For years, Israellycool has been saying that AP essentially cooperates with Hamas, helping it to hide the truth about the way that it intentionally puts civilians in harms’ way while simultaneously helping it to fabricate allegations against against Israel. In a shocking report from The Guardian, we learn that AP has a long history of collaborating with those who seek to annihilate the Jewish people.
[H]istorian Harriet Scharnberg shows that AP was only able to retain its access [in Nazi Germany] by entering into a mutually beneficial two-way cooperation with the Nazi regime.The New York-based agency ceded control of its output by signing up to the so-called Schriftleitergesetz (editor’s law), promising not to publish any material “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home”.
This law required AP to hire reporters who also worked for the Nazi party’s propaganda division. One of the four photographers employed by the Associated Press in the 1930s, Franz Roth, was a member of the SS paramilitary unit’s propaganda division, whose photographs were personally chosen by Hitler. AP has removed Roth’s pictures from its website since Scharnberg published her findings, though thumbnails remain viewable due to “software issues”.
AP also allowed the Nazi regime to use its photo archives for its virulently antisemitic propaganda literature. Publications illustrated with AP photographs include the bestselling SS brochure “Der Untermensch” (“The Sub-Human”) and the booklet “The Jews in the USA”, which aimed to demonstrate the decadence of Jewish Americans with a picture of New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia eating from a buffet with his hands.
Coming just before Associated Press’s 170th anniversary in May, the newly discovered information raises not just difficult questions about the role AP played in allowing Nazi Germany to conceal its true face during Hitler’s first years in power, but also about the agency’s relationship with contemporary totalitarian regimes.
While the AP deal enabled the west to peek into a repressive society that may otherwise have been entirely hidden from view – for which Berlin correspondent Louis P Lochner won a Pulitzer in 1939 – the arrangement also enabled the Nazis to cover up some of its crimes. Scharnberg, a historian at Halle’s Martin Luther University, argued that AP’s cooperation with the Hitler regime allowed the Nazis to “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war”.
The Guardian then provides an example of how AP hid the truth about the Nazi-instigated days-long pogrom in the town of Lviv, while showcasing Russian atrocities against Germans.
Naturally, AP denied any wrongdoing. The Guardian, however, persuasively shows that AP is following a similar pattern of cooperation with North Korea’s repressive regime today.
When it comes to an open society with a free press like Israel, AP is happy to put every flaw, real or perceived, under a journalistic microscope. With repressive, murderous, and genocidal regimes, however, AP is perfectly willing to sacrifice truth and accuracy for continued “access,” and to essentially act as a propaganda tool.
AP hinted at this in December of 2014, when it admitted that during the 2014 Gaza war,
Like other media covering this story, we dealt with numerous obstacles, including Hamas intimidation . . . .
We now have evidence that AP has a history of capitulation to such pressure.
That any newspapers continue to rely on the AP’s reporting is beyond belief.
