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4 Of The Most Morally Bankrupt Lies Anti-Israel Pundits Are Spreading About Hostage Swap By: Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/28/4-of-the-most-morally-bankrupt-lies-anti-israel-pundits-are-spreading-about-hostage-swap/

Terrorist sympathizers are out in full force spreading fake news about Israel’s treatment of its prisoners, as the country executes a swap with Hamas for hostages taken by the terrorist group on Oct. 7. Here are four of the most outrageous lies circulating on social media.

1. Israel Is ‘Only Country That Keeps Children As Prisoners’

This week, American supermodel Gigi Hadid shared a post to her more than 79 million Instagram followers condemning Israel as “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war.” The post, which has been deleted, claimed Palestinian terrorist Ahmed Mansara was “abducted” by Israeli officials at 12 years old and “has endured solitary confinement despite his severe health condition.”

According to the New York Post, Mansara went on a “stabbing rampage” in East Jerusalem with his 15-year-old cousin in 2015 that left a 20-year-old security guard and a 13-year-old boy with critical injuries. Mansara was convicted of two counts of attempted murder after his cousin was killed in the attack by a police officer.

“He initially received a sentence of 12 years in prison, which was later reduced” to nine and a half years, the Post reported. “During his incarceration, Mansara has repeatedly attempted to harm himself and others. He has been in and out of solitary confinement, drawing the ire of Amnesty International, a nongovernmental human rights advocacy group.”

Terrorist sympathizing aside, Hadid’s post claiming Israel is “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war” is fake news on its face. Roughly 30 children — some of whom still remain in captivity nearly two months later — were taken hostage by Hamas, after the terrorist group slaughtered Israeli women and children in the Oct. 7 massacre which killed at least 1,200.

Unsurprisingly, child hostages held by Hamas have been subject to physical and emotional abuse. A 12-year-old was even reportedly placed in solitary confinement for more than two weeks.

Accusing Israel of genocide is despicable doublethink Gary Lineker’s Israel-bashing has exposed the moral rot of the woke West. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/22/accusing-israel-of-genocide-is-despicable-doublethink/

Gary Lineker is taking the piss now, isn’t he? He’s had his knuckles rapped by the BBC numerous times for sharing his centrist-dad blather online. For using the public platform gifted to him by us licence-fee payers – on pain of criminal conviction – to advertise his milquetoast views that most people think are bollocks. And yet now, in studied defiance of his bosses, he’s given voice to his most ignorant political opinion yet. To a dinner-party prejudice that isn’t only irritating but will feel genuinely hurtful to many who are forced by law to make Lineker rich. He’s tweeted a link to a video in which Israel is accused of committing genocide against the Palestinians.

Yes, as if Israel hadn’t suffered enough at the murderous hands of Hamas, now it must endure the indignity of a football pundit wondering out loud if it might be guilty of the worst war crime of all. What next, Wayne Rooney sitting in judgement on the Democratic Republic of Congo? ‘Worth 13 minutes of anyone’s time’, said the Match of the Day presenter turned amateur Hague sleuth in his retweet of a conversation between the Guardian’s Owen Jones and Raz Segal, an associate professor of genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey. In that chat, Segal says that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a ‘textbook genocide’. Textbook. That is, it conforms precisely to the definition of genocide, which is the murder of a large number of people from an ethnic group with the aim of destroying that ethnic group. This is what Lineker is sharing to his 8.9million followers on X. The lie that the Jewish State has a bloodlust to vaporise all Palestinians.

This is serious, no? Mr Lineker is a representative of Britain’s public broadcaster, the BBC. He is the face of BBC Sport. Did he not stop to think how the Jewish section of the public might feel about his sharing of a clip damning Israel as genocidal? Did it not cross his mind that our Jewish citizens who are compelled to pay his wages might now feel a lesser part of ‘the public’ that the Beeb is meant to embody? The vast majority of British Jews support Israel (if not the Netanyahu government). They consider it ‘the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people’. Call me a contrarian, but I think people paid by the public to provide a service to the public ought not to alienate any section of that public by sharing inflammatory ideological claims.

