This just in from AP/Guardian: Suicide bombers during 2nd Intifada didn’t attack people, they attacked “cities”

The beautiful thing about language is that so much meaning depends on the turn of a phrase, a slight grammatical alteration, or the choice of one word over  another.

While the Guardian has mastered modern day anti-Israel newspeak better than most, much of the mainstream media is equally as adept at the sometimes arduous task of avoiding directly assigning moral agency to Palestinian terrorists or, alternatively, assigning humanity to their Jewish victims.

The Guardian’s Conal Urquhart is a master at such ideologically driven rhetorical tricks – a talent which was on full display in his report on the Jerusalem terrorist attack back in March – in which a terrorist planted a bomb laced with shrapnel at a crowded bus station, killing a woman and injuring dozens. Urquhart informed us alternately, in the same article, that “a bomb exploded” and, then, that “a bus exploded”, without once suggesting that an act of terrorism was intentionally committed by someone, nor noting that the attack on innocent Israeli civilians was quite obviously the work of a terrorist or even the more politically correct “militant”.

The Guardian/AP story “West Bank barrier to be rerouted around Palestinian village, June 26, about an Israeli Supreme Court decision to reroute a section of the security fence, contained the following passage:

“Israel began building the barrier in late 2002 to keep out Palestinian attackers amid a wave of suicide bombers targeting its cities. It says the structure is needed to keep militants from reaching Israeli population centres.”

In addition to the skillful avoidance of the word terrorist anywhere in the passage, note that these  faceless suicide bombers were merely “targeting”, rather than successfully murdering, not Israeli civilians, but, rather, “its cities”.    

No, it shouldn’t need repeating, but in the age of delegitimization, where every conceivable tool is employed to avoid casting Israelis as victims, and Palestinian terrorists as perpetrators, the following can’t be repeated enough.

The 2nd Intifada was a coordinated effort by Palestinian terrorists to kill as many innocent Israeli men, women, and children as their shrapnel ridden explosives could achieve – a murderous onslaught which successfully claimed over 1,000 lives and maimed thousands more.  “Cities” weren’t the target. Jews were.

Israel’s security fence represented the efforts of a democracy under siege to do what any nation facing such a threat would attempt: to protect its civilians from the terrorists’ murderous designs.

In the cognitive war against Israel words matter dearly, and its vital, if we are to win this war, that we not allow this steady drip of political propaganda to go unchallenged. 

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