AP, Reuters & AFP Recycle Tedious ‘Israel Ruined Christmas’ Narrative

As billions of Christians around the globe prepare to celebrate Christmas, the world’s biggest news agencies have been scrabbling around for an angle to cover the Christmas celebrations in the Holy Land.

And they’ve found one.

This year, Reuters tells us in a recent headline, will be the “worst Christmas ever” in Bethlehem.

According to Reuters, the birthplace of Jesus Christ will be deserted because the “war has scared away tourists and pilgrims from the Palestinian town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press said it would be a “subdued Christmas” in Bethlehem after “officials in Jesus’ traditional birthplace decided to forgo celebrations due to the Israel-Hamas war.”

“The cancellation of Christmas festivities, which typically draw thousands of visitors, is a severe blow to the town’s tourism-dependent economy,” the AP noted.

In a similar vein, Agence France Press (AFP) predicted subdued celebrations, explaining that as the “war between Israel and Hamas rages around 100 km (60 miles) away in Gaza — leaving thousands of Palestinians dead and nearly two million displaced and trapped in a humanitarian catastrophe — Christmas will be a muted affair in the occupied West Bank.”

The issue with these articles is that they all sound far too familiar.

In fact, it seems that scarcely a December passes without the wire agencies warning that Christmas has been spoiled in Israel.

In 2021, for example, Reuters announced that in Bethlehem there would be a “muted Christmas with few pilgrims to bring cheer.”

In 2020 — during the Coronavirus pandemic — the Associated Press lamented how the spread of the virus had “rob[bed] biblical Bethlehem of Christmas cheer.”

And a couple of years before that, the AFP was hand-wringing about a “subdued Christmas Eve in the historic birthplace of Jesus” as “Jerusalem tensions overshadow Christmas in Bethlehem.”

As you can see, a pattern is emerging: every year, the world’s biggest wire agencies, which supply news copy to thousands of organizations around the world, suggest Christmas celebrations in the Holy Land have been ruined.

What’s more, such articles more often than not imply Israel is responsible for wrecking the holiday, with this year’s slew being no different.

For example, AP notes that Israel has restricted access to Bethlehem and other Palestinian towns following the Hamas attacks on October 7, which it says has resulted in long lines of motorists waiting at checkpoints.

The agency goes on to observe how Bethlehem’s Christmas celebrations have “long been a barometer of Israeli-Palestinian relations,” and references how “celebrations were grim in 2000 at the start of the second intifada… when Israeli forces locked down parts of the West Bank in response to Palestinians carrying out scores of suicide bombings and other attacks that killed Israeli civilians.”

Without being stated directly, the insinuation is clear: Israel is to blame for responding to Palestinian terrorism — and not the Palestinian terrorists whose murderous actions necessitated a response in the first place.

As Israel battles Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip who launched the horrifying terror attack on October 7, the emphasis by the world’s leading news agencies is on how Israel’s prolonging the war has disrupted festive celebrations — and not the fact that Hamas is ultimately responsible having launched the unprovoked attack on innocent civilians in the first place, and that it continues to indiscriminately fire rockets at Israeli towns and cities.

It is lazy and, sadly, predictable journalism: the recycling of the same angle as previous years with the distortion of facts to fit that skewed narrative.

A “humbug” — as popularized by the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol — refers to someone who is deceptive or likely to mislead.

Bah humbug indeed!

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