Opinion: Part of the culpability for the terrorism against Israelis lies with the world media

On Friday, as I was traveling through the Jordan Valley with three of my children, a man on a motorbike drew close to my vehicle and sped by it on the congested route.

He was about to start firing and shoot us all, I thought for a split second.

I took a longer route through the country on purpose as we traveled to the Gan Garoo Zoo (Park Australia) close to Beit She’an to reduce the risk in the wake of the killings of Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina in a different valley further south.

They were en route to Tiberias, where their extended family had spent the previous weekend. Due to the fact that the Dee family lived in Efrat, just across the border before 1967, they were not targeted. They were slain for the same reason that Jewish-looking Greek Orthodox monk Georgios Tsibouktzakis was assassinated there in 2001.

By its very nature, terror is unpredictable, and anyone could become a victim.

The only good to come out of the terrible killings of a mother and her two daughters is that Leo Dee, a brilliant orator and inspirational rabbi who is also a devoted husband to Lucy and the proud father of boy Yehuda and daughters Rina, Maia, Tali, and Keren, has been made known to the world.

Rabbi Dee made the decision to use his platform to promote goodness and to urge the foreign media to report Israel properly after realizing that he had been dragged into the spotlight against his will. Before his wife was laid to rest, he arranged a press conference that the Reuters wire service was present for. He also conducted interviews with nine media outlets while shivaing.

“Never accept terror as legitimate, never blame the victims for the murder, and there is no such thing as moral equivalence between terrorist and victim,” was Rabbi Dee’s advice to humanity. Terrorists are always evil.

Because media sources all around the world seemed to utilize the Dee family’s residence and passing as evidence to support the murders, the rabbi felt forced to deliver these straightforward words.

The Guardian was criticized by HonestReporting for passively using the word “killed” instead of “murdered” and for using the location of the fatalities to explain them rather than mentioning that the assailant was a terrorist. The murderer and the victims were not named in the following Associated Press headline: “Two killed in West Bank after Israel strikes Lebanon, Gaza.”

Al Jazeera’s title, which elevated victim blaming to a new level, read, “Two Israeli settlers killed in occupied West Bank shooting.” The subheadline, which dehumanized the youngsters by implying that the terrorist’s intention was to damage the car, read, “A deadly gun attack was carried out on a vehicle near the illegal Hamra settlement.”

As HonestReporting frequently reminds our readers, the international media is complicit in the murder of Jews by providing justifications for why it is happening, and by doing so, it subtly fuels the fires of additional violence.

At the press conference, Dee apologized, “We can’t trust the news.

Dee challenged the international media to refrain from attacking Israel’s existence.

He questioned, “Isn’t that how the world media treats Israel?” “We construct, they kill us, and they demolish. Since you were the one who originally built it, they claim that it is your fault.

Jews from over the world eagerly agreed to Dee’s plea to post Israeli flags on social media. His more crucial request to fairly cover Israel was less successful.

He pleaded with the world’s media, “Show me your true colors.” “Do you really think moral equivalency holds true? Will you continue to give evil a voice in order to encourage it? Do my family and I actually pose a threat to world peace? We, who propagate compassion and love? We, who prioritize life above all else? Is this murderer’s anonymity truly justified? Is he advancing his own future and moral principles? Let’s go! Get up! Pay attention to your souls. Do you honestly think that? Or does it only sell space for advertisements of consumer products that none of us actually need?

Dee’s challenge ought to serve as the standard for future media coverage of Israel. Before submitting their reports, journalists from media outlets around the world need to evaluate if they crossed that boundary.

Unfortunately, Ramadan coverage of Israel consistently violated that boundary of moral equivalence, and the cost was soon apparent.

According to HonestReporting, Palestinian violence during Ramadan was justified on three different fronts due to dangerously inaccurate reporting of what occurred at al-Aqsa and on the Temple Mount. Too many Israeli families spent Passover in bomb shelters, innocent civilians were murdered, and this happened.

Armed rioters who planned to attack worshipers were removed from the mosque by police using force. while the recordings went viral, false accounts claimed that the police had targeted Muslim worshipers, while in fact they had resorted to force in self-defense against rioters who had been planning to attack worshipers but instead turned on the police.

The world’s media must quit blaming others.
Though the Dee family murders have not yet been solved, those videos and false reports were probably also used as justifications.

Since the beginning of the Palestinian wave of violence in March 2022, this moral equivalence has been more pronounced. Over 4,000 terrorist assaults against Israelis have been carried out over that time.

According to figures gathered by HonestReporting, the global media maintains track of the number of Palestinians killed but fails to disclose that two-thirds were associated with terrorist groups or actively attempted to kill Jews. Of the 50 Israelis killed over that same period, all but eight were unarmed civilians.

The deaths of the Dee family were particularly painful because they were English-speaking Israelis, like the majority of The Jerusalem Post’s print readers. They are a typical Jewish family from Northwest London, the scene of anti-Jewish riots in 2021.

Protesters from Palestine marched while shouting, “F*** the Jews! molest their daughters!”

Two years later, explanations for Maia and Rina Dee’s deaths were offered as a result of their parents’ decision to relocate them from ostensibly safe Northwest London to ostensibly riskier Efrat. However, anti-Semitic incidents are increasing in the UK.

Two years ago, Reuters highlighted that these assaults in England were “fueled by reaction to a rise in violence in Israel and Gaza.” In other words, whether they are “settlers” or not, Jews are not safe anywhere, including Israel and the Diaspora.

I immigrated to the Jewish state, like the Dees, with the hopes of providing a better life for my family.

I’m hoping that the world’s media will learn from Leo Dee and report more responsibly in order to avert the next disaster.

The pro-Israel watchdog HonestReporting, which tracks coverage of Israel in the global mainstream and social media, has the author as its executive director and editor in chief. For 24 years, he was The Jerusalem Post’s leading political journalist and analyst.