Check out these names…Terry Lloyd…Paul Moran…Gary Rado…Michael Kelly…and so forth.
These are among the dozen combat reporters who were killed recently while covering this and that conflict or another, somewhere around the world.
They’re among the hundred or so who are killed each year when caught in the line of fire.
Around a dozen combat reporters were killed recently while covering this and that conflict or another, somewhere around the world.
Chances are that you never heard of them. They came. They saw. They reported…and then it was over for them.
They were mourned by the people closest to them, privately, respectfully…but for the living, life goes on.
But here’s one deceased combat reporter whose name, Shireen Abu Akleh, is now splattered all over the news…as if she were one of a kind.
That’s because this Al-Jazeera reporter got hit in a firefight between the IDF and Palestinian Arabs, and the rush to judgment falls, without evidence, against the Israelis.
The fog of war happened as the IDF were in Arab-occupied Jenin in order to root out nests of terrorists.
Jenin, in the Samaria region, is actually, originally, the Biblical Levite city of Ein-Ganim, stronghold of the Israelite tribe Issachar.
It doesn’t get more Jewish than that.
But Jenin is now in the hands of some 40,000 Palestinian Arabs, and it is administered by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, which got lucky at the Oslo Accords.
Abbas is not always so lucky. Usually, in order to fire up his fellow Islamists, he resorts to inflammatory rhetoric per the usual canard about Jews coming for the al-Aqsa mosque.
That’s one way to incite more bloodshed, and often, it works, as we see from the recent wave of murders against Israeli civilians.
Years earlier, during the Mohammad al-dura hoax, Palestinian Arab leaders saw the perfect chance, and took it, to light the match that sparked an intifada bloodlust.
That’s when all hell breaks loose due to a false report. The mobs are ignited. Reflexively, the media take their side and blame the Jews.
On the scene ourselves, we tell the story in a book through the eyes of a doubting bigtime New York journalist.
Gradually and finally, he becomes dramatically aware of the deceptions; Arab blood libels, and media corruption favoring that one side over the other. Thus, we hear a BBC correspondent telling a Hamas rally…” Journalists are fighting shoulder to shoulder together with the Palestinian people.”
Indeed, It was that way during and after the al-dura fabrication when even the Atlantic, a left-wing magazine, proved the Israelis innocent.
But added…alas” people will believe what they want to believe.”
No one knows this better than Mahmoud Abbas.
A journalist got killed during deadly action between Arabs and Israelis.
That’s his golden bullet to stir up his mobs, and to grandstand the media, and to go crying to the International Criminal Court.
The Israelis are always careful to avoid civilian casualties. That’s a fact. The Palestinian Arabs aim and shoot directly at civilians. This too is a fact.
But Abbas knows how to play this game.
That’s why he refuses to cooperate with the Israelis at finding out who shot that bullet.
Chances are, therefore, that it came from an Arab rifle.
Even if otherwise, combat journalists know the risks.
Stuff happens.
In fact, the lady would be alive today if her fellow Arabs weren’t in the business of killing people.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