Media, lies and videotape Western journalists will never reset the lethal prism through which they refract the Palestinian war against the Jews Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/media-lies-and-videotape-1a5?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

There seems to be no limit to the mainstream media’s malevolence against Israel in reporting the war in Gaza.

Until yesterday, media outlets were sneering at Israeli claims that below Gaza’s al Shifa hospital was an infrastructure of tunnels containing a Hamas command centre. When the IDF found a huge stash of guns and ammunition in the hospital’s MRI room, and revealed they had also found the bodies of two hostages one of whom had been murdered in the hospital, media outlets continued to sneer. The BBC’s World Editor, Jeremy Bowen, waved the discovery aside and said he didn’t find it convincing. He declared:

In the Middle East, you see an awful lot of Kalashnikovs … and it’s not inconceivable that perhaps the security department of a hospital might have had them. 

Yesterday, the IDF revealed that it had uncovered a 55-metre long tunnel down a shaft underneath the hospital, ending at a blast-proof door. It also released CCTV footage from al Shifa of a Nepalese and a Thai hostage being brought in, one of them clearly wounded lying on a hospital gurney and the other being roughly dragged through the hospital corridors with staff looking on. 

One might think all this was proof positive that al Shifa was indeed used as a Hamas command centre, just as Israel had always said. But not for the western media, for whom believing that the Palestinian “victims” of Israeli “oppression” are actually bloodthirsty and manipulative liars while the despised Israelis are their truth-telling victims would entail the world spinning off its axis and shattering into a million virtue-signalling fragments along with these journalists’ entire moral personality.

So there was yet another hallucinatory exchange this morning on BBC Radio’s Today programme (about 2 hours 15 minutes in). Presenter Mishal Husain (whose approach to this issue one week ago I wrote about here) insisted to Israel’s spokesman, Eylon Levy, that maybe the hostages in the video … were being brought in for treatment. 

Yes, she really did ask that. Had the Israelis seen footage of them being treated, she inquired? Eh? Since one of them was on a hospital gurney and was clearly injured, she persisted, did the Israelis have footage of him being treated?

Drawing the Line Between Terrorist and Journalist Observers . . . or willing participants? by Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/drawing-the-line-between-terrorist-and-journalist/

A U.S.-based media watchdog group issued a report last week exposing a half-dozen Arab photo-journalists who accompanied Hamas terrorists in the early hours of October 7 on their killing spree in Israel, documenting their atrocities.

All six of the photo-journalists whose work Honest Reporting examined were employed by major media organizations, including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press. Reuters heralded one photo, showing a lynch mob brutalizing an Israeli soldier they had dragged out of a tank, as its “image of the day.”

An AP photographer took a video of himself in front of the burning Israeli tank, glorifying that he was seeing it with “my own eyes.” He was wearing nothing to identify himself as a member of the press, and appeared to be part of a celebratory crowd.

Another AP reporter snapped close-ups of Hamas terrorists dragging a terrified and bleeding Israeli civilian to a vehicle for transport as a hostage to Gaza.

Others captured the initial breaching of the Israeli border fence, the torching of Israeli homes, and the capture of female hostages.

The report earned cringing excuses from all four news organizations, ranging from the expected “just doing their job,” to embarrassed denials that they had embedded their reporters with Hamas.

Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding that the Department of Justice open a national security investigation into the four media outlets “to determine whether they or their leadership committed federal crimes by supporting Hamas terrorists.”

The six photo-journalists “almost certainly knew about the attack in advance, and even participated by accompanying Hamas terrorists during the attack and filming the heinous acts,” he wrote.

As someone who has reported frequently from Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan, and with Palestinian guerrilla fighters in the Bekaa Valley, I can tell you: the Palestinians control information tightly, just like any other totalitarian. They want to control the “narrative.”

I write about several instances where I succeeded in evading Palestinian attempts at control in my latest book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies. It was always a challenge; often, it was dangerous. The Palestinians a long history of punishing journalists who do not comply with their demands.

But these six “photo-journalists” were not seeking to get around the Hamas narrative to report independently. They sought to glorify Hamas and its atrocities.

