Quite a few members of the army of pro-Palestinian anti-Israel propagandists have tried to convince us that just as the brave and resourceful Ukrainians are resisting Russian aggressors, so are the brave and resourceful Palestinians putting up “resistance” against their Israeli oppressors. A report on this latest preposterousness is here: “Reality Check, AP: Palestinian Terrorists Don’t Do ‘the Same Thing’ as Ukrainians Resisting Russia,” by Akiva Van Koningsveld, Algemeiner, March 31, 2022:
Following in the footsteps of Mehdi Hasan and publications including The Nation, the Associated Press (AP) wire service this week became the latest to lend credence to false analogies between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.
In a March 29 article entitled “Many in Mideast see hypocrisy in Western embrace of Ukraine,” AP writer Joseph Krauss claims that “the world has cheered Ukrainians as they stockpile Molotov cocktails and take up arms against an occupying army,” while Palestinians are branded “terrorists and legitimate targets.”
The Ukrainians, both the regular soldiers, and the many civilians — men between the ages of 18 and 60 — who are now part of Ukraine’s army, have used Molotov cocktails against Russian soldiers and tanks, never against Russian civilians.The Palestinians, by contrast, routinely throw their Molotov cocktails at Israeli civilians. as well as at soldiers guarding the security fence.
Although Krauss acknowledges that there are “important differences between the war in Ukraine — a clear case of one UN-member state invading another — and the conflicts in the Middle East, which often involve civil war and Islamic extremism,” the piece nonetheless perpetuates a narrative that paints Palestinian attacks against innocent Israelis as “resistance.”
And that’s just one of the problems with the article.
When Palestinians stab or shoot, or ram vehicles into Israeli civilians, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a Sbarro’s Pizzeria because there were sure to be “lots of mothers and children,” or murders 30 elderly Israelis at a Passover seder, when they kill rabbis, mothers, young people, when they run down a cyclist and kill him, and in eight days this March murdered 11 Israelis at Beersheva, Hadera, and Bnei Brak, this is not a “resistance” movement, as they claim, but a campaign of murder conducted by terrorists wantonly attacking helpless civilians. And then the Palestinians subsidize imprisoned terrorists, or the families of dead terrorists, with generous payments, which reward past and incentivize future terrorists. .
The AP article asserts that Ukrainians and Palestinians “do the same thing” when they throw Molotov cocktails. But moral equivalences between the plight of the Ukrainian people under attack by Russia and Palestinians attacking Israelis are not grounded in facts.
According to official Israel Security Agency (ISA) data, Palestinian terrorists in February 2022 alone carried out at least 136 attacks on Israelis using Molotov cocktails. The ISA furthermore recorded 29 attacks involving pipe bombs, 14 attacks with firearms, and many instances of arson and stone-throwing….
Does any of that murder and mayhem by the Palestinians, directed overwhelmingly at Israeli civilians, look anything like what the Ukrainians have been doing as they go out to confront Russian tanks, or to shoot down Russian missiles, helicopters, drones, planes, or to take the battle directly to the Russian conscripts whom they have driven from the outskirts of Kyiv and other cities?
The AP attempts to equate private businesses choosing to no longer do business with Russia — in many cases temporarily and aimed at stopping the “needless human suffering unfolding in Ukraine” — with BDS, which seeks to put an end to Israel’s existence as the world’s only Jewish state….
Comment:
Western firms that have pulled out of Russia – temporarily — are not trying to destroy either Russia or the Russian people. They merely want to pressure Putin to stop his war machine in Ukraine.
Do you think the AP will do the handsome thing, and admit that it has been wrong in its grotesque suggestion that the Palestinians are akin to the Ukrainians, while Israel is like Russia? The AP could send out to its thousands of media subscribers a lengthy piece detailing all the ways the Ukrainian war of self-defense against Russian aggression, carried out only against soldiers, differs from the Palestinians’ relentless war, employing terrorist tactics, against Israeli men, women, and children, a war that is not being fought, as the war in Ukraine is, to “resist” an aggressor, but rather, to end the very existence of the Jewish state.
Istvan Vogel says
I realise it was the Muslims and Palestinians who arrived first in Jerusalem. Then Solomon arrived and demolished the Mosques and took the Muslim gravestones from their cemetaries, smashed them up and build roads with them. History is so complicated and riddled with apartheid, racism, and anti kuffar feelings.
Wellington says
Fine sarcasm (I hope).
somehistory says
they were known by another name then, and King David had a large hand in running them out of Jerusalem…previously known as Salem where Melchizedek had been a Priest and King.
mozlums need to produce some of the things they claim to have invented to show that they were in the Land of Israel before the Jews. Lots of pottery, writings on rings and things, show that the Jews were there long, long before this century, but where did the mozlums put their stuff?
It’s a known fact that mozlums don’t want any digging done in and around Jerusalem because of what would be found….none of it would prove they were there first.
and you are right…history is complicated to those who try to hide the truth of it.
gravenimage says
Sarcasm?
Kenneth J Johnson says
I always thught the reporters and the rest of the newspaper industry was intelligent, but it appéars that I am mistaken?? Ken
Wellington says
Journalists of old like Mencken and DeFrank, Murrow too, even Huntley and Brinkley, et al. were intelligent, knew a lot, and at least most of the time strived for objectivity. Well, those days in the journalism business are over and now with the MSM we have nothing more than a de facto arm of the present decrepit Democratic Party.
Sad. But then so much else in our age is sad. As other examples, the destruction of education, from kindergarten through graduate school, and the implosion of the Democratic Party of the USA from within—and with RINOs aplenty like Collins, Murkowski, Cheney, Kinzinger and Romney “contributing” to the overall destruction upon the body politic of America and which the likes of Democrats such as Biden, Harris, Blinken, Pelosi, Schumer, et al. are continuing to engage in for no sound purpose and yet for many ill purposes.
It’s madness all around. Massive stupidity and ignorance too. Best to work with these “assumptions” and proceed accordingly, that is if one is really interested in where the truth of matters ultimately lie.
James Lincoln says
Wellington says,
“…those days in the journalism business are over and now with the MSM we have nothing more than a de facto arm of the present decrepit Democratic Party.”
Yes.
I’m not sure of the exact “instant” when it happened – but it happened.
Decades ago, I would try to keep up with local/national/international news with the following:
Two decent (at the time) local newspapers.
USA Today.
Wall Street Journal.
NBC local news / national news.
Weekly trips to the library for:
Time/Newsweek/U.S. News & World Report.
Barron’s.
A smattering of any other periodicals that I may have missed.
I actually felt fairly well-informed at the time. Now, all of the above newsfeeds are compromised.
gravenimage says
Ken, this is not honest stupidity–this is deliberate politically-motivated falsehood.
gary fouse says
Some would liken AP to Pravda.
gravenimage says
AP Likens Palestinians to Ukraine, Israel to Russia
…………..
Predictable, but ludicrous and utterly false.
Lorensacho says
The whole problem with the media is that their rules call for balance that in the case of Israel and Palestinians has resulted in the creation d a moral equivalence where none exists. The Palestinians don’t want peace, they want Israel to be destroyed. Nothing like that is reflected in Israel’s policies.