On Sunday, an antisemitic mob besieged a Russian airport in an attempt to hunt down passengers from a flight containing Israeli refugees arriving from Tel Aviv.
According to The Jerusalem Post, rioters could be heard chanting “Allahu Akbar” and were documented “stopping cars to check the documents of passengers.” A video reviewed by the Post reportedly shows one antisemite shouting: “We are here for the Jews, we came to kill them with knives and shoot at them.” While no Israeli casualties have been reported, early estimates indicate the attack resulted in 20 injured, including two who remain in “critical condition.”
It’s worth mentioning the airport in question is located in Dagestan, a region of Russia boasting a Muslim-majority population. Footage of the incident reportedly shows many of the rioters to be Arabic and holding so-called “Palestinian” flags, according to the Post.
Despite the antisemitic motivations behind the mob’s attempt to hunt down and harm Jews, legacy media outlets have downplayed the severity of the attacks by painting the incident as a “protest” orchestrated by “anti-Israel” activists.
In its Sunday article covering the attack, The Washington Post classified the terrorists as “protestors” and ran with the headline, “Protesters storm Russian airport to try to block plane from Tel Aviv.” Meanwhile, Sky News, Al Jazeera, and ABC 7 Chicago labeled the attackers as “anti-Israel” demonstrators in their respective headlines.
The Associated Press — which once shared office space with Hamas — decided to take its propaganda a step further with the headline, “Crowd storms Russian airport to protest flight from Israel.”
Yet, for all their coverage thus far, corporate media’s whitewashing of what actually happened in Dagestan is neither surprising nor unprecedented. This strategy of outward lying and distortion of reality has all the hallmarks of the same tactics employed by so-called “journalists” during the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots three years ago.
Following George Floyd’s death, legacy media went out of their way to excuse the violence perpetuated throughout the country by Democrats’ communist foot soldiers. Every participant — no matter how violent — was immediately classified as a “protestor,” with The Atlantic running a full story fretting over people labeling the destructive acts as “riots.”
The corporate press not only excused the burning of American cities; they actively told their audiences to ignore the evidence staring them in the face. Recall after the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when a CNN correspondent stood in front of a building burned by leftist rioters and the network’s chyron read: “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting.”
It is evident to anyone with eyes and a lick of commonsense that the situation was clearly not peaceful. But that didn’t stop CNN from trying to convince their audience that one plus one equals five or that the sky is green.
Similarly, it’s clear that the airport attack in Dagestan was not because the anarchists were just “anti-Israel.” It’s because they’re antisemites who hate Jews and want to do them harm. Claiming modern Islamist attacks against Jews are motivated by “anti-Israel” sentiments is equivalent to asserting the Nazis’ persecution of Polish Jews during World War II stemmed from “anti-Polish” values.
That media outlets are incapable of accurately describing Hamas supporters’ disdain for Jewish people showcases just how much tolerance the left has for antisemitism in its ranks. Then again, if so-called “news” organizations like The New York Times are willing to hire an Adolf Hitler superfan and cover up the Holocaust, legacy media’s willingness to downplay the Dagestan airport attack isn’t all that shocking.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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