France: The secret war of Agence France Presse against Israel

From The Gatestone Institute (Yves Mamou): 

On July 15, 2016, after the truck ramming that killed 84 people in Nice, France, Agence France Presse (AFP) released a report entitled, "When Vehicles Become Weapons". It is the duty of a large news agency such as AFP to list, for its customers, examples of countries that are suffering from vehicular terrorism. 

Concerning Israel, we can read in the third paragraph: "In Israel and the Palestinian territories, car-ramming attacks have featured heavily in a wave of violence that has killed at least 215 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese since October last year". 

A naïve reader might understand that in Israel and Palestinian territories, Jews and Muslims -- or Israelis and Palestinians -- find it amusing to use their vehicles to kill innocent passersby. He might think also that Jews are far better players of this gamer than are Muslims, because they killed "215 Palestinians" against only "34 Israelis." 

As the website Honest Reporting noticed:

"In fact, the total number of Israelis who have committed car ramming attacks against Palestinians is exactly zero, but a reader would have no way of knowing that. To the contrary, the AFP's language gives the incorrect appearance that morePalestinians are targeted by car ramming attacks than Israelis."

Biased information about Israel in the French press is not an episodic occurrence. It is a systematic one. The main engine of this biased information industry is blatantly the Agence France Presse. 

AFP -- like Reuters, Associated Press or Bloomberg -- is a news agency with offices all over the world (150 countries and 200 bureaus). But it is not a private company; it is supposed to be a cooperative owned by customers (newspapers, radios and TV channels), but it is actually a state-owned company, heavily subsidized due to the large number of subscriptions from different French government ministries -- especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The managing director of AFP is appointed by the government. AFP is a tool of French diplomacy and is considered an arm of France's cultural international influence. 

AFP has a large "bureau" in Jerusalem and its journalists have an enormous influence on the European and Middle Eastern press. This influence is enormous because its reports are literally copied-and-pasted by newspapers and countless websites in France and Europe. 

The terrorist attack on June 8, 2016 at the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv is a good example of the systematically biased headlines sent by AFP to its customers.
Three types of biased headlines can be documented.

• If You Do Not Like the Reality, Change the Narrative of the Reality. Example: In Le Figaro, the headline was, "Tel Aviv, Four Dead after a Gunfight [fusillade]." The word fusillade means "gunfight" or "exchange of fire." But what happened at the Sarona Market was not a "fusillade" it was a cold-blooded mass murder committed by two armed Palestinians against unarmed Israeli citizens. What happened in Tel Aviv was the same as what happened in Paris on November 13, 2015, when 130 people sitting in a concert hall, cafés and restaurants were shot dead by extremist Muslim terrorists. But no parallel of this type has been reported in the French media.

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