Anti-Israel Media Bias: An Idiot's Guide

By Noah Beck, Op-Ed Contributor Tuesday, November 03, 2015

This instructive video shows what news reports would look like if they applied their outrageous Israel-reporting techniques to terrorist attacks in the rest of the world. In the hope of lessening the egregious anti-Israel bias, here are some pointers to members of the media:

1) Your job is to report facts, not reinforce a narrative. Really. The facts matter, they form the basis for judgments. So here are some facts for you, meticulously documented and updated (with details and graphs worthy of a data scientist) in a shared Google spreadsheet by Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho.

According to his data, in the 50 days from Sept. 11 through Oct.31, there have been 1,315 Arab Muslim attacks on Jews, including stabbings, bombings, rock-throwing, etc. That's about 26 attacks per day resulting in the murder of 11 innocent Jews. Adjusted for the U.S. population, that's over 1,000 knife, bomb, and other attacks per day that kill 440 people during 50 days of terror. How would the U.S. react to that?

2) Remember that the weaker party can be wrong. Actually, when a Palestinian man stabs a 70-year-old woman, he's not even the weaker party. Sometimes Palestinians do indefensible things. Sometimes Israel is guilty of only trying to protect its citizens from insanely hateful violence. And as an honest reporter, you should try to show this.

3) Properly identify the terrorist and the victim when reporting on casualties, and describe the main causal sequence of events with relevant context. That's how you avoid headlines like "Jewish man uses his neck to attack the blade of Palestinian's knife." The BBC's distortions were actually not far from that when they effectively turned terrorists into victims. The BBC's bias is so egregious that even their former chief complained.

4) Do your homework on this region. Learn its basic history so that you don't moronically suggest (as The New York Times did) that Jews have no historical connection to the Temple Mount. Otherwise it looks like you're trying to support Palestinian revisionism against basic facts and endless archaeological evidence (including what a 10-year-old recently discovered).

Noah Beck is the author of "The Last Israelis," a submarine thriller about the Iranian nuclear threat and the doomsday scenario that it could produce.