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This page parses the content of the narrative script of SaveTheWest video, “The Huffington Post’s Anti-Semitic Bias and Incitement During the Third Intifada,” and provides source links to all key assertions and media items cited.
Title: “The Huffington Post’s Anti-Semitic Bias and Incitement During the Third Intifada”
[VIDEO EMBED HERE]
Contents:
(2) Four examples of HuffPost’s anti-Semitic bias during the Third Intifada
(4) Do HuffPost’s acts and omissions constitute anti-Semitism?
(5) Our inquiry to HuffPost – and its response
(1) Overview of this video
(1.1) About the Huffington Post
(1.2) Previous allegations of an anti-Semitic bias at HuffPost
(1.3) Our investigation: Documenting HuffPost’s coverage of the Third Intifada
(1.4) The results of our investigation
(1.5) Methodology
(1.1) About the Huffington Post
The Huffington Post, or ‘HuffPost,’ claims it has “nearly 130 million unique visitors each month,” making it “the largest news site in the U.S.” And according to data aggregation site eBizMBA, with its thirteen international editions, HuffPost is now the #1 most-popular political website in the world. HuffPost is owned by AOL, which in turn is owned by Verizon.
HuffPost claims on its banner that its first mission is to “inform” its readers.
According to HuffPost’s namesake, President and Editor-in-Chief, Arianna Huffington, this means “informing” readers in an objective, nonpartisan and fearless way:
“[T]oo many reporters have forgotten that the highest calling of journalists is to ferret out the truth, consequences be damned.” (source)
“The editorial stance of the Huffington Post is to debunk the right-left way of thinking, which has become completely obsolete.” (source)
“[HuffPost is] increasingly seen … as an Internet newspaper, not positioned ideologically in terms of how we cover the news.” (source)
AOL, HuffPost’s parent company, tells prospective advertisers that (screencap):
“Huffington Post is… the new model for media organizations.”
HuffPost’s next objective, according to Huffington, is to become “the dominant global media company in video,” specifically “long-form documentaries and original series.”
(1.2) Previous allegations of an anti-Semitic bias at HuffPost by respected watchdogs
Contrary to its claims of objectivity and professionalism, a number of respected Jewish watchdog organizations have accused HuffPost of being biased, particularly regarding news concerning Israel:
The Simon Weisenthal Center has blasted HuffPost for “taking the art of lying to new depths” about Israel’s defensive actions against Hamas…
… and for its false depiction of Israel as a malevolent aggressor:
Background: Don’t Be Fooled. Hezbollah Is Bigger and Badder Than Ever, Shai Oseran and Stéphane Cohen, TheTower.org, March 2014; Israel takes Hezbollah threats seriously, by Ben Caspit, Al-Monitor.com, March 26, 2015.
On two separate occasions, the Anti-Defamation League slammed HuffPost’s bias as “outrageous”:
And the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or CAMERA, exposed and corrected what it claims were more than twelve “misleading and false” allegations that HuffPost made in one article, regarding Israel’s efforts to defend itself from Palestinian terrorism:
Several independent blogs, Huffington Post Monitor and Huff-Watch, have also documented what they claim to be endemic anti-Semitic bias at HuffPost.
(1.3) Our investigation: Documenting HuffPost’s coverage of the Third Intifada
Given HuffPost’s unrivaled size and influence in online news, we at SaveTheWest.com decided to investigate this alleged bias, by closely monitoring how it covered the Fall 2015 wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Jews, also known as the “Third Intifada.”
[To learn more about this most recent wave of Palestinian terrorism (intifada), please see: Israeli–Palestinian conflict (2015), Wikipedia; Palestinians: The Real Goal of the Intifada, The Gatestone Institute; The Hidden Hand behind the Palestinian Terror Wave, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; Ready or Not, the Third Intifada May Be Here, by Adam Chandler, The Atlantic, October 7, 2015.]
Our investigation was conducted from September 13 through November 30, 2015, during which Palestinians terrorists perpetrated 105 attacks against Jews in Israel. This included 30 shootings, 22 car rammings, 82 stabbings, 651 firebomb attacks and more than 1,500 rock-throwing incidents.
The result of this reign of Palestinian terror – averaging more than one attack per day – was that 22 Jews were murdered and 215 were wounded, 21 of them seriously.
(1.4) The results of our investigation
Our investigation revealed four key facts:
(1) Of the 105 Palestinian terror attacks on Jews between September 13 – November 30, 2015, HuffPost ignored 94 of them, meaning they never appeared on either its front page or World page, its two highest-traffic pages that deal with international news.
Source: Chronology of Palestinian attacks during the Third Intifada
(2) Of the 11 Palestinian terrorist attacks that HuffPost did report – all of which were wire service reports from the AP or Reuters – in 9 cases it manipulated the provided headlines and/or associated imagery in the following ways:
(a) It rewrote the headlines to (1) remove the distinction between Palestinian terrorist(s) and Jewish victim(s), at best (eg “violence,” “unrest” occurring in the area) – and at worst, to (2) falsely imply that Israel was the aggressor (example) – and accuse Jews of racism.
(b) It inserted pictures only of Palestinians, often in sympathetic situations, into the headlines of these stories – stories of murderous Palestinian attacks on Jews. For example, at right is a wire story that HuffPost published about two Palestinian terrorists who attempted to murder eight Israeli soldiers by ramming them with cars. Yet rather than matching the story with a picture of any of the victims, or the crime scene, HuffPost sought out and inserted into the headline an unrelated photo of raging Palestinians with the corpse of one of their terrorists.
These nine case of manipulation, along with the two instances in which HuffPost presented reasonably accurate headlines and headline images, are documented on this web page:
Examples of HuffPost’s headline manipulation during the Third Intifada
(3) The only sympathetic personal images and stories that HuffPost inserted into these stories were of Palestinian rioters, terrorists or their grieving loved ones. The lone exception was of a picture of the face of an African migrant who was mistakenly identified as a terrorist during a Palestinian attack. We found not a single image of, or story about the Jewish victims of the Third Intifada – including three Americans who were murdered by Palestinian terrorists – or their funerals, or their grieving loved ones.
