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November 2023

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

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

By on November 21st, 2023

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?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

US and China: Difficult Coups and Institutions di: Francesco Sisci

By on November 21st, 2023

http://www.settimananews.it/informazione-internazionale/us-and-china-difficult-coups-and-institutions/

American newspapers are voicing growing concern that Donald Trump, who is running for president, is sounding more like Mussolini and Hitler.[1] Also, following the 2020 January 6 attack on Capitol Hill, something like a preview of an attempted coup, some fear Trump may be tempted to repeat the game, only this time better organized.

However, there are substantial differences between Trump and Hitler, Mussolini, or Lenin, the master of it all. In all these cases, the tricks worked because they had the backing of the army and the national police, who thought they had been wronged; one way or another, they had no voice, and they were ready to support whoever gave them that representation.

With Lenin, the army was tired of fighting a war they deemed unwinnable against Germany, and the German command, who aided his return to Russia, saw clearly that he was the man to deliver on it.

With Mussolini, the army and many veterans felt deprived of better results from the victory in World War I. They wanted to topple a political system they thought was giving in to dangerous communist revolutionaries. With Hitler, the army felt stabbed in the back because the terms of surrender were too harsh and chafed under a civilian government ready to give in, again, to socialists and communists.

To stage a coup

Presently, the situation in the US, like in Israel at the time of the protests against the constitutional reforms, looks pretty different. The army and the security apparently do not side with Trump; they are neutral, if not hostile to him.

In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to implement reforms that would remove some powers from the judiciary and concentrate them on the executive. The reform was bitterly opposed by large parts of the population and most of the army and the security bodies.

The long Israeli struggle between the government and part of the military — and the ensuing mutual distrust — was certainly the breeding ground for the intelligence failure leading to the October 7 Hamas attack.

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