Mainstream Media Mourns
ISIS Leader’s Death in What Isaiah Meant by “Calling Evil Good”
Breaking Israel News
Latest News Biblical perspective
By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz October 28, 2019 , 2:26 pm
“Ah, Those who call evil good And good evil;
Who present darkness as light And light as darkness; Who present bitter as
sweet And sweet as bitter! Isaiah 5:20 (The Israel Bible™)
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 25, 2019: THE WASHINGTON POST – sign
at headquarters building entrance – (Image: Shutterstock)
Fake news is only getting worse as the Washington Post
described the ISIS leader killed by U.S. Special Forces as an “austere
religious scholar.” An end-of-days expert explains that this aspect of the
media is all part of the plan in which all of mankind is being given a choice:
the truth of the Bible or the lies of the media.
President Trump’s announcement on Sunday that U.S. special forces killed
Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State (ISIS), should
have been met with universal praise however that was not the case. The headline
for the Washington Post’s obituary for the leader of the terrorist organization
read “Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic state,
dies at 48.” This was, in fact, the second incarnation of the story’s headline
though it was unclear why the original and more accurate description of
Baghdadi as the Islamic State’s “terrorist-in-chief” was changed but the
description of the terrorist as a religious leader was replaced with a still
subdued description of him being an “extremist leader.”
Trump’s 2020 campaign team was quick to use the
opportunity to earn points with a tweet that juxtaposed the Washington Post’s
“religious scholar” headline with a photo of the reality of ISIS beheadings.
The tweet went on to criticize the Washington Post
obituary which retained descriptions of the ISIS leader as “an austere religious
scholar with wire-frame glasses…maintained a canny pragmatism as
leader…Acquaintances would remember him as a shy, nearsighted youth who liked
soccer.”
Rabbi Pinchas Winston, a
prominent Torah scholar who writes extensively about the end-of-days,
said that the tikkun (fixing) for such fake news is prophesied to come about
before the arrival. He cited the Prophet Zephaniah.
“For then I will make the peoples pure of
speech, So that they all invoke Hashem
by name And serve Him with one accord. Zephaniah 3:9
“People don’t want the truth. They want a show, a show
that sells. The internet works by channeling to people what they already want,
the subjective reality they feel comfortable with, People are so bored that
they have lost their way and everything, even news, has become
entertainment. People are fascinated by reality shows but it can’t be both
reality and a show. Reality is not a show and shows are not reality. That line,
the difference between reality and show has become lost. People think their
life is a show but it isn’t. People are distant from their own lives and see
life as a show.”
“Part of the redemption, Torah, and God is a return to
objective reality. Truth is something you have to search for, the end result of
a process. It is reconnecting your subjective reality with truth and objective
reality. If you take God out of the picture, you lose objective reality. That
is why the right-wing religious live in rural areas where the natural aspect of
God is evident in everyday life. In cities, it is easy to insulate yourself in
a fabricated subjective reality of your own choosing. You can sit in a city and
argue that a boy is actually a girl but when you go out and try to milk a bull,
things get real very quickly.”
“It is no surprise that a writer for the Washington Post
can sit in an office in Washington D.C. and call the head of ISIS a ‘religious
scholar’. The partisan political expediency was more real to him than the
actual truth. If Baghdadi had been sitting in front of him, threatening to cut
off his head, the writer would probably have written an entirely different
obituary.”
Other media were more restrained but still held back from
celebrating the death lest it is construed as a political victory for the
president. During NBC’s Sunday Today, chief White House correspondent
Hallie Jackson was subdued in her report of the successful Special Forces
operation, diverting the report to a non-sequitur.
“The President’s speech this morning will be a
commander-in-chief moment for him, but consider the backdrop here,” Jackson
said. “It comes at a time when critics have really raise questions about his
policy in Syria.”
The broadcast then presented the opinion of Obama-era CIA
official Jeremy Bash who opined that the removal of al-Baghdadi had no real
effect on a situation he felt Trump was mishandling.
“So, I think this is symbolically very important,” Bash
said on the NBC broadcast. “Whether it’s militarily important really depends,
because last week or in the last two weeks, President Trump made a decision
that really took the foot off the neck of ISIS by taking the ground forces that
was containing them, the Kurds, and abandoning them.”
