Would-be Assassin Stripped of Shirt, Media Hypocrisy Ensues
News giants weaponize security measures, fueling bigotry.
When a wannabe assassin was captured and arrested days ago, the world saw images of him pinned to the ground, shirtless. What followed, from the media, was profound hypocrisy.
It’s a story involving media lies, anti-terrorism efforts, sexual violence against hostages, my northeastern hometown, and the “underwear bomber.” In the latest episode, I explain.
SOP vs. ‘war crime’ claims
Podcast host and former guest Mike Pesca pointed this out in my Substack feed:
“Oh look they took off his clothes. Standard operating procedure for someone who might be a terrorist, or… war crime? Interesting to see how many of the hundreds of journalists in the room alleged ‘war crime’ in this case, when it is their safety that is being protected.”
Of course, no journalists seem to have called this a war crime. But when Israel captures potential terrorists — fighting-age males in areas that civilians were told to evacuate — Israel has stripped down the men to underwear to check for weapons. And the media rushed to platform “war crime” claims — the same media that generally refuses to mention the sexual violence that prisoners from Israel suffered for months on end in Gaza’s tunnels. These are war crimes.
The same media also ignores Hamas stripping and slaughtering Gazans.
But the images of Israeli forces became literally the biggest story on Earth, a massive scandal. I pulled up one particularly telling example, from December 2023 on CNN. First, the network warned viewers that the images were “disturbing” and may be “upsetting.” Then, they showed men in Gaza, outside near their point of capture, in underwear.
Let’s take a moment to note how the media never says it may be “disturbing” to watch images of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank hand out candy and shoot fireworks to celebrate the slaughter of Jewish children.
Then CNN went to a reporter — someone who lies openly, and whom I’ve corrected. “While we don’t know whether some of these men may be Hamas fighters, we know that all of them are not,” said Jeremy Diamond. (That wasn’t what he meant.) “And that’s because some of these men have already been identified by their relatives, some of whom spoke with CNN. Among them includes at least one journalist, a correspondent for al-Araby al-Jadeed, who was identified by his employer. You can see these men in these images. They are blindfolded. They have been stripped down to their underwear.”
Nearly everything was wrong with that “report.” CNN did not “know” that some were not terrorists; it had claims from people calling themselves relatives.
And the Arabic network he mentioned is funded by a Qatari businessman with close ties to the Qatari government. It has faced accusations of “being a Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece,” according to Honest Reporting. Days ago, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies reported that the network platforms pro-extremist, antisemitic material. Then again, so do big mainstream Western news outlets.)Many so-called “journalists” in Gaza are ultimately proven to be terrorists.
To CNN, claims from those sources count as fact, but nothing Israel says counts as fact. The suspected terrorists seen captured in the video were stripped to their underwear because they could easily have weapons in their pants.
Meanwhile, Islamist terrorists have been known to plant bombs in their underwear. In 2012, “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was sentenced to life in prison for the attempted bombing of a U.S. Christmas Day flight. (If you wish to see the world’s most disturbing and uncomfortable undergarment, here it is.)
Immediately before this segment, CNN aired a report from my hometown of Albany, New York, where a 28-year-old man fired shots at Temple Israel, the synagogue I attended growing up. Of course, he was yelling “Free Palestine.”
So CNN went straight from that to yet another report pushing the myth of a “big bad Israel.” And now, CNN and other agencies say nothing about Cole Tomas Allen being stripped to any extent because it’s their employees’ safety at risk.
The media refuses to recognize and own its hypocrisy.
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