09-Mar-16: News reporting and how it ensures more terror

Terror victim Yonatan Azarihab: Used the attacker's
knife in an unexpected way 

Four Arab-on-Israeli stabbing/shooting attacks yesterday, and the Palestinian Arab world is rejoicing in reports of its newest "martyrs".

Ma'an News Agency, true to form, makes its focus clear in the structure of the main headline in its English-language edition: "3 Palestinians shot dead after multiple attacks kill tourist, wound 12". Here's what those few words convey:

• Three more Palestinian Arabs are dead, shot by someone. Heaven only knows why.
• This happened after "multiple attacks". There are no actual attackers.
• The victims of the attacks are three Palestinians, a tourist and 12 wounded

In the Petach Tikva stabbing attack [see our post here], Ma'an says the Palestinian is a seventeen year old, Abd Al-Rahman Radad, from a village called al-Zawiya. The Arabic version of the same report calls him 18 and "the victim". With the non-stop incitement and glorification of murderers being done by Hamas and the PA [see "08-Mar-16: The lethal anguish of "moderate" Abbas"], this Arab teen was indeed a victim - of the sickening kleptocrats who have gotten wealthy on the backs of ordinary Palestinian Arabs and by holding tenaciously to power as their society sinks further back into the Dark Ages.

Neither of Ma'an's two reports on the Petach Tikva terror manages to reveal that the stabbing teen's life ended at the hands of his visibly-Jewish victim, a burly Israeli of 40 (one source idiotically calls him "an elderly orthodox Jewish man") by the name of Yonatan Azarihab and a father of 5. Mr Azarihab overcame the several knife-slashings in his upper body and, somehow grabbing hold of the knife that had been plunged into his neck, pulled it out and thrust it into the body of the Arab, terminating his terrorism career prematurely.

Taylor Force, murdered on Jaffa's seashore promenade
yesterday

In Tuesday's knifing rampage in southern Tel-Aviv ["08-Mar-16: Yet another Arab-on-Israeli terror attack today - stabbing in Jaffa"], we now know a little about the man who was murdered at a spot about 1.5 kilometers away from where the visiting US Vice-President was meeting at that moment with a retired Israeli public figure. Taylor Allen Force, 29, was a West Point graduate who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a field artillery officer with the US Army between May 2009 and August 2014, and was until yesterday a student at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. His wife who was with him when they were attacked is in hospital with very serious injuries inflicted by the same terrorist.

Ma'an says the attacker is a 22-year-old from a village, al-Zawiya, near Qalqiliya. It gives his name as Bashar Masalha. What does Ma'an tell its readers about the man who was murdered by the villager? Not his name, not his age, not his background or anything about his life; just that he was "an American tourist". Nor do they mention how an Israeli musician, sitting near the beach and strumming on his guitar, gave the fleeing knife-man a massive whack on the head, destroying his musical instrument but slowing the murderer down so that the armed security people in pursuit could catch up with him and eventually stop him,

Not surprisingly, the Arabic version of the Ma'an report, the one which the editors assume will not be read by people outside the Arab world, honors the knife-man in a sub-heading as "shaheed", or "martyr". Mr Force is not mentioned at all. Hamas, whether because it's true or because they wish it were, issued a Tweet [here] saying the killer came from its ranks. The American man he murdered is dismissed as "a Zionist".

In the machine-gun assault on a pair of Israeli police on busy Salah al-Din Street in Israel's capital yesterday ["08-Mar-16: In Jerusalem, a shooting attack"], Ma'an identifies the now-dead shooter as Fouad Abu Rajab al-Tamimi, 21. (Tamimi clan members are mentioned frequently in this blog.) In the Ma'an Arabic version, his death came "during a gun battle with Israeli forces".

It's called lethal reporting when writers and editors for news organizations engage in turning terrorists into heroes and figures to be emulated. It's a form of journalism in which further deaths and suffering are assured.