Corporate media banded together on Tuesday to cover for Hamas apologists after a 69-year-old Jewish man was killed due to injuries he sustained at an anti-Israel demonstration in California over the weekend.
Videos show emergency responders in Thousand Oaks, California loading Paul Kessler, who reportedly carried an Israeli flag at the protest, into an ambulance while the anti-Israel crowd chanted and waved Palestinian flags near a pool of his blood on the ground. At least one police officer was seen trying to discourage a man yelling in a megaphone from disturbing the scene.
The pro-Palestine demonstrator who allegedly interacted with Kessler has not been publicly identified or arrested but Sheriff James Fryoff did confirm during a press conference on Tuesday that the 50-year-old’s house is being searched.
“These witnesses provided conflicting statements about what the altercation and who the aggressor was,” Sheriff James Fryoff said.
The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, which might investigate the incident as a hate crime, said witness accounts suggest that “Kessler fell backwards and struck his head on the ground.”
The Ventura County medical examiner, however, almost immediately ruled the manner of death a homicide by blunt force head injury.
“When a manner of death of homicide is made, it’s simply stating that the death occurred at the hands of another person or the actions of another person contributed to the death of a person,” Medical Examiner Dr. Christopher Young said during the press conference.
Fryoff also noted that Young said “the injuries on the face, could have been caused by a megaphone,” as the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles alleged in a statement.
He said the determination of a crime is up to the attorney general but did confirm that “there are injuries on the front of the face, which could be consistent with a blow to the face.”
Even after learning that Kessler suffered some sort of severe contusion, abrasion, laceration, and/or fracture that likely constituted murder, media outlets scrambled to imply the brutal killing was a self-imposed accident.
A web archive snapshot of NBC News’s article about the tragedy asserts that Kessler died merely after “hitting [his] head.”
NBC News stealthily edited the headline on Monday night to reflect that Kessler was “killed in [an] altercation at dueling pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies.” No correction notice was affixed to the article, and the excerpt under the headline still failed to mention that Kessler’s death was ruled a homicide.
Likewise, CNN ambiguously claimed that Kessler died “after suffering [a] head injury.”
Other outlets like Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, and ABC 7 Chicago refused to specify in their headlines that foul play was suspected in Kessler’s death.
If the corporate media’s incessant desire to rationalize the behavior of violent leftists sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The violence playbook that led to the 2020 summer of rage is back and this time Democrats and their allies in the press are using it to justify the behavior of terrorist sympathizers.
‘Passionate’ Is the New ‘Fiery But Mostly Peaceful’
After a long weekend of anti-Israel protesters chanting “intifada” in the nation’s capital city and vandalizing the White House gate, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce described the rowdy gatherings calling for the decimation of Israel and Jews as simply “passionate protests.”
The “passion” possessing antisemites all across our nation is looking more and more like the “mostly peaceful protests” CNN’s Omar Jimenez claimed to see in the flaming dystopian hellscape that was Kenosha, Wisconsin in August 2020.
Kessler and the more than two dozen people who died as a result of the 2020 riots are dead because the left’s latest political pet projects have been far from “peaceful.”
In 2020, the left laced its political rhetoric about race with lies. Democrats enabled the violence by joining the marches, posting the black squares, and refusing to condemn the billions of dollars of damages done to cities, businesses, and government buildings. They showed no concern for holding the rioters accountable, instead working to bail them out.
Fast forward a few years to when Hamas brutally murdered 1,400 Israelis and more than two dozen Americans last month. Democrats are calling for money to be sent to the terrorist-controlled Gaza Strip and lying about what “Free Palestine” really means.
Elected Democrats like Rep. Rashida Tlaib air false narratives — such as a lie about Israel air-striking hospitals — without facing so much as a congressional censure. President Joe Biden and others help her case by overlooking the raging antisemitism that has caused damage, injury, and now death, in favor of elevating the plight of Muslims.
Thanks to Democrats and their allies in the corporate media, the violence will continue to be downplayed and the vast majority of people who openly support terrorism likely won’t shoulder any consequences.
Students calling for the destruction of Israel won’t be kicked out, men yelling antisemitic slurs outside of synagogues and women tearing down posters of Israeli hostages likely won’t be fired, the demonstrators who vandalized the same statue that 2020 rioters tried to topple harbor no fears of arrest, and the people who caused Kessler’s death may not even face jail time. Just like in 2020.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
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