(4) At the same time that HuffPost was ignoring these murdered and maimed Jews, it gave sympathetic, picture-rich coverage on its front page to stories of abused animals, sad celebrities, and an array of freakish, nonsensical “news” items. For example: HuffPost completely ignored the story of a Jewish father and son who were murdered by Palestinian terrorists on November 13 – but wrote and published on the following days an original story on its front page about a sad three-eared cat in England (at right).
(5) Atop this foundation of whitewashing and denial, HuffPost gave top, sustained coverage to editorials that legitimized the Palestinian narrative, and their terrorist attacks against Jews.
The documentation to support our contentions is found on this page* at SaveTheWest.com, which presents the entire script of this video, and provides the source evidence upon which each allegation is based.
(* this page’s URL)
(1.5) Methodology
The primary methodology by which we determined what appeared on HuffPost’s front page and World page each day during the Third Intifada – and what was left absent – was to take full-page screen captures of these pages at least once a day, but most often, twice a day (sample below). We also took full-page screencaps of important individual story pages.
We then correlated all this data to news items that appeared in various print and online publications in the U.S. Israel and elsewhere.
[Scroll various full-page screencaps.]
(2) Four examples of HuffPost’s anti-Semitic bias during the Third Intifada
The following case studies are culled from our master chronology of all 105 Palestinian terrorist attacks, from which we constructed personal profiles of the victims in ten incidents, listed here. These profiles provide summaries of the victims, the attacks on them, the fact that HuffPost either ignored or whitewashed their stories, in contrast to the way it depicts Palestinians who allege wrongdoing, and the “news” items that it chose to post on its front page and World page, instead.
(2.1) The murders of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin
(2.2) The murder of Ezra Schwartz
(2.3) The murder of Rabbi Krishevsky
(2.4) The murder of Hadar Buchris
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(2.1) The murders of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin
See our complete profile of the Henkins’ murders at savethewest.com/henkins/
Meet Rabbi Eitam Henkin, a 31-year-old American rabbi, and his wife Na’ama, a 30-year-old graphic artist. One close friend described them as “a dream couple… inseparable. Everyone knew that they went everywhere together. They invested a lot in their relationship, in their family, their children.”
On October 1, 2015, three weeks into the Third Intifada, the Henkins were driving home with their four small children, ages 4 months, 4, 7 and 9. From out of the darkness, Palestinian terrorists emerged with machine guns, and murdered the Henkins in front of their terrified kids.
The story of the Henkins’ murders was covered widely in the Israeli news media, and received coverage in the U.S., on outlets including NBC and the Chicago Sun-Times:
Israeli media also covered the fact that the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas (whose members were later discovered to have perpetrated the Henkins’ murders) was photographed handing out candy to celebrate this attack, which it called “heroic”:
The funeral for the Henkins was attended by thousands of Israelis. Their eldest son, Matan, age 9, recited the kadish (the Mourner’s Prayer) at the service.
HuffPost ignored the story of the Henkins’ murders, in that never appeared on either its front page or World page.
The only item that HuffPost published about the Henkins’ murders was a sidebar editorial, buried deep on a sub-page:
This fact is confirmed by a search of HuffPost’s archives; the first and third of the only three items associated with the Henkins’ names are listed are this editorial; the second is a “huff-wires” story, which means it is part of its automated news feed, invisible to the casual reader – and as you can see, it only mentioned the Henkins in passing:
The fact that HuffPost would relegate the Henkins’ murders to a sidebar editorial (as opposed to a graphic item in the news columns) is confirmation that it doesn’t consider their plight, or the agony their children and loved ones suffered, to be classified as a “news” story.
Contrast that editorial decision to the personalized, graphic coverage that HuffPost gave to a Palestinian man – simultaneously on its front page and World page – after he claimed he was wrongfully tasered by the Israeli police, in front of his children:
Cops Repeatedly Taser Palestinian Man In Front Of His Kids
Note that HuffPost included the man’s name and allegations in the headline, and wrote an original story for it – but nothing about the Israeli police spokesman’s claim that the officers were acting in self-defense, and that the video was shot or edited to only show what happened after the man attempted to interfere with them breaking up a fight.
Contrast this also to the fact that when a Palestinian was killed during violent clashes with Israeli police, HuffPost published the picture and sympathetic, personal story of one of of the deceased’s wailing relatives on both its front page and World page, for three straight days (1, 2, 3, 4, 5):
Being that HuffPost decided to ignore the Henkins’ murders, what kinds of sympathetic “news” stories did it decide were worthy of graphic, personalized, front-page coverage, in the following days, instead? Here is a sampling:
A cat that was killed by a veterinarian…
…a convicted murderer who protested his execution (a story that HuffPost featured on its front page for four straight days, and whose name produces 467 returns in a search at HuffPost)…
… hungry seals…
…and historic “photos of gay love” (positioned at the very top of the front page):
The bottom line: HuffPost decided that those stories deserved top coverage – as did a Palestinian man who claimed he was wrongfully tased, in front of his kids. But an American rabbi and his wife being machine-gunned to death in front of their children, by Palestinian terrorists, deserved only to be ignored, according to HuffPost’s apparent editorial standards.
Learn more about the Henkins and their murders at:
The murders of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin
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(2.2) The murder of Ezra Schwartz
See our complete profile of the Ezra’s murder at:
savethewest.com/schwartz
Meet Ezra Schwartz, an 18-year-old American Jew from Boston, who graduated high school in June 2015.
During summers, Ezra volunteered a youth camp in New Hampshire. An avid basketball player, he was named “Player of the Game” six times by his high school.
A close friend said: “Ezra’s soul yearned to help others… he was the kind of person who would invest hours in others, who would go out of his way to sit with a kid who was struggling.” His grandfather said Ezra earned the respect and love of all kinds of people, but that “kids with little quirks and idiosyncrasies were his specialty.” Another described Ezra as bringing “warmth and silliness to every room that he entered,” and said he “was always asking me how he could do better, and he was always checking up on even the quietest camper.”
