An excellent post by Judith Apter Klinghoffer points out both the mainstream media’s egregious selectivity and bias in reporting the Iraq conflict and the sanitised and misleading way in which the three freed ‘peace activist’ hostages have been described:

Last night I was delighted to post Good Military News from Iraq. Insurgents attacked yet another police station south of Baghdad but this time instead of a one side massacre, the police fought back. Moreover, it cordoned the area and captured 76 insurgents including a Syrian. Finally, I thought. Here is a concrete example that the training of Iraqis is beginning to bear fruit. I was glad to see on Google that the story was reported by the NYT and other MSM. Indeed, I expected it to lead the news this morning. Fat Chance. Befuddled I searched the NYT. It was not on the front page. I could not find even a minor headline. Finally, I discovered it on page 16 buried in the middle of a long story focusing on the day's violence in Iraq. The Headline read ‘Insurgents Shower Iraq Police Center with Mortar Shells: A second day of intense attack against paramilitary forces.’ The fact that a Syrian was amongst the captured went unmentioned.

Why did the editors refer to Iraq police as a paramilitary force? I suspect in order to justify the attack on it. An attack on police may seem immoral to the reader. But the term paramilitary has a kind of illegal aura, something akin to militia. All of which fits well into the story the NYT wishes to promote: Iraq is in the midst of a civil war in which neither side has a superior moral or legal claim.
Which Iraq story could be found on the front page? ‘Iraq Abuse Trial Is Again Limited To Lower Ranks.’ The clear implications the editors wished to give is that the real villain in the Iraq saga is the American army. If the NYT did not announce this openly, the men whom these ‘mendacious’ coalition forces rescued last night did and they were handsomely rewarded for their ‘daring’ ...

I am referring, of course, to the 3 Western Aid Workers in Iraq Rescued in Military Operation" which should have been called the three traitorous ingrates who were liberated from terrorists by over indulgent coalition forces. For they were NOT aid workers, they were a group of agitators who went to Iraq in order to teach Iraqis how to charge coalition forces with humanitarian abuse. I heard this morning one of their members complain that they have no yet succeeded in ‘training’ Iraqis to file such charges without outside help and that is the reason the organization may continue to send people to Iraq. When the BBC questioned the morality of these men putting coalition forces in harms way, a friend of the British hostage said huffily that his group remained active in Germany during the Nazi rule. In other words, he compared the occupation forces with the Nazis on the BBC without the reporter uttering a word of rebuttal.

The freed British hostage Norman Kember is returning to Britain to a swelling chorus of dismay that the hostages and their backers in the Christian Peacemaker Teams have ungratefully refused to thank the soldiers who freed them. (Update: Recognising the looming PR disaster, there now seems to have been a belated and half-hearted attempt to thank the soldiers involved in the rescue.) The word ‘ungrateful’ is what might be called typical British understatement – or more to the point, in these morally upside-down days, further graphic evidence of the state of denial that is the current default position in British public discourse over Iraq. For the language being used to describe these people distorts and sanitises what they are doing. They are referred to as ‘pacifists’. But what they are actually doing is campaigning against coalition forces in Iraq and aiding the enemy in doing so. The CPT website claims that they challenge ‘the injustices of the occupation’ and work ‘for the human rights of Iraqi detainees’. Strangely, however, they issue not a word of challenge to the murderous injustices of those engaged in the terrorist war against the coalition and the murderous injustices of those Sunnis who are trying to murder as many Shia as possible. Despite preying upon the feelings of all Iraqis of whatever denomination who simply want the violence to stop, they are therefore not in fact working for the human rights of the Shia who are thus being murdered, merely for the ‘human rights’ of those Iraqis who are trying to murder them.

Similarly on the West Bank they ‘document the harassment suffered by villagers at the hands of solders and settlers’ because of Israel’s security barrier – but fail conspicuously to document the campaign of mass murder by those West Bank inhabitants which made the security barrier necessary in the first place. Now we learn from the Telegraph that the released hostages refused to co-operate with their intelligence debriefers. They boast of ‘getting in the way’ in these terrible conflicts – but what they are getting in the way of is the defence of life and liberty against terrorist mass murder. In other words, far from being neutral humanitarian campaigners they are taking sides – the wrong side, the side of terrorist murder over life and liberty, the side of injustice over justice, of lies over truth, of wrong over right and of darkness over light.