EXCUSES

Honest Reporting's latest offering Humanizing the Murderer is a look at how the mainstream media has sought "motives" to explain last week's brutal bulldozer attack by a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. It covers the usual pandering to the cause of the Palestinians in which the Jews must be blamed for every imperfection on the other side.

I'm not always in full agreement with Caroline Glick but HR nails it with this quote from her Jerusalem Post article - The media and enduring narrative when she noted that the bulldozer attack was only the second Palestinian attack on Israelis to be preserved on film. The first was the bloody lynching of two IDF reservists in the early days of the Second Intifada in 2000. Glick pointed out that both cases drew apologies from the networks that showed them:

In this case, as in the case of the lynching eight years ago, the reason the BBC apologized is not because the film's images were too gruesome, but because it strayed from the accepted narratives of the Palestinian war against Israel. To maintain the narratives, "the right editorial balance between the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's audience," is one that engenders the belief that Israel is either morally indistinguishable from the Palestinians, or that Israel is morally inferior to the Palestinians.