On November 18, 2015 Ezra was traveling with friends in a car, south of Jerusalem. While they were stopped in a traffic jam, a Palestinian terrorist opened fire with a submachine gun on the car in which Ezra was riding. Ezra and two others were killed. Two other Jews were murdered by Palestinian terrorists a few hour later.
The Israeli news media gave heavy coverage to this latest Palestinian murder spree, and to the fact that one of the victims was an American. The story of Ezra’s murder was also carried by certain American news outlets, including NBC, which featured this AP story on November 19:
Also on November 19, Reuters published the following story:
“Five dead in Palestinian attacks in Tel Aviv, West Bank – Israel”
In the third and fourth paragraphs, the Reuters story clearly indicates who was responsible for murdering Ezra Schwartz – and the fact that he was an American citizen (emphasis added):
A Palestinian drove along the shoulder of the main road and shot at crawling traffic, killing three people and wounding others. […] Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld… said an American citizen was one of three people killed. […] The American was identified as Ezra Schwartz, 18 […]
The next day, November 20 – after all these facts were in the public domain – HuffPost published the Reuters story on its front page and World page, but note how it rewrote the headline:
“American Teen Among 5 Killed In Israel Attacks”
Why did HuffPost remove the part of the Reuters headline that explicitly stated that this attack was perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists? Why did it instead insert the words “in Israel attacks,” as if to imply that Israel itself was responsible? If one only got their news from HuffPost’s front page and World pages, what other conclusion could they reasonably come to – especially given HuffPost’s virtual blackout on the near-daily Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jews that had been going on for the previous two months?
And being that Ezra was an American citizen, why did HuffPost not make even a cursory effort to tell his story? Or to show his picture? It’s worthwhile to note that HuffPost clearly knew his name – because one of its editors inserted it into its story page URL:
Yet HuffPost’s story page included no pictures of Ezra, and nothing about his personal story.
HuffPost also ignored the fact that shortly after Ezra was murdered, a Hamas spokesman called the attack “an act of bravery.”
A few days after Ezra was murdered, hundreds of Israelis gathered at the Ben Gurion airport in Israel to pay a tearful tribute to Ezra. HuffPost also ignored that fact.
Ezra’s funeral in America was attended by more than fifteen hundred people . HuffPost ignored that, too.
On November 23, 2015 the New England Patriots football team, of which Ezra was a huge fan, devoted a moment of silence to him, by name, and to reflect on his murder, at the hands of Palestinian terrorists:
HuffPost ignored that, too. In fact, to this day, it has never published a picture of Ezra on either its front page or World page. Our evidence further shows that HuffPost only allowed the story of this nondescript attack to remain on its front page for nineteen hours, then removed it.
Contrast HuffPost’s treatment of Ezra to the that which it gave to another “American” teen who was killed in the region, but who was clearly not the innocent child that Ezra was.
“AMERICAN KILLED IN FLOTILLA RAID”
This splash led to a story page in which HuffPost presented the teen’s name in the headline, and assigned responsibility for his death to Israel:
“Furkan Dogan, U.S. Citizen, Killed In Israeli Flotilla Raid”
What makes this contrast even more notable is the fact that unlike Ezra, an innocent civilian who was riding in a car when a Palestinian terrorist murdered him, this “American” teen, Furkan Doğan was born in America, but his family relocated to Turkey when he was two years old, where he remained ever since. And he was killed under disputed circumstances, aboard a ship with Islamist militants who were intent on penetrating Israel’s lawful blockade on the terrorist-controlled Gaza Strip, and who then tried to murder Israeli soldiers when they attempted to enforce the blockade – an attack that was captured on video:
In fact, as was discovered soon after Doğan‘s death, hours before the attack aboard the flotilla, he claimed in his diary that his objective was to die as “a martyr” – a claim also made by the militant Islamists on the ship who attempted to murder the IDF soldiers.
HuffPost ignored all of those facts in its story, even after it updated the page, more than a year later (screencap). The Anti-Defamation League blasted HuffPost as “outrageous” for its dishonest depiction of Doğan, and for publishing an editorial that likened his death to a Palestinian terrorist’s murder of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound handicapped Jew, years earlier. According to the ADL:
“(Doğan) was among a group of extremists on the Mavi Marmara who came aboard with axes, knives and other weapons with intent to attack and kill Israeli personnel when they boarded the ship. Israeli naval forces acted in self-defense when numbers of their group found themselves under vicious assault and their lives in jeopardy.”
Learn more about the reality of the “Flotilla of Terror” in this video.
Why did HuffPost not give Ezra the graphic, sympathetic, prominent coverage that it gave to Doğan? Only HuffPost can answer that question.
Being that HuffPost decided to whitewash and downplay Ezra’s murder, what kinds of sympathetic “news” stories did it decide were worthy of graphic, personalized, front-page coverage, in the following days, instead? Here is a sampling:
A story about abused puppies…
… and a sad “news” story of a model losing “followers” on social media, which ran on its front page for three days straight…
And instead of posting any headlines about Ezra’s murder or funeral, HuffPost decided a story about how transsexual males experience menstruation deserved placement on its front page…
… as did the latest photos of a pop star revealing her private parts – at the very top of its front page (screencap) – where it remained for three straight days:
To learn more about Ezra Schwartz and his murder, please see:
https://savethewest.com/schwartz/
To see more examples of how HuffPost manipulated the headlines and/or headline imagery in 9 of the 11 Palestinian terror attacks that it did give top coverage to, please see:
Examples of HuffPost’s headline manipulation during the Third Intifada : Save The West
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(2.3) The murder of Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky
See our complete profile of Rabbi Krishevsky’s murder at:
https://savethewest.com/krishevsky/
Meet Rabbi Yeshayahu Krishevsky, age 59, a father of one son. News reports described him as devoted scholar of the Torah, the Jewish holy scripture, and an author who wrote a series of books on weekly prayers. An acquaintance said the rabbi spoke at many religious events, because of his “extensive knowledge of the Torah.” Rabbi Krishevsky’s son described him as, “All heart and kindness… those poor people who no one wants to go near, he would come to them, help them, without thinking at all.”
