Police Cruelly Deny Journalists Opportunity To Report Lynch By Jews

“To my great dismay, the police undermined my ability to provide our audience with a visceral confirmation of my biases.”

Rishon LeTzion, November 2 – Law enforcement personnel in this Tel Aviv suburb displayed what journalists are describing as intense lack of consideration for a good anti-Israel story by intervening to prevent passers by from lynching a Palestinian who had just stabbed three people, reporters lamented today.

On Monday afternoon, a 19-year-old Palestinian from Hebron went on a stabbing rampage near Rishon Letzion’s central bus station, seriously wounding an eighty-year-old woman and a forty-year-old man, and lightly injuring a man in his mid-twenties. A crowd of people chased and subdued the attacker, after which a combination of police and civilians prevented the assembled throng from killing him. Reporters from Haaretz, the BBC, the Guardian, CNN, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times registered a complaint with the police, saying that the authorities’ premature action meant that, as journalists covering Israel, they were unable to report an instance of Israeli brutality and lawlessness to balance out the constant steam of Palestinian attacks on Israelis.

Exacerbating the situation, said NY Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, another stabbing occurred soon afterwards in the coastal city of Natanya, seriously wounding a 71-year-old man, and there, too, law enforcement prevented a lynch of the suspect. “Our operative context in covering this beat is Israeli oppression and brutality as a trigger and justification for Palestinian violence,” she explained. “But conveying that narrative becomes challenging and cumbersome when the humanity and restraint of Israelis – especially official organs of the security apparatus such as the police – are front and center. Such behavior seriously undermines our ability to do our jobs in depicting Israel as the irredeemable aggressor.”

Rudoren’s colleague Diaa Hadid showed PreOccupied Territory a draft of the article she had prepared to file, gleefully showcasing what she expected to be a rare instance of Israelis behaving as typical of Palestinians in recent weeks, only to discover that no such wantonness has occurred. “It was devastating,” she recalled. “I’m still reeling. The police ruined such a good story. It’s unconscionable.”

BBC correspondent Thinly Veighled said he managed to salvage a description of the throng chanting, “Death to Arabs,” but that the tameness of the reaction, in comparison to repeated Palestinian attempts to actually kill Jews, left him unsatisfied and frustrated. “My duty as a journalist is to further the narrative of Jewish perfidy, aggression, and provocation, as the root cause of Arab violence,” he explained. “To my great dismay, the police undermined my ability to provide our audience with a visceral confirmation of my biases.”

Al Jazeera ignored the actual events, and reported that a Palestinian had been lynched anyway.