AP Covered Up Hamas Attacks on its Own Reporters

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Another tidbit from Mattie Friedman’s Atlantic piece on Israel and the media.

Most consumers of the Israel story don’t understand how the story is manufactured. But Hamas does. Since assuming power in Gaza in 2007, the Islamic Resistance Movement has come to understand that many reporters are committed to a narrative wherein Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians passive victims with reasonable goals, and are uninterested in contradictory information. Recognizing this, certain Hamas spokesmen have taken to confiding to Western journalists, including some I know personally, that the group is in fact a secretly pragmatic outfit with bellicose rhetoric, and journalists—eager to believe the confession, and sometimes unwilling to credit locals with the smarts necessary to deceive them—have taken it as a scoop instead of as spin.

We read these stories all the time. The moderate wing of Hamas, of the Taliban, of Al Qaeda and we wonder how reporters can fall for it.

This is how.

During my time at the AP, we helped Hamas get this point across with a school of reporting that might be classified as “Surprising Signs of Moderation” (a direct precursor to the “Muslim Brotherhood Is Actually Liberal” school that enjoyed a brief vogue in Egypt). In one of my favorite stories, “More Tolerant Hamas” (December 11, 2011), reporters quoted a Hamas spokesman informing readers that the movement’s policy was that “we are not going to dictate anything to anyone,” and another Hamas leader saying the movement had “learned it needs to be more tolerant of others.” Around the same time, I was informed by the bureau’s senior editors that our Palestinian reporter in Gaza couldn’t possibly provide critical coverage of Hamas because doing so would put him in danger.

Sadly the more “tolerant” Hamas apparently couldn’t protect him from Hamas.

The press could be trusted to play its role in the Hamas script, instead of reporting that there was such a script. Hamas strategy did not exist, according to Hamas—or, as reporters would say, was “not the story.” There was no Hamas charter blaming Jews for centuries of perfidy, or calling for their murder; this was not the story. The rockets falling on Israeli cities were quite harmless; they were not the story either.

And this is the central problem with the media. It’s not just that the media is biased against us. That’s a symptom. It’s that it’s corrupt as an institution because rather than reporting, it decides what the story is and tell it its way.

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.)

So much for the tolerant moderate Hamas.

 

  • truepeers

    It’s not complicated: the essence of antisemitism is that the Jews are responsible for everything, the other guys not.

    • DaveGinOly

      Mmmmm. Everybody else is responsible – “I” or “we” are not. Other people are to blame for everything that “I” or “we” do. “I” or “we” are innocent. Where have I heard this before?

      • truepeers

        If you think i don’t hold Jews responsible for sins, you are wrong. My argument is against thinking in which only one party is always responsible, or not.

  • Hi there

    As a child, I would read the newspapers and wonder about the letters AP on bottom of many articles. I asked my mom about it, and she told me it stood for a news agency, Associated Press.
    I still wondered where they got their name from, associated with what, with whom?
    Now my question is resolved. They are associated with progressive narrative, wherever that may take them, regardless of the risks to themselves, and no matter if they are bopped over the head for it.

  • Bamaguje

    Daniel you are absolutely right.
    The lamestream media is indeed totally corrupt.
    They not interested in the truth, only in pushing their bogus politically correct narrative.
    We see the same the nonsense in Ferguson… where despite abundance of evidence otherwise, we are being force fed with the utterly false narrative it’s all about a racist White cop gunning down an “unarmed Black teenager” without provocation.

  • http://gerardjackson.com/ gerard jackson

    What media? You would have to be completely delusional to believe that that bunch of lying hacks were ever real journalists.

  • Texas Patriot

    Coupled with the Massacre of Innocents at Mosul in the Summer of 2014, threatening Western reporters against reporting the truth is probably the beginning of the end of Stealth Jihad in the West.

    • Infidel4Ever

      I don’t think so. MSM “journalists” are all about protecting the narrative. Look at the way the Obama regime intimidates and manipulates them. No matter what they do or how badly they treat reporters, the MSM is ready, willing and able to keep licking their boots. These lapdogs will never change their tune. The narrative is above the truth to them.

      • Texas Patriot

        I understand what you are saying, but I think there is a limit to which MSM journalists will permit political narrative to override truth, and I think we are very close to reaching that point if we haven’t already reached it. With the HD video beheading of two journalists, ISIS may have crossed the line to the point that even the most doctrinaire political journalist will now have a hard time maintaining the narrative that Islam is a Religion of Peace.

  • Elizabeth capecod

    I think part of this silence stems from fear that hamas will make it impossible for ap reporters to report on the conflict at all unless they play by hamas’ rules….if you can call that reporting.
    So it is clear that ap reporters have sold their souls for a byline.

    • Bamaguje

      The problem is not so much that Hamas coerces journalists, but that most of “journalists” already subscribe to the anti-Israel pro-Palestinian narrative, and therefore willingly play along.
      If they are really committed to the truth, nothing stops them from gathering info, photos and footage while in Gaza/West bank, then tell the truth when they out.

  • MattBracken

    The mainstream media is a joke, it’s just part of the Team Obama spin machine. AP = American Pravda.

  • Gee

    I can actually name one moderate Imam – but of course the media ignores him. Abdul Hadi Palazzi. He is the secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly, and the Khalifah for Europe of the Qadiri Sufi Order.

    Of course the rest of the Muslim world wants him dead

  • Infidel4Ever

    The AP has been a joke for a while. Typical liberal “journalists”, the truth is never as important as the narrative they’re pushing. Look at Ferguson. ‘Nuff said. Liars.

  • DavidG

    Just more long winded excuses while ignoring all of the physically staged propaganda the BBC, Reuters and others having been doing for many decades past. I’m betting Danial is a Commie Jewish American punk and hangs with this Blue Blood rag and the uber J street crowd. So let’s look him up on discoverthe networks.org and Wikipedia…