The Associated Press article, written by Bassem Mroue and Sarah El Deeb and photographed by Hassan Ammar, begins with an image of a sweet-looking young boy in a white Nike polo shirt — a boy who has been horribly disfigured, ostensibly by one of the exploding pagers of Israel’s ingenious counterterrorist operation against Hezbollah last September 17.

Strange, but we don’t remember any AP articles whose marquee image was that of a traumatized Jewish child who’d survived the suicide bombing of a bus or a pizza parlor — or worse, of the charred remains of a Jewish baby, or of a beheaded hostage, or of any of the countless victims of stabbings and shootings and indiscriminate rocket attacks upon the Israeli people over the decades. But that’s par for the course for the AP, which at times appears to be taking its marching orders from the lying propaganda outfit known as the Gaza Health Ministry.

If a journalist’s job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” — it isn’t, but whatever — then the AP must believe that the tiny Jewish state is comfortably surrounded on its west by the sea and on its north, south, and east by people who are hell-bent on its destruction.

The propagandistic image of the wounded boy reminds me of what former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir once said about the grimly resolute mindset of her people: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

In fairness to the AP, though, the article doesn’t really tell us anything about the young boy. It just leaves the image there, hanging over our heads so as to haunt us. Instead, the article subtly opens with an account not of the stunning success of Operation Grim Beeper but of the maiming of 21-year-old Sarah Jaffal, who “was in and out of consciousness for hours, blood streaming from her mouth, excruciating pain in her fingertips” after having “picked up the device belonging to a family member.”

This is despicable stuff. And there’s more, much more. It was like a “slaughterhouse,” said a one-eyed woman named Zeinab Mestrah, who was apparently describing the scene at the hospital to which she was taken but who could just as easily have been describing the scene at Be'eri or Kfar Aza, two of the blood-soaked kibbutzim that Hamas barbarians set upon on October 7, 2023, which was a 9/11 at 15 times the scale for the tiny Jewish nation.

The AP refers to Hezbollah as “a major Shiite political party with a wide network of social institutions,” but the article doesn’t use the word “terrorist” or “terrorism” to describe it. Indeed, neither of those words appears even once in the lengthy article. Instead, the AP says Hezbollah “has acknowledged that most of those wounded and killed were its fighters or personnel,” adding, “The simultaneous explosions in populated areas, however, also wounded many civilians like Jaffal, who was one of four women along with 71 men who received medical treatment in Iran. Hezbollah won’t say how many civilians were hurt, but says most were relatives of the group’s personnel or workers in Hezbollah-linked institutions, including hospitals.”

Hey, live by the sword, get your junk blown off by the sword, I always say.

And don’t these AP scribes have anything better to do? There are Hamas-starved children in Gaza, for Pete’s sake.

Will the Associated Appropriated Press one day change its evil ways? And will the Jew-haters of Hezbollah one day have their enlightenment? Will they one day renounce their murderous ambitions and commit to living in peace with their ancient neighbors?

Unlikely. As historian Will Durant once put it, “Barbarism, like the jungle, does not die out, but only retreats behind the barriers that civilization has thrown up against it, and waits there always to reclaim that to which civilization has temporarily laid claim.”