Key details omitted from a video unfairly prejudice Vice’s viewers against Israel. This was not the first time that the channel has shown bias towards the Jewish state.
Vice News recently posted a video purporting to “uncover the tragic human consequences of the Israel-Palestine conflict through the death of Ahmed al-Mansi.”
Mansi was killed in an IDF airstrike on Gaza on May 14 during Operation Guardian of the Walls.
The video intersperses home footage of Mansi with his children and cell phone videos of Gaza life during the 11-day war.
But Vice omitted key information about Mansi. He was a Hamas operative and a lieutenant in Gaza’s dreaded internal security services. Two other people were killed in the airstrike — Mansi’s brother Yousef and Ahmed Muhammad Abd al-Aziz Sabah, also Hamas operatives. Hamas confirmed as much on one its websites.
All that viewers are told comes from the text on screen saying, “Ahmad Al-Manis, the father of Hala, Sarah, and Malek, was killed by an IDF strike on May 14. His brother Youssef also died in the blast.”
That would be like describing Robert Bowers — currently on trial for killing 11 Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue — as a deliveryman and computer fix-it guy without a whiff of reference to his extensive white supremacist social media activity. It’s an omission that unfairly prejudices Vice’s viewers against Israel.
That day, Israel carried out dozens of strikes on rocket-launching sites, observation sites, a terror cell preparing to fire an anti-tank rocket across the border into Israel, and the homes of several senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad figures.
Honest Reporting critiqued other aspects of the disturbing Vice video.
Demand Vice News correct the video to reflect al-Mansi’s Hamas ties.
Email Vice News editor in chief Michael Learmonth: michael.learmonth@vice.com
