How Soft Words Hide the Truth About the IRGC, Hamas and Hezbollah
By Jon Barber
An observant and analytical North American tourist witnessed a terror attack firsthand while visiting Israel. He knew precisely what had unfolded: a Palestinian man initiated the assault, the situation rapidly escalated, and the IDF arrived strictly to restore order. Back at his hotel, however, he was stunned by the news. The report inverted reality, blaming Israeli forces while framing the actual aggressors as innocent “insurgents.” Confused by the blatant distortion, he asked his local driver why the media was spinning the story so differently. The driver replied with a matter-of-fact shrug: “That’s how things work around here.” This story is true.
In everyday news coverage, mainstream media outlets often trade clarity for caution, replacing direct language with softer, more neutral-sounding terms. Instead of calling a perpetrator a “terrorist,” they frequently opt for labels like “radicals,” “insurgents,” “rebels,” “militants,” or “extremists,” framing events in a way that blurs moral and factual lines.
How the Media Cleans Up the Language
Reframing terror is not just a minor tweak in vocabulary, it changes how we see the world:
• “Radicals” and “Extremists”: These words shift our attention away from violent acts and onto abstract ideas. It frames the problem as a “difference of opinion” rather than a series of brutal attacks.
• “Insurgents” and “Rebels”: This language paints these groups as underdogs fighting a government, intentionally hiding the fact that they are targeting innocent civilians.
• “Militants”: This serves as a vague, catch-all word that blurs the line between a regular soldier and someone who deliberately breaks the laws of war and commits atrocities.
The Trap of Trying to Stay “Neutral”
Newsrooms justify these soft words by saying they need to be objective and avoid making moral judgments. They are caught between pleasing governments, loud internet audiences, and political pressure, so they try to sit on the fence.
But this attempt at neutrality creates a dangerous illusion.
The Problem with fake “balance” is that we are talking about groups that have explicitly stated goals of destruction, like Hamas, whose founding documents openly call for the elimination of Israel. Refusing to use precise words is not objective. It is an escape from the plain facts.
The excuse that reporters cannot verify what happened in real-time does not hold up. The histories, ideologies, and actions of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the IRGC and Al-Qaeda are matters of public record. They are legally designated as terrorist organizations by most Western and civilized nations. When major networks like the BBC look past these legal realities to call people who attack civilians, even children, mere “militants,” they are helping to wash away the truth and so become complicit.
The War for Your Mind
Modern conflicts are not just fought with weapons; they are fought on newsfeeds. Terrorist groups and their sponsors run highly sophisticated propaganda machines designed to take advantage of Western media standards, comparable to the techniques pioneered by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, a system built on emotional manipulation, staged imagery, and relentless repetition to overwhelm critical thinking. Today’s methods are remarkably similar, the
deliberate use of distortion and moral inversion to recast perpetrators as victims and to flood open societies with narratives engineered to confuse, divide, and destabilize. Often the source of such ‘news’ appears to be the West, yet in reality it is the base camps of terrorist entities, as the social media company X revealed when it started publishing the geographic source of postings.
Media disinformation is not just about random social media posts. They are organized campaigns of psychological warfare. By weaponizing unverified civilian death tolls and spreading staged imagery, terrorist groups and their complicit Western newsrooms turn much of journalism into a megaphone for their cause.
What Happens When Truth Dies?
When the media abdicates its responsibility to call things what they are, the real-world consequences are immediate and dangerous. We are entering a world where the line between the perpetrator and the victim is entirely erased. If this trend continues, we face a grim future:
• No One Is Held Accountable: When violent actors control the story, the very idea of a war crime becomes a matter of opinion, and the roles of perpetrator and victim are reversed.
• The Truth Is Weaponized: Rules designed to keep journalism fair are used to trick open societies, turning independent reporters into unintentional tools for propaganda, or bluntly “useful idiots”.
• A Complete Loss of Trust: When people see horrific violence with their own eyes but read sanitized, watered-down words in the paper, they either stop trusting the news altogether or believe a lie.
Giving a Green Light to Hatred
The fallout from this media distortion is not an abstract debate, it has real, terrifying consequences for real people. In the case of Israel, by constantly painting a democracy desperately defending itself as the primary villain, the media ecosystem has created an excuse for global antisemitism.
When the media hides the actual, existential threat facing Israel, anger is quickly transferred from the Middle East to Jewish communities around the world. The historic surge we are seeing in antisemitic harassment, property damage, physical violence and now murder is the direct result of a news environment that demonizes the Jewish state through soft words and fake moral balance.
How We Turn Things Around
What Newsrooms Must Do
Media companies need to realize that their current way of doing things is broken. To get their integrity back, they must choose plain facts over safe language.
1. Call Things What They Are: Stop using soft euphemisms. If an organization is legally designated as a terrorist group, use the proper title. If an attack targets civilians, call it terrorism.
2. Verify Before Reporting: Treat data, claims, and numbers coming from terrorist organizations with the same extreme scepticism you would give to any hostile wartime propaganda.
3. Be Honest About What You Don’t Know: If a claim cannot be verified, say so plainly. Do not fill the gaps with guesses that accidentally favour the attackers.
4. Print the whole truth: Do not ignore context and events which are relevant but do not suit a certain narrative: tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
What We Can Do
In a world full of fake news, we cannot be a passive reader.
1. Check the Source: Look past emotional headlines. Check the original charters, official government watchlists, and verified independent reports to see the facts for yourself. Recognise activism veiled as journalism.
2. Demand Better: Hold news organizations accountable. Write complaints when they skip key facts, repeat unverified claims, or use words that soften atrocities. Be very active when you have the opportunity to comment in online forums, without being intimidated by a tsunami of deception.
3. Learn the Playbook: Learn how modern propaganda works. When we understand how algorithms and emotional manipulation are used to shape your opinion, it becomes much harder for fake stories to take root. Share in your networks what is happening and how to address it.
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