On the morning of October 13, 2015, Rabbi Krishevsky finished prayers at a Jerusalem synagogue, then walked to the nearby bus stop. From out of nowhere, a Palestinian terrorist drove his car up onto the sidewalk, then into the bus stop, and ran down the the rabbi and other Jews who were waiting there. The terrorist then got out of his car with a meat cleaver, and hacked Rabbi Krishevksy to death.
The entire attack on Rabbi Krishevsky was captured on video:
Several Israeli and several Western news organizations presented the video of this attack in their reports, along with accounts of four other Palestinian terrorist attacks that occurred the same day, which claimed the lives of two other Jews.
Nineteen other Jews were injured, including an American peace activist, Richard Lakin, who was left clinging to life after Palestinian terrorists shot him in the head, and stabbed him in the chest (he died two weeks later).
The video of Rabbi Krishevsky’s murder was also included at the very top of the story that Reuters wrote about this bloody day of Palestinian terrorism against Jews, which it matched with this headline copy:
“Palestinian ‘Day of Rage’ attacks kill three: Israeli police”
The opening sentence of the Reuters story reads (emphasis added):
Palestinian men armed with knives and a gun killed at least three people and wounded several others in a string of attacks in Jerusalem and near Tel Aviv on Tuesday, police said, on a “Day of Rage” declared by Palestinian groups.
HuffPost published the Reuters story, on both its front page and World page. Yet note how fundamentally HuffPost changed the copy of the headline, to remove any indication that Palestinian terrorists had just murdered three Jews, and injured twenty – and to imply, instead, that each side was attacking the other:
“Israel and Palestine: Worst unrest in years”
Note also that instead of matching its altered headline with a picture of even one of the three Jewish victims who were killed – or the American Jew who was left clinging to life – or of the crime scenes, HuffPost instead chose to match it with a picture of a Palestinian rioter.
HuffPost clearly knew what this story was about, because it put the actual nature of it in the URL, and the sub-headline:
On the evening of October 13, HuffPost ratcheted up its obfuscation of the facts, by publishing this splash headline at the top of its World page:
Note the wording HuffPost employed for its mangled headline and sub-headlines:
“Unrest…” “Turmoil…” “Numerous Israelis and Palestinians have lost their lives in… attacks…”
If one only got their news from HuffPost, they would have absolutely no means of discerning from this headline who was killing whom, or why. It would appear as if this were merely a tit-for-tat series of attacks, with no telling who was the attacker, and who the victim. And they certainly would have had no reason to know that Rabbi Krishevsky had been murdered, or that it had been captured on video.
Rabbi Krishevsky’s funeral was attended by thousands of Israelis:
HuffPost also completely ignored that story.
This is demonstrated by the fact that a search of Rabbi Krishevsky’s name at HuffPost, more than two months after his murder, returns no results; HuffPost has not published even one story containing his name, let alone any of the details of his horrific murder:
As we’ve already seen, HuffPost often makes it an editorial practice to put the names, faces and personal stories of Palestinians and animals who meet misfortune, into its headlines. Yet apparently that same policy dictated that HuffPost completely ignore the videotaped murder of a beloved rabbi, by a Palestinian terrorist.
It is worth noting that HuffPost has demonstrated its technical ability to display full-motion video on its front page, when it decides the story is sufficiently newsworthy. One such incident occurred on August 7, 2013, when visitors to HuffPost’s front page were greeted with full-motion video of a woman rubbing her buttocks in dog’s face, as “news,” which auto-played as soon as the page loaded:
Also, contrast HuffPost’s actions in Rabbi Krishevksy’s case, to the ease with which it explicitly assigns blame to Jews, even when it knows (or should know) the accusations are untrue, or cannot be proven true, and whenever possible, it graphically depicts these attacks – and the grieving survivors.
For example, in this case, a masked, unknown assailant comedically “attacked” a Palestinian-supporting rabbi, who apparently was not injured – comedically, because if you’ve ever seen the opening sequence of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” this “attack” looks eerily familiar.
The “attack,” in this remote area, which occurred on October 23 – ten days after the videotaped murder of Rabbi Krishevsky – just happened to be caught on close-up video. Because the “victimized” rabbi said he suspects the unknown assailant was “a Jewish extremist,” HuffPost instantly ran with that headline – and included the video of the “attack” on its story page:
In another case, HuffPost published a “news” story near the top of its front page in which it referred to Jews as subhuman animals, claiming that a “pack” of them “chased off” Gov. Mitt Romney:
In reality, this “pack” of Jews were actually Romney supporters – something that HuffPost only begrudgingly corrected, days later.
And in the rare case in which there is reasonable suspicion or proof that one or more Jewish extremists perpetrate a terrible crime, or are accused of rampaging through a Palestinian area, HuffPost crafts headlines that identify them as such, match them with sympathetic pictures of the victims – or their grieving survivors – then publish them on its front page:
Yet in Rabbi Krishevsky’s case, and in practically every case we examined during the Third Intifada, HuffPost avoided identifying Palestinian terrorists as the perpetrators, and Jews as their victims.
Given the ease with which HuffPost employs the term “Jewish extremists,” and refers to “packs of Jews,” is it not ironic that when the New York Post identified the jihadists who perpetrated the recent San Bernadino massacre as “Muslim killers,” HuffPost blasted the paper as being “racist”?
Returning now to Rabbi Krishevsky’s murder, being that HuffPost decided to ignore his story, and the anguish of his loved ones, what kinds of sympathetic “news” stories did it decide were more worthy of graphic, personalized, front-page coverage, in the following days, instead? Here is a sampling:
A story of abused dogs…
… Khloe Kardashian’s sadness after her ex-boyfriend was found passed out from a drug overdose in a whorehouse. (Notably, HuffPost also wrote an original story, evoking sympathy for this multi-millionaire athlete, asserting that “we” wouldn’t shame him if he had a heart attack, so why should “we” shame him for drug abuse? – because after all, “people with substance use disorder are suffering terribly.”)
