RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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?

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.

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.