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June 6, 2010

If D-Day had been reported by today's MSM

Edward Olshaker
On the solemn day commemorating the sacrifices of US troops and their allies, it is difficult not to feel that much of what they gained at immeasurable cost is being thrown away, and that costly lessons learned at that time have been forgotten.

Over the past week, the Mideast narrative pushed by the radical Left for decades -- that Israel is the perpetual aggressor, regardless of the facts -- officially bled through into the US mainstream media. Ironically, 66 years after D-Day, this marks a propaganda victory for Islamic imperialists pursuing the same two goals as the Third Reich: to exterminate the Jews (the goal "activists" chanted on the way to Gaza), and to impose their nightmarish form of fascism on the world. The fight for civilization then and now looks remarkably similar; the glaring difference is that the Allies of 1944 were not cast as villains by their own nations' media.

False and misleading storylines that used to be confined to hate websites of "progressives," neo-Nazis, and jihadists, ascribing vile motives to Israel, are now being repeated by the major networks, such as the following from NBC and CBS on June 2. The inaccurate talking points defaming Israel and favoring Hamas and its supporters are highlighted in italic.

From NBC:

ANDREA MITCHELL: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu [said] Israel has to defend itself from weapons smuggled into Gaza. But he offered no proof that there were weapons on board...

"BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: There's no shortage of food. There's no shortage of medicine. There's no shortage of other goods.

MITCHELL: That is not what NBC News witnessed in Gaza today. Muhammed Abidrabu and his family of 12 live in two tents. Their home was destroyed when Israel invaded a year and a half ago. In the cooking area, only some cooking oil and a small bag of vegetables. A million and a half people live here, strangled by poverty, unemployment and hopelessness....

The White House has warned Israel not to attack any more ships, but the larger concern is the diplomatic fallout with Turkey, a key ally, that can now work against international sanctions against Iran at the U.N..."

Contrary to Mitchell's report, weapons were indeed on board, including those used in the attempted murder of commandos (and searches of all shipments bound for Hamas, including those found to have no weapons, require no apology). Mitchell then falsely casts Israel as the aggressor against Gaza and against aid ships, when their actions were in fact defensive and reluctant, and even blames the Jewish state for damaging US relations with Turkey. It's no secret that Turkey's transformation from a secular state allied with the West, to an Islamist ally of Ahmadinejad, was complete before this tragedy, and that Turkey itself provoked the tragedy.

From Katie Couric on CBS:

"Now to the international dispute over Israel's deadly raid on ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza..."

The phrase "Israel's deadly raid" continues to be repeated like a mantra, despite inconvenient facts that must be cast aside in order to use those derogatory words -- that the "activists" were better-armed than the Israeli commandos they attacked; that the commandos only used deadly force when their lives were at risk; and that the initiators of violence were armed al-Qaeda-linked thugs. (Couric's use of the plural in "Israel's deadly raid on ships" adds another layer of slanderous dishonesty; five of the six ships were peacefully inspected and their aid delivered.) 

This was followed by a Richard Roth report that focused in part on what might have "provok[ed] the chaos commandos met when they boarded...." The commandos did not meet "chaos." They met sadistic, life-threatening attacks. In fairness to Roth, he is not alone in slanting coverage to downplay, ignore, or deny the violence committed against the commandos; he is merely joining the bandwagon.

Imagine the Allied landing on Normandy being reported in the same way. Through selective, hostile reporting, the largest, most selfless, noblest military action in history would have been depicted as a deadly, botched attack on an innocent nation.

The civilian death toll was indeed horrific. William I. Hitchcock, the author of The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe, described the gruesome cost of an invasion that virtually no one doubted was necessary:

On June 6, 1944, ...- D-Day, a moment immortalized in countless films and books as a glorious day for Americans - US and British aircraft pummeled the French coastline in Normandy, killing about 3,000 French civilians. This would turn out to be roughly the same number of allied servicemen who died that day.

And this was only the beginning. During the summer of 1944, as German and allied soldiers ground Normandy into a bloody mess, over 19,000 French citizens died in the crossfire. Most of these were killed by Allied airpower, which dominated the skies over France. In Caen, where British troops fought a fierce two-month long campaign against entrenched German positions, repeated allied air strikes completely destroyed the city. At the end of the battle, 2,000 of the city's residents lay dead beneath the rubble. Nearby, the lovely cathedral town of Lisieux was also flattened in the fighting, and over 700 of its citizens killed. No town or village in Normandy was spared these punishing blows. During World War II, about 70,000 French civilians were killed as a result of allied bombing in France.

If the media had reported on D-Day and subsequent fighting like they covered the Gaza flotilla story -- pointedly ignoring the broader picture, and even repeating the enemy's propaganda -- the storyline would be that a military campaign that started as a "deadly attack on civilians" also ended in disgrace, in the decades-long occupation of Germany and Japan, proof in itself that fighting the Axis Powers was a mistake. If this sounds farfetched, consider that this is literally the argument put forth by some mainstream journalists marking the 40th anniversary of the other June 6 war, in which Israel defeated enemies bent on its annihilation: in retrospect, they claimed, Israel's victory and survival was an undesirable outcome because of the resulting occupation.

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