ABC journalists lost in ‘moral chasm’ on Israel
You would think journalists, of all people, would know the difference between a hostage and a prisoner. You would think these people who are meant to report the truth would know there’s a huge, gaping difference between taking someone hostage and locking someone up for a crime.
Everyone else knows it. Everyone else knows there’s no moral equivalence between kidnapping a citizen in the dead of night and imprisoning someone following a fair trial. The former is one of the vilest crimes. The latter is what society does to punish vile crimes. A child could understand this.
And yet it seems some at the ABC do not. It seems there are journalists at the national broadcaster whose minds have been so fried by wokeness that they struggle to make a moral distinction between hostage-taking and legitimate law and order.
Consider the internal ABC memo on Israel-Gaza that Al Jazeera published on Tuesday. It’s a shocking document. It’s a three-page whinge by ABC staff over what they hilariously see as the ABC’s “pro-Israel” bias. What are they smoking?
We use language that favours “the Israeli narrative” and discounts the Palestinian narrative, the memo writers moan. And one of the examples they give to back up their delirious belief that the ABC is a hotbed of Israelophilia concerns hostages and prisoners.
“We mention the number of Israeli hostages in many stories, but we never mention the number of Palestinian prisoners in Israel,” they say. Read that again. Think about what’s being said here. The memo writers clearly thought this was a slam-dunk argument, hard proof that their employer is in bed with the Jewish state. But in truth it only exposes the moaners’ own moral rot, the extent to which their hatred for Israel has corroded both their critical and ethical faculties.
For it should be clear to everyone who isn’t a sociopath why broadcasters don’t feel the need to mention Palestinian prisoners in Israel every time they mention Israeli hostages in Gaza – because they are not the same thing.
Palestinians in Israeli jails are either awaiting trial, have already been tried, or are held in administrative detention, often for offences such as rioting or terrorism.
The Israelis being kept in dark, damp tunnels by Hamas, or chained to the bed of some Islamic Jihad hothead, have done nothing whatsoever to deserve their inhuman fate.
They committed no crime, caused no public nuisance. The only thing they’re “guilty” of is being Jewish in Israel. It is for this reason and this reason alone the anti-Semitic army of Hamas stole them from their homes and condemned them to captivity.
That some at the ABC cannot seem to tell the difference between the racist kidnapping of Jews and the legitimate jailing of Palestinians who have committed offences is genuinely disturbing. That really is what the memo writers are implying: that there’s an equivalence between Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, so the ABC must always mention both in order to prove it is impartial.
But that wouldn’t be impartiality – it would be insanity. It would be like the ABC mentioning how many prisoners there are in Australia every time it reported on the Taliban’s kidnapping of Aussie academic Timothy Weeks back in 2016. It would be like making sure you mention cheese every time you mention chalk.
The ABC memo provides a grim insight into the moral decay at the national broadcaster. It’s from a meeting of 200 staff members in November. Al Jazeera got hold of it via a freedom of information request and published it in full for the first time this week. It’s a hot mess of moral relativism, a seething cry of anti-Israel rage masquerading as a plea for neutrality. It complains that the ABC is content to describe Hamas’s October 7 attack as “barbaric” and “savage” but reluctant to describe Israel’s response as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”.
What are they talking about? As journalists they ought to know what words mean. They ought to know “barbaric” means “extremely cruel and unpleasant”, making it an entirely apt descriptor for Hamas’s rape, kidnap and slaughter of hundreds of Jews on October 7. And they ought to know that “genocide” is a far more contested term. It is not merely descriptive, it is highly charged. It is the most serious accusation that can be made against a state.
How depressing that people at the ABC cannot see it’s totally fine to refer to a barbaric act as “barbaric”, but deeply problematic – and I would say flat-out wrong – to rebrand a just war against racist terrorists as a “genocide”.
Words are their trade, yet they don’t seem to understand them.
Then the memo writers’ unhinged moral equivalence really goes off the rails. What “qualitative difference” is there, they ask, between the killings of October 7 and the deaths that have occurred as a result of Israel’s subsequent war on Hamas? “What qualifies the first as a massacre, but not the second?” they ask their bosses.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this. Except perhaps to say: if you cannot tell the difference between the conscious targeting of civilians for rape and murder and the accidental death of civilians in war, then you have come completely unstuck from morality. If you cannot see the moral chasm that separates the stabbing and shooting of people on account of their Jewishness and the highly regrettable collateral damage of civilian deaths in war, then you have utterly abandoned reason.
Let me spell it out for the head-scratchers at the ABC who struggle to see a “qualitative difference” between a racist pogrom and a war.
The former is the conscious, willing destruction of innocent life from the standpoint of venomous racial hatred. The latter is a tragedy, always, but also as old as time.
Hamas’s pogrom was an act of violent eugenicism that shamed our species. Israel’s war on Hamas is something nobody wants, least of all Israel itself, but which Hamas made inevitable when it carried out its carnival of Jew murder on October 7.
The noisy hate for Israel in much of the press and on our streets can sometimes blind us to the moral truth of this terrible conflict. Which is that Hamas started it and Hamas now refuses to end it by returning the hostages and surrendering to Israel. The moral responsibility for the current calamity in the Middle East lies entirely with the fascistic army that lit this hellish fire on October 7.
To me, it is nothing short of chilling that a chunk of ABC staff seems not to understand the difference between racist slaughter and war. Or between terrorism and counter-terrorism. Or between the intentional murder of women and children and the accidental killing of women and children. Or even between a hostage and a prisoner.
Fundamentally, they cannot tell the difference between the purveyors of fascism and the victims of fascism. Their moral obliviousness is startling. That these people help to oversee the flow of information leaves me cold.
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