26-Aug-15: Defiance, activism, jihad and New York Times journalism

Click for the background to this 2013 CAMERA campaign.
The girl in the poster is our murdered daughter, Malk

An article by Diaa Hadid in yesterday's New York Times, a classic exemplification of lethal journalism, reminds us of the extraordinary amorality the paper's editors have demonstrated when dealing with the ideology-driven murderers of Jews and Israelis.

It's a piece about a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist (rooted in a defiant past, she writes) who is at the center of an article we posted here on Friday ["21-Aug-15: Hungering, thirsting, just dying for fresh victims"] and another two days later ["23-Aug-15: Do they understand the price of freeing the hunger-striking terrorists?"].

Hadid repeatedly invokes his quiet, his defiance, his activism. But never his blood-lust or doctrinal hatred of Jews.

She devotes precisely zero words to an explanation of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its goals ("destruction of Israel through violent means", according to the Council on Foreign Relations) and its status as a client of the Islamist regime in Iran. These are at the very heart of understanding how a man ends up being and doing what he is and does. But it goes unmentioned, unanalyzed.

What she and her editors have created can only be called a hagiography, beatifying a quiet-spoken hero who... thirsts, hungers, to kill people.

But let's start with her words: what did he do before becoming a hunger striker?

Mr. Allan joined Islamic Jihad when he was studying law... in Jenin, said his father... He said his son was energized by the fight against Israel during the second Palestinian intifada. Mr. Allan was first jailed by Israel in 2006 for trying to recruit a suicide bomber to carry out an attack in Israel, and was held for three years. He was briefly detained a second time by Israel in 2011...

We expect some readers will wonder why "trying to recruit a suicide bomber" causes this much angst.

Not for the first time, we want to say here clearly and unambiguously that we hate the expression "suicide bomber". We tried to explain why here: "30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs". Here is part of what we wrote then:

Whatever the intentions of those who do them, who engineer them, who plan them and who encourage them, lethal attacks in the nature of 9/11, 7/7, 11-M, the massacre by a Saudi inside a Kuwaiti mosque this past Friday, are never about suicide, and never were. Acts of murder is what they are about, and what they are. The intention of those acts and of the people who do them is to kill. Often, the person doing the killing is completely indifferent to the personal outcome for himself or herself, for reasons that are worth understanding but come down to this: the killing is the reason; the death of the killer is an incidental outcome about which the perpetrators (and those who facilitated the killing by sending the killer on his or her way) have no particular concern.
This has significance. The term "suicide bomber" is used frequently in the mainstream media - almost always inaccurately and usually misleadingly - when what they are in reality describing is a human bomb, and a human bomb attack.

Hadid is of course not the problem. Like anyone else, she holds views. At the New York Times, a huge commercial entity, they have people whose jobs including filtering out tendentiousness, subjectivity, hate-filled polemicism masquerading as journalism, and bad, agenda-driven writing. 

And in the case of Ms Hadid's work product about which there is some background here ["The NY Times' Israel-hating Reporter", FrontPageMag, April 28, 2015], it's not really that difficult to know what to watch for if watching is part of what a NY Times person is supposed to do. 

Things like this tirade from 2007:

"I can't look at Israelis anymore. I can't separate your average Israeli citizen from the occupation, I don't want to be friends with them, I don't want to talk to them," says Hadid... ["Diaa Hadid: AP's Propagandist"] 

There's nothing wrong with any of this as long as we agree that people are free, in democratic societies where the human rights of all are respected, to express the most intolerant of viewpoints, and under certain conditions even hatred. But then why would the New York Times decide to give a person with that kind of mindset a job reporting on Israel-hating, murder-minded Islamist terrorists? And, to judge from the by-line of yesterday's piece, to give them the privilege of writing it from the NYT Middle East bureau in the heart of beautiful Jerusalem... where Ms Hadid can't avoid looking at more Israelis than she plainly wants to. Doesn't seem right or fair or smart.

As for the editors at the New York Times, we wish they had reconsidered that extraordinary paragraph we quoted above. Here's how, in our view, it should have been phrased:

Mr. Allan joined Islamic Jihad when he was studying law... in Jenin, said his father... He said his son's Islamist passions, and especially the lust for murdering Jews wholesale was ignited during the terrorist war declared by Arafat in September 2000. Mr. Allan was first jailed by Israel in 2006 for trying to plant a human bomb in a location where many Jewish Israelis would have been blown to pieces (as had happened five years earlier at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria, the credit for the blowing up of which was first claimed by Islamic Jihad before Hamas made a more convincing case to show it was their work.) He was held for three years, an astonishingly light sentence given the effort he had made and the intended carnage that was so narrowly avoided. He was briefly detained a second time by Israel in 2011 on the basis of well-founded fears that he was making another effort to achieve the barbarous aims of the outlawed terror organization to which he had pledged alliegance... 

So do we expect to get any serious attention for this from the New York Times? 

If you are familiar with some of our previous posts about its work ["28-Jun-07: About sweet-faced young women", "5-Jul-07: A Balance of Views?", "17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns", "30-Mar-13: "To see the NY Times gloss over this travesty of justice is journalism of the most amoral sort", "9-Aug-13: Protesting journalism of the amoral sort", "14-Nov-13: To really understand about terrorism's victims, can't beat the New York Times"], you probably know the answer already.