…“What to eat and drink to help you poop”…
… and a rumor that John Lennon harbored a gay curiosity:
To learn more about Rabbi Krishevsky and his murder, please see:
https://savethewest.com/krishevsky/
To see more examples of how HuffPost manipulated the headlines and/or headline imagery in 9 of the 11 Palestinian terror attacks that it did give top coverage to, please see:
Examples of HuffPost’s headline manipulation during the Third Intifada : Save The West
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(2.4) The murder of Hadar Buchris
See our complete profile of Hadar Buchris’s murder at:
https://savethewest.com/buchris/
Meet Hadar Buchris. This 21-year-old Jewish girl studied theater, and had two goals in life: to travel to India and to get married.
Having just completed a half-year trek through India in late 2015, according to one of her closest friends, Hadar “was already thinking of what names to give her future children.”
Hadar’s father, Aryeh, marveled at her:
“A dear, beautiful, so smart and sensitive girl… with a big heart, larger than life…
One of Hadar’s teachers described her as:
“a fantastic, bright girl… always a source of good energy for the whole group… she was a very talented theater student and a successful comic who always created positive vibes around her friends. She was also a kind of ‘psychologist’ who would lend a sympathetic ear to whoever needed it.”
Another of her friends described Hadar’s “beautiful spirit,” and how:
“she would start her day with a huge smile of optimism and love… a lioness in the midst of battle… (who) never gave in to sorrow or pain…”
While she was sitting at a bus stop on November 22, 2015, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed Hadar repeatedly in the face, head and chest. Hadar was taken to the hospital in critical condition, but died a few hours later.
The story of Hadar’s murder and her funeral, which was attended by thousands of Israelis, was covered in depth by the Israeli media, and certain U.S. news outlets.
HuffPost completely ignored Hadar’s murder and her funeral.
Meaning, not just that the story didn’t appear on HuffPost’s front page or World page, as in the other cases described earlier – it didn’t appear anywhere on the site. You can confirm this fact for yourself, by doing a search of her name at HuffPost – which turns up zero results:
Contrast HuffPost’s treatment of Hadar to the personalized, front-page coverage it gives to Palestinians who merely allege that they’ve been wronged in some way – often without any evidence.
For example:
A Palestinian journalist who alleged she was detained and interrogated:
Female Palestinian criminals who alleged that Israeli guards “humiliated” them (with no proof):
And when a Palestinian film maker alleged he was detained for 60 minutes at a U.S. airport, HuffPost decided that his story was a proverbial “stop-the-presses” moment, which deserved a personalized, splash headline atop its front page:
If you follow the links beneath those pictures to the story pages at HuffPost, you’ll find that in each of these cases, HuffPost presented the victim’s faces, names and sympathetic personal narratives.
HuffPost has even extended this personalized, sympathetic treatment to notorious Palestinian terrorists. For example, when Israel was accused of abducting Dirar Al Sisi, Hamas’s chief rocket maker, HuffPost described him only as a “Palestinian,” and gave top, sustained coverage on its front page and World page to these weepy-eyed pictures of his daughter, holding a picture of him:
And on its story page, HuffPost included the terrorist’s name right in its headline:
Yet when Sisi was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in prison for his leading role in Hamas’s terrorism against Jews, HuffPost ignored the story.
It’s not that HuffPost ignores all young women who are subjected to what it considers injustices in foreign nations. For example, after members of the all-girl Russian punk band “Pussy Riot” were arrested for barging into a famed orthodox church in Moscow, during services, then singing a vulgar song, HuffPost began a multi-year stream of sympathetic stories about these “victims’ plights, including top-of-the-page splash headlines:
On one day alone, HuffPost had nine separate stories on its World page about Pussy Riot – at the same time:
2012-08-19 Wphls 1235a – 9 Refs to Pussyriot – Zero Israel by SaveTheWest
HuffPost continued with six stories about Pussy Riot on its World page the next day, five the day after that, three the day after that. It has since published more than a hundred articles about the plight of Pussy Riot since then, including even editorials by band members and their parents.
Why does HuffPost’s editorial policy dictate that Palestinians, terrorists and others receive such sympathetic, top-level, personalized treatment – yet Jews who are murdered by Palestinian terrorists, like Hadar Buchris, deserve only to be ignored?
Which leads to the question: being that HuffPost decided to completely ignore Hadar’s murder, what kinds of sympathetic “news” stories did it decide were worthy of graphic, personalized, front-page coverage, in the following days, instead? Here is a sampling:
A story about an abused puppy…
…a story about freakish Muslim refugees who are sewing their mouths shut (for which HuffPost created a gory, graphic top-of-the-front-page splash headline)…
…and a story about “Nola,” a rhino that died…
HuffPost also decided that these tabloid-type stories were newsworthy enough to appear on its front page, instead of anything about Hadar:
An update on the latest Kardashian-Jenner dating dramas…
… and explicit photos of nude women:
See our complete profile of Hadar Buchris’s murder at:
https://savethewest.com/buchris/
(3) HuffPost’s use of pictures and words to help legitimize and incite Palestinians’ anti-Semitic hatred and violence
Our investigation also revealed two additional facets of HuffPost’s anti-Semitic bias during the period of the Third Intifada that we examined:
(3.1) Bias in pictures of corpses and grieving loved ones
We could find not a single instance in which HuffPost published a picture of any of the funerals of the Jews who’d been murdered by Palestinian terrorists. In contrast, HuffPost repeatedly inserted heart-wrenching pictures of grieving Palestinians – into the precious few stories of such attacks that it actually covered of Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jews.
If one only saw the words expressed in these top editorials, one could have reasonably thought they were reading a virulent Islamist website.
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(3.1) Bias in pictures of corpses and grieving loved ones
Here are some of the pictures taken at funerals for the Jewish victims of the Third Intifada, many of which were attended by thousands of Israelis. HuffPost ignored all of them:
Contrast that editorial decision to HuffPost’s practice of seeking out and inserting heart-wrenching pictures of Palestinians grieving their lost loved ones – including even terrorists and rioters who were shot by Israeli security forces during or after attacks. Here are three examples of this phenomenon:
Example 1: The Third Intifada started on September 13, 2015 when Palestinian terrorists murdered Alexander Levlovich and injured two others. Between September 14 and 21, three more Jews were injured, in rock-throwing and firebomb attacks. Then, between October 1 and 5, Palestinian terrorists murdered Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin, and Rabbis Aharon Bennet and Nehemia Lavi, and injured three others. HuffPost ignored all of these attacks. (For details, see Chronology.)
