Beheaded? Or simply headless?
Ahh the choices in modern journalism covering modern warfare.
Here’s the headline from Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/media/
NY Mag reporter forced to explain viral post that it was ‘overstatement’ to claim Hamas ‘beheaded’ infants
NY Mag’s Eric Levitz insists he was trying to be journalistically accurate
Fox reports:
“New York Magazine Intelligencer features writer Eric Levitz responded Sunday to backlash over a post he made on whether babies were actually beheaded’ or not in Israel by Hamas terrorists, where he said it wasn’t fully proven that occurred.
‘According to this report,’ Levitz wrote in response to an investigation by an international team of forensic pathologists, ‘Hamas militants tied a parent and child together and then burned them alive.’
‘Last night, I asserted that this report indicated that babies were beheaded,’ Levitz wrote on Sunday. ‘This was an overstatement. I should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them.’
He gave a parenthetical explanation as to the exact definition of a beheading. ‘(The verb behead has multiple definitions, and is sometimes used to mean decapitate; the report indicates that Hamas did behead babies in that sense. But the term can also connote a form of execution using a knife, and we do not have confirmation of beheading in this sense)[.]’
The reporter added that he did not ‘think much of anything follows from this distinction’ because whether the infants were beheaded or not, either case was an example of ‘horrific atrocities,’ he wrote. ‘But some people disagree[.]’
Levitz has since responded directly to the backlash that he has received over his post. ‘Many have misconstrued this tweet as an apology for Hamas. It isn’t; the tweet immediately follows one in which I highlight the fact that Hamas burned families alive. I recently wrote a piece expressing my moral revulsion at leftwing apologias for Hamas.’”
Good for Levitz issuing his clarification. Whether babies are being beheaded by Hamas or burned alive, clearly either should qualify as a war crime. A crime committed by savages who have zero regard for human life – human life period, not to mention if their victim is a Jew.