Media, lies and videotape Western journalists will never reset the lethal prism through which they refract the Palestinian war against the Jews Melanie Phillips
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?
So let’s get our heads round this — one hostage was being wheeled in on a gurney by armed men after an attempt by their fellow terrorists to murder him; the other was seen being roughly dragged by armed men, one of whom held a meat cleaver, into a hospital where one hostage at least had been murdered on the premises; and this BBC presenter is asking whether the Israelis can prove that the hostages weren’t being brought in for treatment?
As for the 55-foot tunnel at the bottom of a secret shaft, Husain’s next insightful observation was that “the fact that there was a basement was never in doubt” — not least because it had been constructed, she averred, “when Israel was in control”. So, far from this being evidence of a Hamas terrorist hub, it was probably … an Israeli shelter, or something for Israel’s use. And therefore — inescapably— a baroque and deliberate Israeli lie.
In response to this eye-watering perversity, Eylon Levy made some effective points but then became too emotional. Consequently, when Husain switched to asking about the IDF operations in the “West Bank”, he failed to rise to this new onslaught and instead of responding to her aggression in forensic fashion he sounded like a record stuck in the horrific groove of October 7.
Declaring in horror that “200 Palestinians have been killed including 52 children and another eight by ‘settlers’”, Husain demanded to know:
Why are so many Palestinians dying in the West Bank?
Well, here are just a few facts which she should have known but of which she seemed totally unaware. Before October 7, Israelis were being subjected to the deadliest wave of terror attacks from the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria since the terrorist campaign known as the “Second Intifada” was finally suppressed in 2005.
According to research done by the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, around 700 terror attacks against Israelis have take place in these disputed territories in the six weeks since the Hamas pogrom. These have increased significantly not just in number but in sophistication and lethality. The “West Bank” is being ramped up as a front in Iran’s war against Israel, in addition to the fronts in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Gaza.
On November 16, three Hamas terrorists from the “West Bank” stormed an Israeli checkpoint near Jerusalem, wounding at least six people before being killed by the IDF. Security forces also found and destroyed a laboratory for manufacturing explosive devices, where they discovered several IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) ready for use.
Two days previously, the IDF conducted an operation against terrorists in Tulkarm, where they discovered an explosives laboratory, killed several terrorists and arrested one more.
On November 17, the IDF killed two Palestinians who attacked Israeli forces at a checkpoint near Hebron. That night, Israeli security forces attacked a terrorist safe house near Nablus and killed a Palestinian who had been involved in a series of shooting attacks and was planning further military activity.
The same night Israeli security forces in Jenin uncovered IEDs planted under and on the side of the road that were intended to hit Israeli forces, and IAF aircraft attacked a squad of armed terrorists who fired at the soldiers.
Is Husain really waxing so indignant about the killing of these terrorists? Does she really believe the Hamas nonsense that every Palestinian who has been killed was a civilian?
Her loaded questioning was of a piece with the astonishing position adopted by much of the mainstream media: that while statistics and claims put out by Hamas and Israel-bashing NGOs are to be reported at face value, whatever Israel says is put into quotes or described in language indicating serious scepticism or doubt, along with the rubric: “This could not be independently verified”. Audiences and readers are thus being primed to believe that Israel routinely lies while Hamas tells the truth — the precise opposite of the case.
Husain declared that Hamas casualty statistics had always ended up being accepted by the Israelis. You really do have to rub your eyes at this. There has never been a conflict or incident over the past several years where the Palestinians, whether from Hamas or other terror groups, have told the truth.
European and American sources have stated that Hamas death statistics are routinely exaggerated. In this current war, Hamas claimed that 500 Palestinian civilians had been killed by an Israeli airstrike hitting the al Ahli hospital. Yet it was an Islamic Jihad rocket fired at Israeli civilians from near the hospital that had misfired and fallen into the hospital’s car park, killing an estimated 50-70 people.
Husain’s absurd statement is in line with BBC Verify’s (sic) equally ridiculous pseudo-analysis rubbishing the charge that Hamas routinely inflates its casualty totals, quoting in support notorious Israel-bashing NGOs such as Human Rights Watch saying they had “no reason to believe” that Hamas figures were anything other than reliable.
A moment’s thought would tell anyone capable of rational brain activity that the Hamas casualty figures are literally incredible because they don’t acknowledge one single terrorist among those who have been killed. That’s because to Hamas, every single Palestinian who is killed, including their own operatives, is an innocent civilian while every single Israeli civilian is a combatant deserving to be killed.
Despite this easily ascertainable fact, media outlets put scare quotes and health warnings around Israeli claims but none around those made by Hamas or its allies. The result is that many if not most mainstream media outlets are feeding the public a stream of lies, falsehoods, distortions, omissions and selective reporting about the war in Gaza.
The indefatigable and heroic blogger-for-truth David Collier has written a must-read post here about the terrorist connections of a number of al Shifa hospital doctors. These have been quoted by western media outlets week after week swearing that the hospital had nothing to do with Hamas and they had seen no evidence whatever of any Hamas activity — a lie revealed in the videos released by the Israelis, which show hospital staff watching the Hamas gunmen bringing in the hostages and casually chatting to them.
Collier reveals that one doctor after the other had posted support for the October 7 atrocities, spread lies that the IDF had stolen the hospital’s water and then presented it as humanitarian aid, celebrated as “resistance” the massacre of Jews last January outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, praised the terrorists who carried out another attack in Jerusalem this month as “fighting fire with fire”, and so on.
It seems quite obvious now that there is simply no evidence that the Israelis can ever bring forward of the perfidy, lies and barbarism of the Palestinians that the western media will ever allow to reset the lethal prism through which they refract the Palestinian war against the Jews.
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