It wasn’t until October 6, three weeks into the Third Intifada, that HuffPost published this, its front-page story about violence in Israel – but it mentioned nothing about any Palestinian terrorist attacks. It only claimed that Israel was “destroying Palestinian militants’ homes” for… well, it didn’t say why – which HuffPost matched with a sympathetic picture of a Palestinian woman, amid the wreckage of a structure.
If that headline sounds curiously incomplete, that’s because it is. The page to which that headline led on HuffPost contained a story from the AP, for which the wire service produced the headline, “Amid unrest in West Bank, Israel demolishes militants’ homes,” as demonstrated in the Los Angeles Daily News’s version of the story.
We’ve already seen how HuffPost removes “Palestinian” from wire service headlines concerning Palestinian terrorist attacks, preferring instead to insert nebulous terms such as “unrest.” It is noteworthy though that in this opening salvo, apparently even the word “unrest” was too much for HuffPost, so it removed the term from the AP headline. Instead, it created one that falsely implied that the only aggressor here was Israel, and that it was taking unprovoked, malicious action against Palestinians – specifically, the poor woman in the picture. That mangled headline, however, was just a hint of how far HuffPost would go to incite hate against Israel in this opening “piece.”
Upon clicking on that headline link, the first thing one sees on HuffPost’s story page, is the sub-headline that tells the actual story, but which the casual reader may miss:
“The violence comes amid a new wave of violence after Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli couple in the West Bank.”
“Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli couple in the West Bank”? What couple? What gunmen? Until this point in time, as we saw earlier, HuffPost had completely ignored the all the Jews who had been murdered and injured in Palestinian terrorist attacks.
But HuffPost was just getting started. The first image at the top of the story page is the same Palestinian woman standing in front of the demolished home. Beneath that is this picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, clearly very angry:
Then, beneath one more picture of a demolished home, HuffPost inserted this picture, of a wailing Palestinian mother, mourning over her young son’s casket:
The caption HuffPost inserted beneath the photo read (emphasis added):
Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinian teenagers, including a 13-year-old boy, on Monday. In this photo, the mother of 13-year-old Palestinian Abdel Rahman Abdullah mourns at her son’s funeral on Oct. 6.
HuffPost essentially asserts that Israeli soldiers murdered two Palestinian teenagers. What HuffPost left out of this caption, however, is the fact that this woman’s son was shot while he was attacking Israeli soldiers with rocks. How do we know this? Because it’s deep in the copy of HuffPost’s own story page:
Israeli forces killed another Palestinian assailant over the weekend and on Monday the troops shot dead two teenagers — including a 13-year-old boy — who were throwing stones during clashes with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.
It is also worthwhile to note that neither of these pictures were included in the story that HuffPost obtained from the AP (as evidenced by the CBS.com and SFGate.com versions). HuffPost actively sought them out and inserted them, to visually shape its first narrative about the Third Intifada as being one of Israel acting as an murderous aggressor – and Palestinians always being the distraught victims.
This is exactly the same kind of libelous incitement and obfuscation that the Palestinian “governments,” terrorist groups and the media entities that support them use to justify murdering Jews, supposedly for “retaliation.”
Example 2: On November 27, HuffPost published on its front page and World page an AP wire story about two separate attacks on Israeli soldiers by Palestinian terrorists. Here is the original AP story:
In one incident, the terrorist rammed his car into two soldiers; the second terrorist rammed his car into six soldiers. Note that the only picture the AP included was one of the crime scene.
HuffPost published the AP story, but manipulated the headline to once again visually depict Palestinians as the victims – this time, in a funeral scene in which they are holding up the corpse of what may well be one of the terrorists who were killed during or after an attack on Jews:
And on the page to which that headline leads, which features the copy of the AP story, HuffPost captioned its headline picture in a way that, once again, completely removes the distinction between terrorist and their Jewish victims:
“Tensions have escalated in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza border in recent months”
Scrolling down the page, though, HuffPost inserted another unrelated picture, this time, of wailing Palestinian women:
Example 3:
Returning now to that comically inept story that HuffPost ran about the “suspected Jewish extremist attack” on a “human rights rabbi”: After writing a detailed, sympathetic article (the only one we observed during our investigation), into which it inserted pictures and video of the about the alleged incident, HuffPost decided to insert yet another unrelated picture of a wailing Palestinian woman, from months earlier, on the page (screencap):
Why would HuffPost, a self-professed “objective” newspaper, repeatedly go to such lengths to graphically depict the grief and anger of Palestinians over their lost loved ones – yet not publish a single picture of any of those grieving Jews who’d been murdered by Palestinian terrorists? Only HuffPost can answer that question.
But wait, it actually gets worse.
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(3.2) HuffPost gave top, sustained coverage to editorials that legitimized the Palestinian narrative, and their terrorist attacks against Jews
On October 19, five weeks into the Third Intifada, HuffPost published this splash headline on its World page, which it matched with this sympathetic picture of an apparently exasperated, exhausted Palestinian rioter, or terrorist:
That headline leads not to a news story, but rather to a an opinion piece by a Palestinian-sympathizing “journalist.” Before we examine its content, though, it should be noted that HuffPost almost invariably devotes its splash headlines to news stories. Yet in this case, it apparently felt such sympathy for the supposed plight of the Palestinian teens, who perpetrated a significant portion of the terrorist attacks during the Third Intifada, that it took this editorial, which would normally be positioned on its left sidebar, and gave it a splash headline.
In the editorial, the “journalist” presents an Orwellian, whitewashed depiction of these Palestinian teens. She compares them to those she encountered as a “teacher” in a Palestinian “school,” as being:
“[n]ormal kids who wanted normal lives… [T]hey wanted to sleep through the night without the fear of soldiers raiding their house, turning it upside down, or stationing themselves on the roof… My students wanted what any human being wants, regardless of nationality.