ABC’s Good Morning America dismissed the
successful removal of the terrorist leader simply as “the kind of thing that
Americans expect presidents to accomplish” while reminding the audience that
former-President Obama oversaw the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden.
Hadar Sela, the managing editor of BBC Watch, has been writing for the media watchdog
for more than a decade and sees the WAPO headline as business as usual for the
media.
“In the old days, we all used to trust the news. The news
was fact-checked. Now, there is a pressing need to be the first to get a story
out so that is not always true. That is especially the case with headlines.
There are a lot of stupid headlines, perhaps no more than there used to be, but
the public has reached a saturation level and has much less tolerance. And they
are frequently misleading with the headline not always reflecting what is
contained in the article.”
Sela noted that in the case of the BBC, there is a policy
that creates a built-in anti-Israel bias.
“The BBC does not, as a policy, use the word
‘terrorism’ to describe attacks against Israelis. They claim it is because
there is a military conflict going on and they don’t want to take sides,” Selah
explained, noting that this policy can sometimes lead to outright bad
journalism. She referred to a BBC headline in 2015 about an attack in the Old
City of Jerusalem in which a Palestinian armed with a knife murdered two Jews.
. An Associated Press headline originally read, “2 Palestinians killed
following stabbing attack in Jerusalem.” After complaints by media watchdog CAMERA (Committee
for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), that was slightly improved
to read, “Palestinian stabbers kill Israeli, assailants shot dead.”
“They do call it terrorism when the attacks in Europe
and, even more poignantly, they talk about Jewish terrorists when Arabs are
attacked. But terrorism should relate to the method and not the ideology behind
it,” Sela said. “This is clearly a result of the politically correct culture
that has taken over in the last few years and in its extreme form has ruined
our society.”
Tamar Sternthal, the director of the Israel Office CAMERA , noted that
what the Washington Post did by referring to al-Baghdadi as a “cleric” was
nothing new in the world of media.
“This is a particularly extreme example but we have seen
whitewashing like Hamas leaders being presented as respectable voices speaking
for humanitarian agendas and being given a platform on New York Times op-eds,”
Sternthal said. “This process of whitewashing terrorists is nothing new.”
Sternthal referred to several other cases of whitewashing
terrorists: Brussels terrorist Mehdi Nammouche who was described as “a very polite Frenchman“,
convicted bomber Rasmeah Odeh described as a “Controversial Palestinian
Activist”, and many others. In a manner similar to the recent WAPO
gaffe, the 1974 New York Times obituary described Nazi collaborator and
the founder of Palestinian nationalism, Haj al Amin Husseini as “a handsome and
soft-spoken gentleman with keen blue eyes.”
Sternthal said. In her article on the WAPO
headline, Sternthal noted a chilling trend in this trend.
“Indeed, while The Washington Post al-Baghdadi
case is an extreme example involving perhaps the world’s most notorious
terrorist, the whitewashing of terrorists who killed Israelis, Jews and others
is a common occurrence.”
The subdued media response in the wake of the removal of
al-Baghdadi became a virtual roar of white noise as just a few hours after
Trump’s press conference lauding his success, news came out of the targeted
killing of Abu Hassan al-Muhajir, an ISIS spokesman who had been tapped to be
al-Baghdadi’s successor.
In the ice-cold waters of media coverage of the Trump
administration’s major victory in the war on terror, Seth Frantzman’s article
in the Jerusalem Post
is a steaming geyser of truth under the headline “Baghdadi, Rapist, Led
Genocidal ‘Caliphate,’ Died in Tunnel.” Unlike the WAPO obituary, Frantzman’s
article paints a far more realistic picture of al-Baghdadi’s life, a grim story
indeed that describes a lifetime of unparalleled evil.
“As one Kurdish commander told me as we crouched in the
cold near the frontline in Sinjar in 2015, ‘Daesh [ISIS] must be punished and
revenge taken for what they did,” Frantzman wrote. “‘It’s not my job to decided
whether they go to heaven or hell, but rather to send them to Allah to decide.’
American special forces sent Baghdadi to his judgement. The hell on earth he
tried to create will take years to heal. But for the free peoples who rose up
in 2014 to fight and purge ISIS from Iraq and Syria, it is a good day that this
menace is gone.”
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