CNN Goes Full ‘Enemy of the People’ Reporting on the Arrest Made in the Death of Paul Kessler: Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2023/11/16/cnn-goes-full-enemy-of-the-people-reporting-on-the-arrest-made-in-the-death-of-paul-kessler-n4923991

Despite undergoing myriad personnel changes at all levels in the last year or so, CNN is still woefully CNN. 

Here is some background on this story from my colleague Rabbi Michael Barclay: 

An arrest has been made in the death of Paul Kessler, the Jewish man who died in a counter-protest a week and a half ago in Ventura County, Calif. The charge of manslaughter has been leveled against Loay Alnaji, and there is still an ongoing investigation into the possibility of a hate crime. There will be a press conference on Friday morning, and officials will hold a private meeting with local clergy beforehand.

This is a story that, predictably, the mainstream media tried to ignore and send down the memory hole. My good friend Jennifer Van Laar stayed on top of it from the beginning over at our sister site RedState. Once local law enforcement made the story impossible to ignore, the leftmedia approach was to be as vague as possible about the facts because the hacks have a pre-approved list of potential hate crimes that they can be offended by. A raging anti-Semite assault on a Jewish man isn’t on that list. 

The ABC on Gaza: Exactly as Expected, Except Worse Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/ Forlorn creatures of habit, our household watches                   https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/   Australian Broadcasting Company’sTV flagship 7pm News (Victoria) nightly. As I remarked across the dinner table at 6.59pm on Tuesday, “Stand by for Hamas footage of suffering children in Gaza, with no ABC mention that Hamas uses […]

JOURNALIST JIHADISTS?  Employees of American news agencies apparently were embedded in plainclothes with Hamas terrorists during Oct 7th Israeli massacre

Thanks to Janet Levy for this explosive story….rsk

Honest Reporting is out with an absolute bombshell of a story, revealing today that Gaza-based photo journalists of the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, who also do contract work for CNN and The New York Times, were embedded with Hamas during their killing spree across southern Israel.
Dossier Today (h/t Charlotte) The report asks many compelling questions:
What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically.
It seems plausible that these “journalists” had advance knowledge of the attack and did nothing to warn authorities of the planned massacre. Not only that, the photos and videos of that horrific day show that these photojournalists were embedded with Hamas without any apparel that identifies them as press.
It seems plausible that these “journalists” had advance knowledge of the attack and did nothing to warn authorities of the planned massacre. Not only that, the photos and videos of that horrific day show that these photojournalists were embedded with Hamas without any apparel that identifies them as press.
The report even documents that one of the men, Hassan Eslaiah, who works for AP and CNN, deleted evidence of his involvement in the assault, in which Eslaiah was dressed in plainclothes.
On X.com, a photo surfaced this evening of Eslaiah embracing Yahya Sinwar, the highest ranking Hamas official in Gaza. Sinwar has been convicted of committing several murders and acts of terrorism.
While Reuters is based in London, The Associated Press, CNN, and The New York Times are all headquartered in the United States, where it is illegal to provide material support to Hamas, because the jihadist group is listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

How News Outlets Obtained Images of Hamas’ October 7 Terror Attack Is Soaked in Controversy Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/11/08/reporters-from-major-publications-were-embedded-with-hamas-on-october-7and-knew-an-attack-was-coming-n2630973

I understand there’s a debate regarding journalists getting involved in the stories they cover. The number one rule is that you don’t become the subject. It’s a debate that’s been around for years, namely regarding the photojournalism of war-torn or poverty-stricken nations, which comes with horrid photos of death and destruction. For some, it could be disturbing that these reporters take pictures of extremely malnourished children in Africa and then go about their way, but that’s the ghoulish side of the business. 

Then, there’s having knowledge of a massive terror attack and doing nothing about it. Photographers from major publications, like The Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, and CNN, were embedded with Hamas on October 7 and followed the terrorists into Israel. There are some serious questions, though Honest Reporting, an outfit that tracks anti-Israel bias, goes so far as to accuse the photographers of potentially being complicit in a terror attack (via Honest Reporting): 

On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions. 

