With "Mainstream" reporting, there's always a subtext

...And it's often repulsive

My friend Andrea Widburg at American Thinker always provides “recommended reading.” I particularly recommend her essay of June 8, “Four living hostages are back in Israel, and the Hamas lovers are furious.”

The counter-terrorist hostage rescue operation just carried out in Gaza by Israeli forces was, in its complexity, its precision, its daring and its success, not so different from the counter-terrorist operation in 1976 in which Israeli commandos rescued 102 of 106 passengers and crew of the hijacked Air France Flight 139, who were held hostage at the Entebbe, Uganda airport.

Four Entebbe hostages were killed by their captors, including one elderly Israeli woman who had been removed to a hospital before the rescue operation and was murdered there on orders from Ugandan President Idi Amin.

As in the Entebbe operation, the Israeli rescuers in Gaza suffered one fatality; at Entebbe, that sole fatality was Yonatan Netanyahu, commander of the elite unit and the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s current Prime Minister (the operation had been conceived under the codename Operation Thunderbolt but was retroactively codenamed Operation Yonatan).

The Israeli commandos killed all the hijackers, as well as other terrorists who had joined them in Uganda and 45 Ugandan soldiers deployed to support the terrorists. In addition, 11 Ugandan warplanes were destroyed.

The Entebbe operation was celebrated in Raid on Entebbe, a 1977 TV movie with a cast that included two of my own favorite actors: Charles Bronson (who, like me, had once been a Pitchman on the Atlantic City Boardwalk!) played an Israeli general, and Yaphet Kotto (who was of Cameroonian heritage and was Jewish!) played Idi Amin. In 2018 another film, Entebbe (aka 7 Days in Entebbe) also celebrated the bravery and heroism of the hostages and their rescuers.

What a far cry from the way this recent hostage rescue is being reported!

Upon reading Andrea Widburg’s American Thinker piece, I sent her an e-mail with the following thoughts and observations:

1) Will we ever learn just what sort of treatment the hostages were subjected to while in captivity? Does anyone believe they were treated with any semblance of humanity, let alone according to the Geneva Convention? Has the “journalism establishment” decided that the public has no need to know such details?

2) Speaking of the “journalism establishment,” I’ve noticed that the way this hostage rescue is being reported (at least in the short radio newscasts that I’ve heard) is like this:

“In a daring raid, Israeli forces rescued four hostages who had been held in Gaza since Oct. 7. They had been kidnapped during a music festival.”

Oh? Was there a music festival in Israel in October, during which people were kidnapped?

Hmmm…I guess the average person is supposed to have a very short memory; I guess that was sort of like “some people did something”. Not like it was part of some earth-shaking, unprecedentedly monstrous act of pure, calculated evil. Not like it was the equivalent, for Israel, of the attacks on 9/11 (and arguably worse, given the horrific acts committed upon individuals, particularly women and babies), but a mere “kidnapping from a music festival.”

Well, Andrea responded, by sending me this essay by Bonchie on RedState.com, “The Press Reactions to Israel Rescuing the Hostages Will Make Your Blood Boil” (also highly-recommended reading — PLEASE!), which documents and deconstructs the deliberately misleading spin being applied (by so many so-called “journalists”) to reporting about the Gaza hostage rescue, and ends with the following observation:

Long story short: The mainstream press is awful. There is no low its members won't stoop to, and that includes becoming propagandists for terrorists. 

I couldn’t say that any better. Except that I will add something I’ve been saying for many years: We are dealing with masters of propaganda who make the infamous Dr. Goebbels look like a mere tyro.

ST