“This whole conflict,” the foreign journalist said over coffee, “is a prime time show; the Palestinians provide us with the more romantic story.”

We quote from an article by documentary film-maker Pierre Rehov at Gatestone:

Terrorism is a show; it needs a producer and a distributor.

Without a certain complicity from the international media, terrorism would not be so effective and might even disappear altogether.

While Hamas is raining rockets and missiles on the Israeli civilian population, and in return is suffering a high level of destruction and hundreds of casualties as a result of collateral damage, one might ask: “What is the purpose?” The same question is also true of suicide terrorism. The genuine aim seems to be to gather sympathy while terrorizing the enemy, with an audience on an unlimited number of channels. …

If a rocket succeeds in going through Israel’s anti-missile defense and causing damage to Israel, Hamas is “showing its strength,” by hitting the Jewish state. If a retaliation by Israel sadly results in the death of Arab civilians, Hamas is “showing how inhuman Israel is,” and therefore how much Israel deserves the world’s opprobrium. For Hamas and similar terror groups, therefore, the “show” is always a win-win. …

The media are the real leaders of the free world. …

And to a large extent they are abusing that power.

There should never be a moral equivalence painted between the deliberate killing of civilians, and a retaliation that tragically leads to casualties among civilians. Yet, in the eye of the camera, there is. A dead child covered with blood is the strong moment of the show. [So] Hamas is asking [ordering] the population of Gaza to stay in their homes, while Israel is asking the civilians in Gaza to run away from places it might bomb. I imagine the leaders of Hamas, who are running the show, hiding in the basement of schools, mosques, hospitals, and tunnels, making comments on the latest developments: “More blood. We need more blood.”

The media who are pro-Palestinian, when they do not find enough horrific images from inside Gaza, recycle old pictures, Photoshop them, or use footage from other conflicts, mostly from Iraq and Syria. In the current conflict, they are already doing just that.

Even though YouTube, Facebook and other social media are useful in building a larger audience for the show, reporters and journalists play their role. Sadly, they do not have a choice.

We think this article is good, but just there we have to disagree. They do have a choice: “Report what Hamas wants  you to, or lose your accreditation with us and so possibly your job”. (Almost all of them make the wrong choice.)

– As Rehov goes on to demonstrate:

As the journalist went on to explain, “Palestinians have written the scenario of this prime-time piece. As the editors say, ‘If it bleeds, it leads’.” 

On the field, they are urged to send back a “juicy” story that might even make the front page. 

A reporter is a professional, making a living by writing up what he sees and hears … Reporters risk theirs lives.

In the West Bank, they are taken in hand by Palestinian “translators,” fixers trained to escort journalists the same way that in the Soviet era, sputniks, or “minders,” were trained to promote communism, and to make sure that the tourists and journalists saw only what the government wanted them to see, and, even more, that thy did not see what the government did not want them to see. … In the Middle East, reporters are threatened, except in Israel.

Their choice becomes a simple one: promote the Palestinian point of view (or whichever), or stop working in the West Bank (or wherever).

Rehov himself was offered a lucrative opportunity by a Palestinian to get world attention by filming a dead child whom he would have to say was “killed by an Israeli soldier”.

When making one of my documentaries, the Palestinian who was leading my crew offered me a scoop. As I was French, he trusted me to be on the Palestinians’ side. “You know,” he said, “what pays well? When an Israeli soldier kills a child. Are you interested?” he continued. “We can arrange that. For $10,000, I can organize everything.” Was he talking of a staging, or the real killing of a child? I did not dare to ask. I still nurture hope, despite the facts, that people would not willingly sacrifice children just to promote a show.

Our guess? Had it been some other Western film-maker and the offer had been accepted, a child would have been killed in front of the camera by “an Israeli soldier”; the “Israeli soldier” would have been fake, but the killing of the child would have been real.

Too far-fetched? Beyond any human being’s capacity for evil? Not at all. Hamas is having hundreds of real children killed by real Israeli soldiers right now in order to have them photographed and shown in newspapers and on television and computer screens all over the world. For that and that only they are forcing their children to suffer and die.

Could anything be more immoral, more absolutely evil, than this: to insist, despite advance warnings, that civilians, including as many children as possible, stay in or on the building – a house, a school, a hospital – from which rockets are being launched, so that they will be killed and maimed and dismembered when the rocket base is struck, simply in order to exploit the moral sentiment of the Western world by showing it the wounded and the dead with help from complicit media? Children as theater props, bleeding and dead.

As Rehov says:

Everything in Palestinian society is designed to promote martyrdom.

In fact the Palestinians were created as a separate nation by the Arab states in order to be martyrs. That is their function in Arab and Islamic politics and international relations. That is why rich and powerful Arabs don’t help them. That is why their sympathizers in the UN and wherever else keep them dependent on aid.

The Palestinians have embraced that role. And they will go on martyring themselves as long as the West allows them to. And no longer.