The Twisted Morality of NPR’s Reporting on Israel

The practitioners of moral equivalency see themselves as the brave protectors of human lives, as long as those human lives are not Israeli lives.

By Joseph Puder, FrontPage Magazine

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, provocatively firing rockets into Israeli cities aiming to kill civilians, are regularly equated by the left-leaning western media with Israel’s retaliation. Reasonable observers would consider Israel’s actions as self-defense. For elements in the international community, especially those in the liberal left who appoint themselves as “morality referees,” Palestinian terrorist action and Israel’s reaction constitutes moral equivalency. Similarly, Palestinian terrorists from Jenin, (in Northern Samaria or West Bank) seeking to be martyrs for the cause of Palestine and Shahids for the sake of Allah, earlier this month murdered Israeli civilians on their way to a wedding in Tel Aviv. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) elite troops provided with pinpoint intelligence, converged on the Jenin refugee camp where the Palestinian murderers came from to bring them to justice. The Palestinian terrorists opened fire at the approaching Israelis, and in the exchange of fire, the Palestinian terrorists were killed. Once again, the “morality referees” find “moral equivalency” in the actions that have occurred.

The mothers of the deceased Palestinian terrorists are proud of their terrorist sons’ deeds, and receive the honors of being Shahid mothers, as well as compensation from the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the form of a lifelong pension. The customary jubilation of mothers and families, when hearing of their sons’ deaths, reveal how deeply rooted in Islamic history the concept of “Martyrdom” or “Shahada” in Arabic, is. In a sermon to fellow Muslims from the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Mufti of the PA, Sheik Ikrima Sabri was recorded by the Voice of Palestine (May 25, 2001) as saying: “The Muslim loves death and martyrdom, just as you Jews love life. There is a great difference between he who loves the hereafter and he who loves this world. The Muslim loves death and he seeks martyrdom.” Contrast that with the grief Israeli mothers feel at the loss of a child. A life full of potential that was extinguished by a killer who did not care whom he murdered provided that the victim was a Jew.

National Public Radio (NPR) represents the liberal-left warped perception of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. On January 28, 2023, NPR reported that, “Younger Palestinians have grown up not knowing anything but Israel’s tough permit regime which controls Palestinians entry and movement, and some of their only interactions with Israelis are often hostile settlers, or occupation-enforcing soldiers, who often raid homes and jail people months without charges. Some young Palestinians see violent resistance against Israel as their only viable path to freedom, with young militants lionized on social media.”

NPR’s buzz words are laden with bias and distortion. NPR does not explain that the so-called “tough permit regime” is critical to prevent terrorist infiltration into Israel and murdering innocent civilians. In using the phrase “hostile settlers,” NPR not only revealed its bias, but it never established that Jews have as much legal right to settle on public lands in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) as Palestinians do. Or, that these young Palestinians regularly stone and kill Israelis on the roads, and infiltrate into Jewish “settlements”, killing innocent women and children. The “occupation enforcing soldiers,” is another NPR misnomer. The Palestinians have chosen the destruction of the Jewish state through terror, rather than peace and accommodation by negotiations with Israel. The so-called occupation is a result of the PA refusal to come to a final settlement with Israel as we have seen at the Camp David Summit in July 2000, when President Clinton hosted Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PA and Ehud Barak, Israel’s Prime Minister. Barak offered far-reaching concessions, which President Clinton endorsed. Arafat, unwilling to “end the conflict,” hastily departed and two months later launched the Second Intifada. In 2008, Israel’s PM Ehud Olmert proposed even more far-reaching concessions to Mahmoud Abbas, the PA chairman, and the latter likewise declined to settle for an agreement that would have created a Palestinian state. Apparently, he feared being assassinated by his people.

NPR asserted that Israelis “raid homes and jailed Palestinians for months without charges…” Once again, NPR does not clarify that those Palestinians raided and jailed are suspected terrorists, who planned to carry out terrorist attacks inside Israel, better described as “ticking bombs.” Another fact that NPR typically ignored is that “those young Palestinians” are killing Israelis inside Israel, as was the case earlier this month in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. Those “Palestinian young militants” as described by NPR are nothing but cold-blooded killers, and the proper name for them is terrorists, not militants.

In a Jerusalem Post opinion piece (February 27, 2023), Ardie Gelman asked in what universe is there a moral equivalency between ramming a vehicle into people standing at a bus stop and a young Palestinian losing his life in a crossfire with terrorists? To simplify it, the Palestinian rammer intentionally set out to kill two young religious Jewish boys aged 4 and 6 on the eve of the Sabbath, along with a young Yeshiva man who just got married. The young Palestinian was shot accidently without intent by either an Israeli soldier or a Palestinian sniper. How can one compare the two occurrences, but they do, it is called moral equivalency.

To the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Israel is always guilty regardless of the facts pertaining to a particular operation between Israel and the Palestinians. For the Biden administration and the EU elites, morality is judged by the number of casualties emanating from a particular military operation. If the Palestinians happened to suffer more casualties, that becomes the litmus test for morality. Yet, any respectable system judges all human conflicts by the offender’s intent and not necessarily the result of the actions taken place. The reality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Palestinian terror shows unmistakable intent to commit the crime of murder against Israeli-Jews. In the case of Palestinian terror moreover, there is more than theoretical intent, there are actual murders committed against innocent civilians.

Hamas and PIJ terrorists stopped from infiltrating into Israel through tunnels to commit wholesale slaughter of Israeli civilians are held on the same moral level as Israeli soldiers who prevent them from accomplishing their task. This is a twisted morality that is repeatedly being applied to Israel, and it is called moral equivalency. The practitioners of moral equivalency see themselves as the brave protectors of human lives, as long as those human lives are not Israeli lives. This sort of moral equivalency is clearly perverted morality.

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