An AFP photographer captured images of Fatah supporters in Bethlehem carrying a huge sign glorifying Dallal al-Mughrabi, but the news agency's captions whitewash the arch-terrorist who slaughtered dozens of unarmed men, women and children in the bloodiest terror attack against Israeli civilians.
Journalists give a huge platform to Banksy's tiny "Scar of Bethlehem" installation depicting the nativity scene in front of Israel's security barrier topped with a bullet hole, an anti-Israel motif evoking antisemitic charges of deicide.
Harking back to 2015, when mainstream media outlets routinely published headlines falsely casting Palestinian perpetrators as victims, two leading wire services once again offer up headlines turning a reported Palestinian assailant into the victim.
The New York Times runs a front-page AFP photo of a projectile over Gaza City, identifying it as an "Israeli missile." The founder of Israel's missile defense program says the projectile resembles a Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli missile.
With the insertion of just three words, Agence France Presse manages to completely distort the very nature of Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and the Israeli army's air strikes targeting terrorists and their weaponry. Thus, numerous AFP articles and captions today refer to the violent exchange as "tit-for-tat," language which denotes equivalency.
An Agence France Presse photo caption whitewashes an Islamic Jihad terrorist killed while he was reportedly preparing to fire rockets at Israel, saying only that Mohammed Hamuda was a Palestinian killed in an Israeli air strike.
While The Washington Post headline whitewashing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an "austere religious scholar" was particularly egregious given that ISIS is the world's most dangerous terror group, it is not unique. Other terrorists who received favorable media coverage include Brussels terrorist Mehdi Nammouche (pictured), convicted bomber Rasmeah Odeh, hijacker Leila Khaled and more.
AFP captions claim that Imad Shahin died of injuries "sustained during a protest." In fact, according to Palestinian and Israeli sources, he was fatally shot as he was attempting to cross into Israel.
CAMERA prompts the correction of more than one dozen AFP captions which whitewashed Hamas terrorist Bassam al-Sayeh, erasing his conviction for his role in the October 2015 shooting murder of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin in front of their four children. Editors commendably add the essential information and fix additional problematic elements of the captions.
A series of Agence France-Presse photo captions erase the crimes of Bassam al-Sayeh, convicted for his role in the 2015 murders of Rabbi Eitam and Naama Henkin. The captions, released in the wake of al-Sayeh's death, also ignore that he died from cancer, falsely implying that prison conditions were at fault.
