July 8 ‘Media Critique’: ”Humanizing the Murderer”

I should be completely inured to HonestReportings hypocrisy and stupidity by now, but this latest ‘Media Critique’ was another WTF! moment.

HR is concerned over some media's coverage that placed,

emphasis on the attacker's motives to humanize him and "explain" his actions

It’s just that favourite old canard that media examination of motivation in such incidents is actually legitimisation of them. Given that the attacker was human, it’s hard to see the problem with humanisation, unless HR is suggesting that de-humanisation is the right approach? And of course HR are careful to restrict their sampling (ie distort by omission) of the media to suit their own ends. Exactly the same kind of coverage appeared in the Israeli media, eg. in Ha'aretz , YnetNews, and even in the Jerusalem Post, from which HR quoted an excerpt of an article that is critical of other media for exploring motives! It’s comedy (or hypocrisy) central. But you can’t sell this as ‘anti-Israel media bias’ if the Israeli media is doing precisely the same thing, so HR carefully avoid mentioning this. The HR sheep may be quite dim, but it would be too much to expect even of them that their credulity could stretch so far as to swallow that.

But nothing HR say can be taken at face value. Outraged over attempts to “explain” murderous actions today, while yesterday it was a very different story………November 2002 and UNRWA employee, Iain Hook, is killed by the IDF in Jenin.

An innocent unarmed man is killed. Knowing how much HR detest “humanizing the murderer” or even any attempt to "explain" it, their ‘Media Critique’ of that day laments that “media outlets have failed to report the Israeli side of this story”.

And remember HRs whine just 6 days ago about the BBC headline?

the latest BBC headline "Bulldozer rampage hits Jerusalem", is also fundamentally flawed, failing to attribute the attack to the Palestinian individual who carried it out. Instead it refers to an inanimate machine as the instigator. Of course, the bulldozer did not carry out its actions of its own free will.

So, how did HR describe the murder of Iain Hook ?

United Nations worker Iain Hook was killed by an IDF bullet

Ah, that would be the bullet of free will.

According to HRs standards of 6 days ago this was “fundamentally flawed’, “shocking” and “despicable”.