Media Romanticize Teenage Terrorists and Their Dreams of ‘Martyrdom’

Spraying bullets at a group of Jewish worshipers, planning a pipe bomb attack in Tel Aviv, and kidnapping a gravely-injured Druze teenager are apparently just some of the activities The Times of London’s diplomatic correspondent Catherine Philp considers to be part of “Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.”

We must assume that Philp believes attacking unarmed civilians is a legitimate act of so-called “resistance,” or she would not have used the word seven times in only 15 paragraphs to describe the undertakings of the Jenin Battalion and Lions’ Den terrorist groups, which are behind scores of deadly attacks.

In the piece, “I was ready to die, says Palestinian fighter hit by drone strike,” Philp strikes a creepily sympathetic tone as she introduces readers to the “new generation in the Palestinian armed resistance,” including teenage “fighter” Harbosh, whose face, Philp observes, is “pockmarked by acne” as he is interviewed from his hospital bed recalling “how close he came to martyrdom” during the IDF’s recent counter-terrorism raid in Jenin.

While giving a brief history of the Jenin Battalion, Philp describes this “militant coalition that has sprung up and thrived in the squalid surroundings of the Jenin camp where this week Israel began its largest military operation in the West Bank in two decades.”

She goes on to claim the group consists “overwhelmingly” of members between 16 and 22, all of whom have a “burning sense of grievance,” having “grown up in an era when prospects for peace were in effect dead, in a moribund economy with few jobs, their only heroes martyrs whose images blanket the camp’s alleys.”

Aside from the obvious problem of Philp’s framing of Jenin terrorists as disenchanted youngsters with little choice in life other than to pick up an M16 rifle and start shooting, the presentation of the Jenin Battalion as a sort of grass-roots youth movement is simply bizarre.

After all, the terrorist group is well-funded by Iran (which Philp acknowledges) and comprises operatives from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (which Philp ignores).

Indeed, the whole piece is replete with language that serves to glorify and justify Palestinian terrorism, from Philp’s quoting the uncle of one Jenin Battalion member who gushes that the new “generation is more dangerous than the previous one,” to her subtly romanticizing the “daring [Gilboa] jailbreak.”

The piece, unfortunately, appears to be part of a trend in which media outlets publish strange terrorism puff pieces following the Jenin raid.

For example, The Economist recently promised to take its readers “inside the Lions’ Den,” which it described as the “West Bank’s Gen Z fighters.”

The piece, which describes the group that planned a large-scale terror attack in Tel Aviv as a “Palestinian armed-resistance group,” is packed with jarring statements that appear to whitewash the motivations and actions of a group that has repeatedly sought to maim and murder innocent Israelis.

Among the most troubling lines in the financial magazine’s feature, are the framing of the Jenin raid to destroy terrorist infrastructure as the “most aggressive assault on the West Bank in over two decades”; describing confirmed terrorists as “Palestinian resistance fighters”; reimagining the Second Intifada as a mere “uprising” in which Nablus became the “center of opposition”; and claiming Lions’ Den terrorists are primarily motivated by their “frustrations with the Israeli occupation and an enfeebled PA,” as opposed to a blind hatred of Israelis and Jews.

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