[They] are calling for their human and civil rights, for equality, for hope. Will Israel — and the world — listen?”
And what about the fact that a significant portion of the murderous attacks against Jews were being perpetrated by these supposed “normal kids”? HuffPost enabled this “journalist” to claim these teenage terrorists are the victims in this equation:
“[T]oday’s stabbings… are cries of despair and hopelessness…”
HuffPost published that editorial on its World page on October 19.
Was HuffPost unaware of this video, captured three days earlier, on October 16, of a Palestinian teenager attempting to murder Jews in an Israeli supermarket? Does he appear to be a “normal kid,” or “crying out in despair?”
How about this Palestinian teen, caught on video on October 13, as he attempting to murder Jews at a bus stop?
Or what about these Palestinian children, ages 11 and 14, who attempted to stab an Israeli security guard to death on a train?
Curiously, as much as it enjoys giving top coverage to videos that it believes are newsworthy, HuffPost completely ignored those videos.
Later on October 19, HuffPost inserted this editorial at the very top of the blog section on its World page: an even more-Orwellian means of depicting Palestinians as the real victims of the situation:
A one-sentence except from this screed is all that’s needed to expose the depth to which this “journalist” – and HuffPost – sunk, to engage in the kind of libelous incitement that Palestinian terrorists and propagandists employ, which leads directly to Jews being murdered, in supposed “retaliation”:
“Palestinians in Jerusalem are feeling terrorized, worried about leaving their homes and becoming a victim of summary execution.”
It should be noted that the media watchdog CAMERA has done detailed research on claims made by this Palestinian “journalist,” and publicized the reasons why it claims he is “delusional.” Yet HuffPost gave this other-worldly screed top billing, and left it on its World page for the next seven days.
Those editorials, however, pale in comparison to this far more-explicit justification for Palestinian terrorists’ murders of Jews, that actually claims Israel is getting just what it deserves:
HuffPost published this other-worldly hate piece on its World page, and left there for six straight days. And the best part? HuffPost claims that the author of this screed is a “Palestinian ‘human rights worker’.”
At this point, anyone who knows even the most basic facts of what’s been occurring in Israel and the disputed territories over the previous few months, might reasonably wonder: “Is this a legitimate Western newspaper we’re reading – or a radical Islamist propaganda website?”
This confusion is bolstered by the fact that during the period of our investigation, we found not a single headline story in which HuffPost “informed” its readers of the following, well-documented facts:
- Palestinian government officials and clerics claim Muslims have divine justification to exterminate all Jews, whom they refer to as descendants of apes and pigs.
- For years, as the renowned watchdog Palestinian Media Watch has documented, Palestinians’ governments, schools and media have been indoctrinating preteen children to want to violently attack, and ultimately exterminate Jews:
- During the Third Intifada, the indoctrination turned to teaching children that it’s their moral duty to stab Jews:
- The Palestinian “government” uses Western humanitarian aid money to financially reward and give top jobs to convicted terrorists who murdered Jews, whom it is able to get released from Israeli prisons.
- Surveys that show that more than 70% of Palestinians support terrorism against Jews, and completely expel them from the region.
HuffPost has one of the largest newsrooms in America, with more than 350 journalists, editors and researchers. Is it even possible that HuffPost doesn’t know about those facts? Or, did it just decide to utterly ignore them throughout the Third Intifada?
(4) Do HuffPost’s acts and omissions constitute anti-Semitism?
“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
Before we can answer this question, we must first define “anti-Semitism,” especially in the context of journalism. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, anti-Semitism is defined as:
“hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group”
Although that definition could describe the past two thousand years of anti-Semitism, since the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland in Israel, this hatred has expanded – and so too must the definition of anti-Semitism. The U.S. State Department defines contemporary anti-Semitism in much the same way that scholar and human rights activist Natan Sharansky did, consisting of his “three Ds test”:
- Demonization: Vilifying Israel or Jews as a whole (bigoted smears, as opposed to legitimate criticism over factual issues)
- Double-standards: Applying standards of conduct to Israel (or Jews) that are applied to no other nation or group
- Delegitimization: Denying Israel’s right to exist, or the fact that Jews have existed in Israel (and the “occupied territories”) for thousands of years
In the realm of journalism, and considering the findings of our investigation into HuffPost’s coverage of the Third Intifada, we contend a fourth “D” should be added:
Dehumanization, a phenomenon that, as the Brandeis Center has documented, goes back to ancient times, but was industrialized by communists and Nazis. Today, as then, this dehumanization involves claiming that Jews are subhuman animals.
The Palestinian government consistently dehumanizes Jews, and did so throughout the Third Intifada. It also indoctrinates Palestinian children to believe this as well, as was evidenced in a recent Palestinian TV show, in which preteen girls claimed Jews are “barbaric monkeys, and wretched pigs”:
In the case of journalism, we believe that a news organization is engaging in anti-Semitic bias when it consistently dehumanizes Jews, by consistently:
- Giving prominent news coverage to sub-human animals who meet misfortune, yet downplaying or ignoring Jews who have been violently attacked because they are Jews.
- Ignoring those who mourn Jews who’ve been murdered, because they were Jews, yet showers prominent, sympathetic and coverage on those who mourn non-Jews – including even the anti-Semitic terrorists who violently attack them.
- Removing or blurring the distinction between terrorists who violently attacking Jews, and their Jewish victims, to the point where the casual observer has no idea who attacked whom.
- Referring to Palestinian terrorists as “Palestinians,” or other nebulous terms, yet referring to Jewish terrorists accurately, or as “Jewish extremists.”
If you agree that these “four-Ds” are a legitimate standard of measure, then we contend that HuffPost’s acts and omissions during the Third Intifada can only be classified as a particularly vicious, ugly manifestation of anti-Semitic bias. We further contend that prominently publishing editorials that rely on demonstrably false, libelous accusations to justify violent attacks on Jews, while whitewashing the actual motivations and history of these attackers, takes anti-Semitic bias to a whole new level, and into the realm of overt incitement.
