Last Wednesday, a 18-year old Palestinian teenager stabbed an Israeli man in Jerusalem’s Old City, and was then shot and injured.
On Saturday, 16-year old Palestinian teenager stabbed an Israeli man in Jerusalem’s Old City, and was then shot dead.
Today the Independent has a piece about the latter stabber, Ishaq Badran, asking “what drove him to it?” in its sub-headline.
The opening paragraph:
Ishaq Badran was described simply as a “terrorist” after stabbing an Israeli near the Damascus Gate in occupied East Jerusalem on Saturday.
Well, how else would you describe Badran?
What follows is worse. This is how The Independent connects the two stabbers:
Mr Badran said that his son had been deeply upset by reports that a settler had stripped the hijab off a Muslim woman in the Old City of Jerusalem last Wednesday. The reports, which could not be independently confirmed, soon spread on Palestinian social media. “He spoke to his mother about this and cried,” Mr Badran told The Independent. “He was crying, saying: ‘No one is defending these women’.” The woman was shot as she tried to stab an Israeli man, according to Israeli police.
This is plainly, demonstrably a lie – and the Independent lends credence to them by suggesting there is even a chance of them being “independently confirmed”. We learn far later that this woman was not stripped of her hijab at all, but was shot because she stabbed an Israeli (not “tried to” as the article claims).
And then there’s this:
A friend of Ishaq’s, aged 13, said he was “extremely upset” when he saw him on Thursday and Friday last week. “We were looking at pictures of martyrs. He said that Fadi Aloun was killed in cold blood,” he said, referring to a Palestinian shot by Israeli police on 3 October for what Palestinians believe was no reason. Israeli police say he was killed after he stabbed an Israeli.
But Fadi Aloun had stabbed an Israeli teenager, earlier writing on his Facebook wall “either martyrdom or victory”. Again, we learn of the Palestinian stabber’s crime at the end of the paragraph; the truth takes a backseat to whatever is buzzing on social media in anti-Israel Palestinian hubs.
The Independent should be tearing apart false social media rumours, rather than indulging them as somehow part of a reasonable narrative.
