in custody are known to be right wing extremists. It took only days for that to happen. I guess they were repaying the favor that the Palestinian Authority did us in helping us swiftly find and capture the murderers of the three Israeli teens.

Oh wait, that’s right, the PA has given us no help at all.

But before the arrests and without any proof whatsoever that the boy was killed in retaliation for the murder of the three Israeli teens the Arabs started a riot and attacked Israeli police. They threw stones at cars and attacked Israeli motorists. They also destroyed stops on the line for Jerusalem’s new light rail.

This, of course, has been given nonstop coverage on all of the foreign news channels. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean if a group of people go around rioting and attacking people then they obviously must have a good reason for it. Right?

Obviously they are just expressing their frustration at living under the Israeli occupation. Right!

Which explains why Israeli Arabs in the Galilee also rioted. After all, all of Israel. Including what lies within the pre-1967 borders, is Occupied Palestine.

Clearly this is all Israel’s fault for even existing!

Yesterday’s Huffington Post led with a major headline about the boy’s murder. They of course did not do the same thing about the three Israeli kids.

This murder was just one act. Did Israelis everywhere go on a rampage against Arabs and attack them and throw stones at their cars as even the Israeli Arabs in the galilee did all last week to Jews? No! Of course not!

But maybe they should have so that the kidnapping would have gotten some attention. Oh no wait. The press would have depicted that as Jews beating up on poor defenseless Arabs.

When Baruch Goldstein murdered 35 Arabs in Hevron in 1994, what was the reaction of the Israeli government?

It banned the extreme right wing groups that followed the racist rantings of Meir Kahane and even rounded up hundreds of their supporters and detained them in jail without any court hearing for months.

What was the response of the leaders of the Palestinian Authority to the Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups for acts of terrorism committed against Israelis?

I’m still waiting to find out.

Now for all of you people out there who might be thinking of posting comments criticizing me for being too right wing or for not being concerned enough about the suffering of the Arabs. For those of you who might be thinking of posting a comment in which you try to explain that while the murder of the Israelis was horrible, it was the act of a minority who don’t want peace, whereas, Israel’s government is guilty itself of committing acts of state sponsored terrorism against the Arabs, Don’t bother!

It’s time that you people just wake up to the simple truth that most Israelis did years ago. The other side doesn’t want peace with us. They want us to cease to exist.

Even if polls show that most Israelis may believe that we should withdraw from the West Bank, it does not mean that they believe that this will bring peace. Just look what we got when we withdrew unilaterally from Gaza.

If you do go ahead and post such comments then know this. Even if you think that you are being anonymous, I have a new app that lets me find you wherever you are in the world and with the push of a button on my phone I can send an electric shock to a certain private part of your anatomy.

About the author

Gil

Gil Tanenbaum made aliyah from New York after he completed college. He Has lived in Israel for over 20 years. He has an MBA from Bar Ilan University and is a contributor for various blogs.

3 Comments

  • Several times a day I would visit Jewlicious.com over the past seven days, waiting to see if someone on the ground in Israel would post a story on this issue. I am happy that Gil has.

    All weekend I listened to NPR and the BBC, and I was just appalled at the lead stories and in-depth focus on the horrendous grisly murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, and then the slight mention at the ends of the packages of the kidnapping and murders of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel. I am not focused on tit for tat in coverage, but I agree that the intnl media is quite blatantly on to the newest story and the news cycle moves on.

  • Right on, Gil! Good for you for telling it like it is, namely, that the Palestinians don’t want peace; it’s right there in the PLO Charter for anyone who cares to read it. Has been for quite some time, for that matter.

  • The bias is clear, nothing new as you say. I expect it to get worse before it gets better. Messiah Himself will return and set things right. I look forward to that day as a Messianic believer. I pray for the peace of Israel. Shalom