While progressives love to hate Fox News, the pro-Israel crowd generally finds Fox less aggressively hostile to the Jewish State. That doesn’t mean that Fox is snow white when it comes to choosing page views over truth. A piece published yesterday, Israel’s prime minister and the Palestinian president trade accusations at the United Nations, is proof of that, considering that the headline is not borne out by the text.
Which makes the headline a falsehood.
The reader is confronted with a headline purporting to be evenhanded. Both the Israeli PM and the Palestinian President are said to be trading accusations. The first sentence of the piece clarifies that the two attacked each other:
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked each other in speeches before world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly.
The article goes on to cite “examples” of accusations from each side. There are plenty of real examples of Abbas taking digs at Israel/Netanyahu. However, reading through the entire piece, I see not one accusation leveled by the Israeli PM against Abbas.
Genocide
The examples are sorted according to subject matter. On the subject of genocide for example, Abbas accuses Israel of waging a “war of genocide,” deliberately targeting civilians, and committing war crimes. But when it comes to Netanyahu’s supposed accusation/attack, the article cites Netanyahu speaking about the use of human shields by Hamas militia. Nothing about Abbas. Nothing about genocide.
A Chance At Peace
Abbas accuses Israel of scuttling all efforts at peace by way of breached agreements, land confiscations, and so on.
Netanyahu? He says Israel wants peace, but the challenge is militant Islam and a need for a broad rapprochement between Israel and the Arab countries. Where is the accusation here? Nothing about Abbas. No blame. No accusation.
A challenge is cited. Not a challenge from Abbas and his people, but from militant Islam in general. And by the way, since when is experiencing a challenge the same thing as leveling an accusation?
Occupation
Abbas accuses Israel of occupying Arab land.
Netanyahu says Israel doesn’t occupy Arab land. This is an attack? An accusation? No. It’s a denial of Abbas’ claim, or a refutation.
Not an accusation. Not an attack.
Hamas
The article cites no accusation on either side, which proves that the headline is only “link bait” or something to tempt and draw in readers. Abbas defends the unity government he made with Hamas. Netanyahu explains why he sees Hamas and ISIS in the same light.
UN Resolution
No accusation here, either. Though you might be excused for calling Abbas’ threat an “attack” against Israel. Abbas calls on the UN Security Council to end the Israeli “occupation.”
Netanyahu calls for direct negotiations.
The End.
The thing that irks me most about that lying son-of-a-gun of a headline is that Israel comes first, as if Israel were the primary party responsible for starting this whole game of one-upmanship in which the two sides trade barbs. Except there’s no game and no two sides trading. One side making digs at the other side. Not Israel. Fox lists not a single accusation by Netanyahu against Abbas in the entirety of this piece.
Which is kind of ironic, considering that in his address, Netanyahu did definitely take a potshot against Abbas or rather at the world at large:
It’s the same moral universe where a man who wrote a dissertation of lies about the Holocaust and who insists on a Palestine free of Jews — Judenrein — can stand at this podium and shamelessly accuse Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
I guess Fox or its source, the AP, completely missed that reference to Abbas’ doctoral dissertation which bore this oh-so-delectable title, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.
As we say in Hebrew: v’ha’mayveen, yaveen.
