RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hamas isn’t merely a terrorist organization committed to murdering Jews, it’s a terrorist organization that urges its own people to become cannon fodder as a means of appealing to Western journalists and intellectuals. The higher the death toll, the happier Hamas will be. And few things have more of a detrimental effect on the Palestinian cause than the media’s asymmetrical coverage of this conflict with the Jews.

Until Palestinians shed their hatred, turn from the Israeli fences, and march towards their own governments, they will remain pawns and saps in a decades-long suicide mission. That’s because no amount of bad press about Israel’s efforts to stop violence coming from Gaza will impel that nation to create a terror state on its borders. It’s untenable, not to mention immoral. We would never contemplate such a thing. Nor would any rational country.

Despite what you’ve heard, the 35,000 Palestinian “demonstrators” massed along the security fence between Israel and Gaza — the ones throwing firebombs and other explosives, burning tires, chucking rocks (if you think these are aren’t deadly, you should see one landing; I have), and those attempting to light fires to burn crops and vegetation — are only ostensibly protesting the United States moving its embassy to Israel’s capital. I know this because Hamas doesn’t accept a U.S. embassy anywhere in Israel, as it doesn’t recognize Israel at all.

Hamas has openly asserted that it’s attempting to create incursions into Israel, and that has absolutely nothing to do with East or West or North or South Jerusalem. For Palestinians this is about the 70th anniversary of Israel — or, as they see it, Nakba. It’s about an ongoing historic effort — an intermittently theocratic or nationalistic effort, depending on the trends — to play victim.

In a classic smear, NBC News “investigated” the Gatestone Institute and found that it is an “anti-Muslim think-tank” with ties to the same Russians who interfered in the 2016 election.

NBC’s report begins with an iteration of the Russia-Trump collusion story: that Gatestone’s former chairman, Ambassador John Bolton, now U.S. National Security Advisor, who has described Russia’s attempts to undermine the U.S. election as an act of war, was affiliated with “a nonprofit that has promoted misleading and false anti-Muslim news, some of which was amplified by a Russian troll factory,” implying that he was somehow colluding with Russia to spread anti-Muslim propaganda. NBC initially provides no evidence for this claim, but buried deep inside the article it asserts that, according to its “exclusive database,” Russian trolls tweeted a total of four Gatestone articles – out of more than 200,000 tweets identified by Twitter as being linked to Russian accounts. Bolton, on the contrary, is usually criticized for having hawkish views on Russia. …

NBC News also provides no evidence for its insinuation that White House attorneys are “potential[ly]” investigating Bolton’s affiliation with Gatestone. Moreover, after first implying that Bolton is “anti-Muslim,” NBC undercuts its own claims by admitting that his name cannot be found on “the anti-Muslim articles at issue.” NBC also acknowledges that Bolton was opposed to Trump’s so-called Muslim ban.

The NBC report, written by political reporter Heidi Przybyla, appears to be based almost entirely on a series of deceptive reports about Gatestone by The Intercept, a left-leaning digital news site which itself has admitted to fabricating stories and quotes and is listed as one of “The Best Websites to Follow If You’re Plotting the Left-Wing Resistance”. The NBC report, which fails to cite The Intercept, is also intriguingly similar to false allegations in Wikipedia, which also parrots numerous false, but published, claims about Gatestone, such as that Gatestone incorrectly writes about the existence of no-go zones.

A year or so ago, there were a spate of articles about the red pill videos on YouTube – millennials turning off to the bullying by feminists and race hustlers, thinking for themselves, becoming conservative, and posting a video of their personal journey from blue to red online. I googled ‘red pill’ and had a cheerful time following links. I learned about Candace Owens at that time, and a lot of other black and white millennials who had posted articulate, heartfelt, intimate, sometimes funny YouTubes explaining why they’d become conservative.

For months afterward, when I was sick of all the bad news about millennials becoming little fascists, I would turn to the red pill videos and cheer myself up. And then I found I could no longer find them. When I went to YouTube and searched for red pill, all I got was the documentary by that name (worth seeing) available for $3.99.

The most famous videos are still there. But even they are hard to find. Laci Green got 1.9 million hits on a video called ‘Taking the Red Pill?” which is a defense of free speech. But when I clicked her name, not a single red pill video comes up, even though I have just done 24 searches in a row containing the phrase ‘red pill.” Her video on her personal journey to being ‘red pilled’ received 700,000 hits. Why wouldn’t the search engine pull it up for me?

The week Candace Owens was headline news, thanks to Kanye West tweeting she should be listened to, I confidently did a google search for ‘YouTube Candace.’ Google did not fill in the rest of her name, although I have watched many of her videos. Instead I was treating to page after page of links to a yoga instructor. I have never searched for anything yoga in my life. That seemed odd.