Friday, June 21, 2024

So, That's Why WaPo Refused to Disclose This Key Detail About Israel's Hostage Rescue

Matt Vespa reporting for Townhall 

It’s been a couple of weeks since Israeli forces launched a successful raid in Gaza that rescued four hostages taken by Hamas during the October 7 attacks last year. Normal people celebrated this operation, whereas the anti-Israel, antisemitic clowns were mourning the loss of the terrorists killed in the raid. 

That’s how you know the Left is messed up in the head on this matter: they were more upset over the dead captors and the rescue of those they held captive. The media coverage does play a part in that since newsrooms are staffed with woke left-wingers who hate Jewish people. That hateful pipeline can be traced back to the network of colleges that saw pro-Hamas shenanigans run amok last spring. 

Yet, The Washington Post’s June 8th article on the raid left out the crucial detail that the hostages were being detained in civilian housing, with so-called civilians holding them hostages. It’s why “civilians” isn’t the appropriate term for those who got wasted by the IDF. Still, the Washington Free Beacon found a possible reason why these facts were omitted: the publication is loaded with Al-Jazeera alums: 

Days after the Israel Defence Forces rescued four hostages from a Palestinian refugee camp, for example, a Post headline blared: "More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza." The report, the work of 11 Post staffers, went on to describe "one of the bloodiest raids in the war" as a "brazen operation" that left "unimaginable devastation in its wake." 

"Residential blocks were destroyed, tanks menaced the streets and grievously wounded Palestinians, some without limbs, writhed in pain on the dusty roads of the camp’s central market, according to videos and images of the raid," the report stated. The first quote in the story comes from a Hamas spokesman who accused Israel of committing "a massacre." An Israeli official is quoted in the seventh paragraph. 

What the piece did not mention is that the hostages were held by prominent Gazan civilians in crowded apartment buildings and that Hamas fighters opened fire on the hostages and Israeli soldiers during the operation, making civilian casualties virtually inevitable. 

Hostility to Israel has been a thread throughout the paper’s reporting. But there’s another pattern among reporters on the Post’s foreign desk. At least six members of the Post’s foreign desk previously wrote for Al Jazeera, the Doha-based news outlet bankrolled in part by the government of Qatar, which is now sheltering Hamas’s top leaders, a Washington Free Beacon review found. 

[…] 

The Al Jazeera-Washington Post pipeline raises ethical questions for an American newspaper that prides itself as a bulwark against threats to "democracy." Founded in 1996, Al Jazeera has been described by an Israeli court as an "intelligence and propaganda arm" for Hamas, and the outlet is banned from broadcasting in Israel, where officials alleged in February that Al Jazeera "journalist" Muhammed Wishah served as a commander in Hamas’s guided missile units. In the United States, the Justice Department ordered the network’s English language affiliate to register as a foreign agent of Qatar in 2020, though it has refused to do so. 

The Post did not respond to a request for comment. 

Well, there’s your reason, folks. We have terrorists peddling propaganda on the front pages of our newspapers, disseminating the same Hamas talking points and treating them as gospel—no shock—and being key figures in fanning the flames of the genocide narrative that is wholly manufactured by the media and left-wing activists.

Not that you would be shocked, but these folks have infested the media with anti-Israel drivel, which thankfully hasn't resonated beyond these unhinged circles.