Hamas-shielding AP went too far…By seeking a journalism prize for its propaganda, AP showed it is irredeemably evil

by Don Surber

Never write angry, but this injustice is so outrageous, I might be tempted to think that self-righteous anger is a good thing in this case. But self-righteous anger belongs to God alone for He knows far more than we ever will.

So I will stick to my lane and try to deal in a calm manner with the unadulterated evil of the Associated Press. Under leadership no longer moored to facts or objectivity, it has become a worldwide propagandist for Hamas and other Islamic terrorists. Commies, too.

AP just won an award for its pro-terrorist coverage of the Palestinian attack on Israel. People call it Hamas but it is just like blaming only the Nazis for World War II because the vast majority of Germans — like the Palestinians now — were all in favor of destroying Jews and anyone else who got in their way.

For years, AP’s bureau in Gaza City provided cover for the military intelligence of Hamas. As long as AP was in there, Israel could not bomb the place.

This was an open secret. Matti Friedman wrote of it in The Atlantic in 2014:

When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

So Hamas as launching rockets protected from exposure by AP for years. Finally, Israel had enough in 2021 and called up AP and gave its staff an hour to vamoose before the IDF destroyed the building. The AP played dumb. Its president and CEO at the time, Gary Pruitt, “We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building. This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”

No indication?

The Atlantic article was every indication that Pruitt or anyone else in management needed. The magazine laid out how AP and the rest of the news organizations do the bidding of Hamas. AP hired Hamas-approved local writers and photojournalists and failed to disclose this to readers and the news groups that paid AP for stories and photos.

If AP was not doing that — as Pruitt implied — then AP management had a duty to fight this defamation.

But it was not defamation. It was the truth — the very kryptonite of the modern news organization. And so Pruitt and the rest of the people who are supposed to make sure AP’s sticks to journalism ignored the story. They hoped it would go away.

And it did go away until October 7, 2023, when Palestinians broke the 15th ceasefire between Israel and its various attackers over the past nearly eight decades. The Palestinians raped, tortured and murdered 1,400 Jews, torturing their bodies afterward. It was a sneak attack that AP knew about in advance because when the attackers attacked, AP was there to record the savagery.

Or so a lawsuit claims.

The New York Post reported in February,

“Several survivors of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel have accused the Associated Press in a new lawsuit of aiding and abetting the terrorist organization by using freelance photojournalists believed to be embedded with the violent militants.

“The plaintiffs — Israeli-Americans and Americans who attended the Nova music festival raided by Hamas as well as loved ones of victims — are suing the news outlet for damages under the Antiterrorism Act, according to the federal complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida Wednesday night.

“They are being represented by lawyers working with the nonprofit National Jewish Advocacy Center who accuse the major media company of ‘materially supporting terrorism’ by paying alleged Hamas-associated photojournalists for images captured during and immediately after the Oct. 7 invasion.”

The lawsuit says,

“There is no doubt that AP’s photographers participated in the October 7th massacre, and that AP knew, or at the very least should have known, through simple due diligence, that the people they were paying were longstanding Hamas affiliates and full participants in the terrorist attack that they were also documenting.”

The Post said,

“the majority of the complaint focuses on one photojournalist, Hassan Eslaiah — who has been accused of being a Hamas associate even before the terrorist groups’ bloody invasion of Israel.”

He’s the one being smooched by the Hamas commander in the photo.

Now if I faced such serious allegations, I would refrain from drawing attention to it, but AP believes it is untouchable. AP submitted the work of Eslaiah and 5 other tag-along terrorists for a journalism award. It is called spiking the ball.

AP tells readers these are just freelance photographers, but when it comes to promoting an award, they are members of Team AP.

The Organizer reported,

“Freelance photojournalist Ali Mahmud, who contributed to the Associated Press and accompanied the Hamas terrorists during the October 7, 2024 attack in Israel has won the Team Picture Story of the Year awarded by Donald Reynolds Journalism Institute in the United States for the photograph of Shani Louk who was paraded naked by the Hamas terrorists before killing her.”

It’s like giving Hitler an award for the lampshade he made.

Make no mistake, this is just as evil. Those photos are trophies displayed by these terrorists on AP’s payroll. The story was polite — “Ali Mahmud is one of the journalists that travelled with terrorists into Israel and extensively covered the attack” — but these are military photographers in the Palestinian army.

My how times have changed. 14 years ago, Hearst Newspapers forced Helen Thomas to resign after she said Israelis should go back to Europe. Now such sentiment wins you an award, especially if you help terrorize Israelis.

Journalists generally are an untrustworthy group of gougers, as Breitbart reminded readers over the weekend.

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