News Outlets Shy Away From “Terrorists” To Describe Hamas
On Monday I wrote that if it weren’t for Elon Musk’s ownership of X - the platform formerly known as Twitter - we wouldn’t know what really happened last Saturday in Israel. The legacy media has been proven to be an unreliable, biased source of news over the past several years, dominated as it is by left-wing journalists.
Today it is citizen journalists, posting raw videos and eyewitness accounts of the depravity that is Hamas, that tell the real story. And they’re telling it on X. The legacy media can do nothing but play catch-up and blur the images, to protect the sensitivities of their viewers - and by extension, the terrorists - from the fury of decent people.
Oddly, it’s also Hamas terrorists themselves, brimming with pride over their butchery, who are posting their own videos to highlight their inhumanity. They, too, are a hideous source of information about what is happening in Israel.
If you want the unvarnished truth about this war you simply must go to the alternative media.
In his Monday podcast,“The Face of Absolute Evil,” Ben Shapiro warned his 6.4 million subscribers that he was about to show them raw footage of the carnage in Israel. Images so horrific they would be seared onto their eyelids.
“Look,” a visibly shaken Shapiro warned. “Do not look away. See what they have done.”
Many of us did just that. And what we saw was the stuff of nightmares.
Worse, it continues.
On Tuesday we saw images of tiny body bags outside a kibbutz. Bloody cribs. Footage of bleeding families being abducted. Reports are that 40 babies were slaughtered in one tiny community. Some of the infants were beheaded, an act so depraved that I can barely write it. There are images of terrified toddlers in dog crates.
An email from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC), a publicly funded news outlet, instructed journalists to avoid using the word “terrorist” in their coverage of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
“Do not refer to militants, soldiers, or anyone else as ‘terrorists,'” George Achi, the Director of Journalistic Standards with CBC News, told employees in an email sent midday Saturday. “The notion of terrorism remains highly politicized and is part of the story. Even when quoting/clipping a government or a source referring to fighters as ‘terrorists,’ we should add context to ensure the audience understands this opinion, not fact,” Achi explained in a note first obtained by the American organization StopAntisemtism.
Then there’s this from the BBC:
British politicians know perfectly well why the BBC avoids the word ‘terrorist’, and over the years plenty of them have privately agreed with it. Calling someone a terrorist means you’re taking sides and ceasing to treat the situation with due impartiality. The BBC’s job is to…
— John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) October 10, 2023
But those are foreign news sources, you say. Surely that isn’t happening in America.
I have bad news, Bambi. It happened here two years ago. The Associate Press Stylebook, the “bible of journalism,” which several years ago declared the terms “illegal alien” and “rioter” verboten, similarly doesn’t approve of the word “terrorist.”
AP generally avoids labeling someone a “terrorist” on its own, preferring to cite competent law enforcement officials or other credible authorities. Instead, we describe the specific actions we are reporting on and what we know about the perpetrators’ motives.
— APStylebook (@APStylebook) January 7, 2021
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Come to think of it, I agree that the word “terrorist” doesn’t adequately describe religious fanatics who would decapitate babies, rape their mothers and mutilate their fathers.
Barbarians is better. Although there really are no words.