What were they doing there so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? Judging from the pictures of lynching, kidnapping and storming of an Israeli kibbutz, it seems like the border has been breached not only physically, but also journalistically. 

Four names appear on AP’s photo credits from the Israel-Gaza border area on October 7: Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali. 

Eslaiah, a freelancer who also works for CNN, crossed into Israel, took photos of a burning Israeli tank, and then captured infiltrators entering Kibbutz Kfar Azza. 

[…] 

Masoud, who also works for The New York Times, was there as well —  just in time to set foot in Israeli territory and take more tank pictures. 

Ali Mahmud and Hatem Ali were positioned to get pictures of the horrific abductions of Israelis into Gaza. 

NBC Quietly Changes “Man Dies After Hitting Head” Headline on Death of Elderly Jewish Man by Pro-Palestine Protestor By Margaret Flavin

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/11/nbc-alters-headline-after-criticism-classic-msm-gaslighting/

On Monday, an elderly Jewish man, 65-year-old Paul Kessler, succumbed to injuries sustained at a pro-Palestinian protest over the weekend after he was hit in the head by a pro-Palestinian protester.

Despite the extensive media reports about the deadly incident, NBC News’ headline is classic Mainstream Media gaslighting.  The original headline read, “Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.”

Keller did not just “hit his head.” He was attacked by a pro-Palestine protestor and assaulted with a megaphone.

The vicious blow caused Keller to fall to the ground where suffered an additional blow to the head, compounding his injuries.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that Kessler, “was in a physical altercation with counter-protestor(s)” during which he “fell backwards and struck his head on the ground.”

The statement added that the “Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office determined the cause of death to be blunt force head injury and the manner of death homicide.”

Mr. Keller died from homicide, not from “hitting his head” in a passive fall.

Israel Screens Horrific Footage from Hamas Attacks for U.S. Media: What We Saw By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/israel-screens-horrific-footage-from-hamas-attacks-for-u-s-media/

NR attended the screening with other journalists in New York, as Israel tries to combat disinformation about the assault.

As Israel combats worsening denialism of the atrocities that Hamas terrorists committed on October 7, officials from the country screened footage from the attacks for reporters today in New York.

I joined about 20 other journalists in a 14th-floor Manhattan conference room to watch the horrific video, which includes footage and images from a range of sources — such as cameras that Hamas attackers wore, dash cams, traffic cameras, and the phones of terrorists, their victims, and first responders — providing evidence of the crimes that Hamas carried out in Israel this month. The footage shows gagged and bound civilians burnt to an unidentifiable crisp; the casual and summary execution of people, including children, cowering under desks in the dark as they hide from terrorists wearing headlamps; the grisly decapitation of a Thai worker already bleeding from the stomach by a terrorist using a garden hoe; and other horrors.

Today’s session was the first time that the video, which is about 45 minutes long, has been screened outside of Israel. Earlier this week, the IDF invited international journalists to watch it near Tel Aviv. Otherwise, officials told us, only President Biden and a few other top leaders have viewed the clips, which will also be taken to the U.N., where anti-Israel sentiment runs rampant.

The Israeli officials did not seem to know for certain if the video would be more widely circulated in the future. So far, it’s been shown only to journalists, under the condition that we not record any portion of it. Upon arriving, I had to leave my electronics in a locker downstairs. The primary concern is respect for the families of the victims, who have not authorized the public release of the videos, officials said. Acting Israeli consul-general Aviv Ezra said after the screening that the foreign minister has sought to share the video with specific audiences because we “can’t sugarcoat it” and because of the “conspiracy people” and the reality of Holocaust denial.

It is impossible to know the true prevalence of denial of Hamas’s atrocities. But some prominent figures have joined the deniers’ ranks. During an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour this week, Queen Rania of Jordan — a U.S. ally — complained about the media’s purported “double standards” regarding the war. “Even on CNN, at the beginning of the conflict there was a headline that reported on Israeli children found slaughtered in an Israeli kibbutz. It was not independently verified,” she said, asking if CNN would publish something that was not already verified. But atrocities targeting children had already been extensively documented. Queen Rania’s understanding of the situation would benefit from viewing the video: It showed nightmarish images of dead babies and children.