Article by Robert Spencer in PJMedia
Can the Hamas-Linked AP Any Longer Be Considered a News Source?
The Associated Press (AP) is one of the largest, most respected, most venerable news sources on the planet. It is also increasingly clear that the AP, in these overheated days, has reduced itself to acting as a press agency for Hamas. This tendency has become so pronounced recently that among all the massively biased far-Left propaganda outfits that make up the establishment media, the AP has essentially disqualified itself from being regarded any longer as even close to being a reliable source for news.
The first indication that the AP had run off the rails came during the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, when Israeli forces bombed a building in Gaza that housed a Hamas operations base and an AP office. The AP protested, claiming that it had no idea, none whatsoever, that it was sharing a building with Hamas, and this organization of intrepid journalists was put into the embarrassing position of having to be informed by Israel’s Ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, about the operations of Hamas right under their noses.
But it’s almost certain that they knew already, and said nothing about Hamas’ presence in their building because of sympathy with the jihad terror organization and a shared antipathy to Israel. This became clear again on July 13, when the AP ran a tear-jerker entitled “Israel bars jailed Palestinian from daughter’s funeral,” claiming: “Israel refused to let a prominent jailed Palestinian lawmaker attend her daughter’s funeral on Tuesday, despite a campaign by activists and human rights groups for her to be released on humanitarian grounds.”
Those terrible Israelis! And it gets even worse. According to the AP article, the “jailed lawmaker” was “Khalida Jarrar, 58, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” who “has been in and out of Israeli prison in recent years. A military court sentenced her to two years in March for being a member of an outlawed group. With time served, she is set to be released in October.” Her late daughter Suha “worked on issues related to gender and climate change for the Al-Haq human rights group.”
Suha “worked on issues related to gender and climate change”! Why, she was a saint on earth, and the evil Israelis wouldn’t even let her bereaved mother pay her respects! However, the AP left out a few telling details. According to Gidon Ben-zvi in Algemeiner, Suha Jarrar worked for the same terrorist organization of which her mother was a member: “Suha Jarrar worked for al-Haq, a highly controversial organization with ties to the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP], of which her mother was a member. Al-Haq has asserted that terrorists have a ‘right’ to receive salaries from the Palestinian Authority.”
Ben-zvi also notes “the vagueness of the Associated Press headline: Israel bars jailed Palestinian from daughter’s funeral. While the AP thereafter refers to her as a ‘Palestinian lawmaker,’ it fails to note Jarrar’s history of using her status as a former legislator to cover up her involvement in various illegal activities. Moreover, it is simply bizarre for the AP to open its coverage of Jarrar by referring to her as a ‘lawmaker.’ After all, the Palestinian Legislative Council in which she served has essentially been defunct since 2007 — after the Hamas terrorist group ousted the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority from the Gaza Strip — and was officially dissolved in 2018.”
Yes, but “Palestinian lawmaker” suits the AP’s purposes better than the more accurate label, “Palestinian terrorist,” and that’s what Khalida Jarrar is. States Ben-zvi: “She is a convicted terrorist responsible for, among other attacks, the murder of a 17-year-old Israeli girl. In 2019, Jarrar was again arrested in the wake of a PFLP-directed terror attack that killed Rina Shnerb near the West Bank Jewish community of Dolev. The Shin Bet security agency specifically identified Jarrar as head of a 50-strong terrorist cell that carried out the murder.”
So Israel wouldn’t let a terrorist murderer out of prison to attend the funeral of her terrorist daughter, and the AP makes this about Israel being cruel and heartless. And wait, there’s more: JNS reported Thursday that the AP just published a photoessay, “War’s trauma apparent in portraits of Gazan children,” that is “egregiously partisan and defamatory.”
What a surprise! The AP story depicts Israel “as being virtually solely responsible for the children’s trauma, all but ignoring Hamas’s role in the tragedies,” and provides “no indication whatsoever that Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza fire at Israel from densely populated neighborhoods. Hamas also stores weaponry among civilians and houses its command offices in residential areas, a fact acknowledged by Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.” The AP cites “precision-guided Israeli bombs” while “ignoring the Hamas sites that Israel was targeting when some of these children were killed,” thereby implying that Israel targeted the children. AP also failed to acknowledge that many children in Gaza were killed by misfired Hamas rockets, and that some of the “children” killed in Israeli airstrikes were actually members of jihad terror groups.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. And three times? Anyone who cites the AP should henceforth refer to this thoroughly corrupt and compromised “news” agency as “Hamas-linked AP,” in the interests of the journalistic accuracy that AP itself has abandoned.
