The Washington Post, I believe, is trying to have it all ways. They don’t want to take a side or torque off the “other team”. The Washington Post doesn’t want to make a value judgement on any other the actors in the Hamas War on Israel. The editors changed a headline that said the children were “detained” to “kidnapped”.

Language dies as propaganda. As you all are well aware, we live in a Constitutional Republic. The arrogance of the Legacy Corporate Media. They believe they have zero obligation to be straight with their readers. Thus, Fox (not much better) gives us this headline: “Washington Post stealth edits caption describing Israeli woman’s children as being ‘detained’ by Hamas”:

The Washington Post stealth edited the caption of a photo Thursday that initially described Israeli children as having been “detained” by Hamas terrorists. The caption was subsequently changed to say they were “taken hostage.”

The terror group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, with hundreds of terrorists pouring into the country, killing over 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping many others. The Israeli military said Thursday there are still 203 hostages in Gaza.

The Post published a piece Thursday about the families of hostages, but it was the caption of a photo of a mother saying, “Two of her children have been detained by Hamas,” that drew the most attention.

For clarity, maybe a few definitions?

Stealth Edit:

A stealth edit occurs when an online resource is changed without any record of the change being preserved. The term has a negative connotation, as it is a technique which allows authors to attempt to retroactively change what is written.

A common scenario would be a reporter posting a diatribe against something, followed by a blogger posting that the reporter is too extreme, followed by the reporter stealth editing the original post to be less extreme. The result is that the blogger looks like the one who is too extreme, since the public can’t tell that the original post has been changed.

The existence of stealth edits may often be detected by comparing the current contents of a web page against Google’s cache of the same page. In some cases, stealth editing of online content can be manually identified by making use of a web archiving service.

So, the WaPo got caught using “detained” and swapped it out for “taken hostage” without making an editorial note of the change. Skeevy ethics, there.

Child Abduction in War

The abduction of children during conflict is one of the six grave violations identified and condemned by the UN Security Council . The six grave violations form the basis of the Council’s architecture to monitor, report and respond to abuses suffered by children in times of war. Ending and preventing these violations is also the focus of the Special Representative’s work and advocacy.

The abduction of children is a trigger to list parties to armed conflict in the annexes of the annual report of the Secretary-General on children and armed conflict.

In times of war, children are too often abducted by parties to conflict and subjected to brutal treatment. In many cases, the abduction of children is the precursor to other grave violations. Children can be abducted to be killed or maimed, to become victims of sexual violence or to be recruited to the ranks of an army or armed groups. In some instances, abducted children are detained arbitrarily by Governments or armed groups. Parties to conflict also abduct children in systematic campaigns of violence and reprisal against civilian populations.

In the 1990s and early 2000s in northern Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army notoriously used systematic abductions as its modus operandi to recruit children and commit sexual violence.

In recent years, Boko Haram and ISIL also used systematic abductions of children as methods of warfare.

There’s a couple of groups you really don’t want to be lumped in with. I don’t know why but I thought that Hamas was better than the sub-humans in the Lord’s Resistance Army, Boko Haram and ISIL. I was very wrong.

Interesting choice of words from Washington Post. “detained” pic.twitter.com/kiuKHPjIwo

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) October 20, 2023

If you will watch this video, you will see pictures of some of the precious ones kidnapped from their families in Israel and held in Gaza:

Now more than ever, remember this quote by Israel PM Golda Meir:

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

The kidnapped children and the burned and decapitated babies show us that we are a long way off.

Featured Image: Danny Hammontree/flickr.com/cropped/Creative Commons 4.0