This takes on added significance considering that in mid-2015, HuffPost opened its first all-Arabic branch. Given the bias and incitement documented in this video, one can only imagine the extent to which the HuffPost network of sites is helping to fuel the global resurgence of anti-Semitic hatred and violence, which numerous experts say is now worse than at any time since the 1930s.
Additional resources:
Antisemitism, Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 18, 2015.
Antisemitism, U.S. Department of State.
3D Test of Antisemitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization, by Natan Sharansky.
Fact Sheet on the Elements of Anti-Semitic Discourse, by Kenneth L. Marcus, The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law; see Section 10:
“Beastilization: Since ancient times, Jews have been compared in derogatory terms to barnyard and wild animals. In some influential ancient Christian texts, for example, Jews are compared to pigs, goats, and cows.”
Palestinian Authority TV Airs Video of Children Referring to Jews as ‘Barbaric Monkeys’ and ‘Wretched Pigs’ (VIDEO), by Zach Pontz, The Algemeiner, July 7, 2013.
News Flash: Jews Are ‘Apes And Pigs.’ So Why Is Egypt’s Morsi The Elephant In America’s Newsrooms?, by Richard Behar, Forbes, January 11, 2013.
Animalization and dehumanization, a special report by Palestinian Media Watch.
(5) Our inquiry to HuffPost – and its response
On the morning of December 21, 2015, we sent HuffPost’s press department the following message via its contact form (which limits inquiries to 1,000 characters; this came in at 998):
Dear Sir or Madam:
Regarding your coverage of recent Palestinian terrorism (the Third Intifada):
1) Why have you not presented any stories or pictures on your front page or World page that focused on any of the Jewish victims of these attacks – especially the 3 Americans who were murdered – or their grieving loved ones?
2) Why, in contrast, do you consistently and exclusively insert graphic, sympathetic pictures of the Palestinian terrorists and their grieving loved ones into your news stories about the Third Intifada?
3) Why do you effectively dehumanize Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism, by publishing on your front page sympathetic, picture-rich stories about abused animals and sad celebrities in the hours and days after these Jews were murdered and maimed, instead of anything about them?
4) Why do you rewrite wire service headlines that explicitly describe acts of Palestinian terrorism and murder, to instead claim only nondescript “unrest” or “violence” is occurring?
We requested that HuffPost reply by Monday, December 28th, 2015.
As of January 15th, 2016, HuffPost has not replied to our inquiry.
Resources
This video was constructed as an outgrowth of extensive research and documentation, to validate all the assertions it contains. To enable viewers to see the evidence for themselves, and learn more about certain facets of the issues this video raises, we offer the following resources:
At SaveTheWest.com
Third Intifada victim profiles
Dedicated pages that profile ten of the Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks during the Third Intifada. Each provides a profile of the victim, how they were attacked, the grief their loved ones endured, and what types of “news” stories HuffPost chose to give top coverage to, instead of anything about them.
Chronology of Palestinian attacks during the Third Intifada
A comprehensive, chronological account of the 105 Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jews during the period we investigated, from September 13- November 30, 2015, indications of the 11 that HuffPost covered, and certain notable events that took place during this period, that provide a fuller context with which to consider this video.
Examples of HuffPost’s headline manipulation during the Third Intifada
In this video, we claimed, “Of the 105 Palestinian terror attacks on Jews between September 13 – November 30, 2015, HuffPost ignored 94 of these attacks [and] of the 11 Palestinian terrorist attacks that HuffPost did report – all of which were wire service reports from the AP or Reuters – in 9 cases it manipulated the provided headlines and/or associated imagery in [one of two ways].” This page provides detailed, step-by-step validation of this assertion.
Other resources
The following are several resources whose research and analysis work has been vital to the development of this video, and the supporting pages.
Palestinian Media Watch: Self-description: “Studies Palestinian society from a broad range of perspectives by monitoring and analyzing the Palestinian Authority through its media and schoolbooks. PMW’s major focus is on the messages that the Palestinian leaders, from the Palestinian Authority, Fatah and Hamas, send to the population through the broad range of institutions and infrastructures they control.”
Middle East Media Research Institute: Self-description: “Exploring the Middle East and South Asia through their media, MEMRI bridges the language gap between the West and the Middle East and South Asia, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu-Pashtu, Dari, and Turkish media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends.”
The Gatestone Institute: A source of original analysis about, reporting from within the Palestinian territories (link). Introductory self-description: “A non-partisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank is dedicated to educating the public about what the mainstream media fails to report.”
CAMERA (Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America): Self-description: “A media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East. CAMERA fosters rigorous reporting, while educating news consumers about Middle East issues and the role of the media.”
The Investigative Project on Terrorism: Self-description: “A non-profit research group founded by Steven Emerson in 1995. It is recognized as the world’s most comprehensive data center on radical Islamic terrorist groups. For more than a decade, the IPT has investigated the operations, funding, activities and front groups of Islamic terrorist and extremist groups in the United States and around the world.”
IDF Blog: The official blog of the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Prime Minister’s Office (Israel)
Huff-Watch: An independent blog site. Self-description: “The purpose of Huff-Watch is to act as a repository for factual, relevant, contextual analysis of HuffPost, and the criticism that has been directed at it from other sources.”
Huffington Post Monitor: An independent blog site. Motto: “Standing Up Against Hate on the Huffington Post.”
References on journalistic standards and practices
American Press Institute: Self-description: “The American Press Institute conducts research, training, convenes thought leaders and creates tools to help chart a path ahead for journalism in the 21st century. The Press Institute is an educational non-advocacy 501(c)3 nonprofit organization affiliated with the Newspaper Association of America. It aims to help the news media, especially local publishers and newspaper media, advance in the digital age.”
See two API articles in particular: “What Is The Purpose Of Journalism?,” and “The Lost Meaning of ‘Objectivity’.”
The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics: Organizational self-description: “The Society of Professional Journalists is the nation’s most broad-based journalism organization, dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior.” The Code of Ethics is described as: “a statement of abiding principles supported by explanations and position papers that address changing journalistic practices.”
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