The notion that a video caused a jihadist attack, or that jihadism more broadly is tolerable or understandable given socioeconomics, “climate disruption” or anything else evinces a soft bigotry of low expectations.

Conversely, the notion that Israel’s defensive action in response to jihadism is always and everywhere “disproportionate” – that unless Israel acts in a self-righteously suicidal manner it is in the wrong – evinces a hard bigotry of “high” expectations.

I explore this outrageous double standard in context of the Third Intifada — in which the media is effectively complicit — in a new article for PJ Media titled Israel, the Media’s Hard Bigotry of ‘High’ Expectations and the Obama Intifada.

Here’s a taste:

As the Lutheran pastor and courageous Nazi resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Not to speak is to speak.” Today he might say of Israeli-Arab coverage, “Not to judge is to judge.” That is, in trying to appear “even-handed,” the media actually explicitly judges when it comes to Arab jihadists versus Jews in Israel.

In drawing moral equivalence between two morally unequivalent sides, the media downgrades Israelis while upgrading jihadists, and worse judges the Israeli as the oppressor and the Arab as the oppressed. The media judges jihadist savagery as tolerable, but Jewish defensive action as unacceptable. The media judges the Arab right to a state (for a Palestinian people that has never existed) as inviolable, but Israel’s right to exist as unconscionable.

Read the whole thing here.

Featured Image Source: MEMRI.