In the Media

The Algemeiner – 16 July 2024

For nine long months, Israel has been locked in a battle against Hamas – the evil genocidal regime of Gaza that sparked this latest conflict when it launched a murderous campaign against Israeli civil society on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping a further 250.

And almost from the very beginning, the sympathy that should have been with Israel, a democratic free society that had been so brutally attacked, quickly evaporated, exposing much of the mainstream media’s almost obsessive desire to blame Israel as the aggressor.

As Israel fought back, many news agencies parroted the figures and the stories given by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, as if it were some kind of neutral trustworthy source of truth.

It isn’t.

On October 17 last year, it claimed that an Israeli missile strike hit the al Ahli al Arabi hospital, killing at least 500 people. Despite this accusation, without verification, receiving wide media coverage, Israeli officials released their findings debunking entirely the Hamas claim and displaying evidence that it was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile that had fallen short and landed in the hospital parking lot causing estimates of somewhere between 10 and 50 deaths – a toll far lower than claimed.

The haste to accept a terrorist organisation’s slanderous claim marked the beginning of another battlefront in Israel’s war with Hamas – the information war.

Since that moment, there have been many more claims and accusations against Israel, often emanating from information provided by Hamas, which the world media have eagerly accepted.

This includes ignoring evidence of Hamas’ collusion with UNRWA housing weaponry, terror infrastructure and command centres and their staff participating in the October 7 massacre.

It also includes the accusations that a famine was imminent in Gaza, a libel told by the UN’s World Food Programme, only to be told later in another UN report that it couldn’t endorse that view due to lack of evidence.

The claim of the targeting of civilians was also laid bare, when the UN quietly revised down its civilian casualty figures from Gaza, after it became apparent the figures provided by Hamas, and which were once again parroted by the world as truth, grossly exaggerated the numbers of women and children killed.

Sometimes corrections are made, but often it is too late as the damage is already done and the perversion of truth has had a real impact on international governments in their attitude towards Israel as they often accept the word of the UN, heavily influenced by Hamas, as a trustworthy source of truth.

The consequence of all this misinformation is that Israel, not Hamas, is mostly blamed and held responsible for the misery of this war.

Even just last month when Israeli forces heroically rescued four Israeli hostages, including Noa Argamani, who became the face of the October 7 massacre when haunting video of her being dragged away to Gaza on a motorcycle, desperately pleading for her life, was beamed across the world, many news outlets refused to acknowledge the Israeli achievement, falsely referring to the hostages as being “released” or “freed” rather than “rescued”.

The BBC initially reported that “Four Israeli hostages freed in raid in central Gaza” before it was changed to “rescued” later. Reuters headline similarly reported that Noa Argamani was “freed” in time to see her terminally ill mother. And Francesca Albanese, a UN “Special Rapporteur” known for her extreme anti-Israeli bias, tweeted that she was “relieved that four hostages have been released” yet in the very same tweet accused Israel of using “hostages to legitimise killing” and Israel of “genocidal intent”.

What followed then, in an all too familiar pattern, was a complete reframing of the story to de-emphasise the rescue of the hostages and move its focus to the casualties instead. Once again they accepted Hamas’ claim that at least 274 Palestinians were killed in the operation – a figure completely unverified and disputed by Israeli authorities – rushing to reframe the story as a “massacre” in a Gaza refugee camp.

It’s a truly dystopian alternate reality when a country under existential threat from a brutal terrorist death cult rescues innocent hostages from its clutches and the world’s reaction is criticism and lamentation.

Hamas started this war on October 7 with its vicious and cruel attack. Since then over 19,000 rockets, drones and anti-tank missiles have been fired into Israel by Hamas and its various allies. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar openly welcomes the civilian deaths in Gaza as “necessary sacrifices”, yet despite all this and throughout this long war, it remains Israel that continues to be criticised in a way no country ever has, tainted by the misinformation and lies fed by an evil genocidal terror organisation that revels in the death and destruction it sows.

It should be so simple, yet much of the world still cannot seem to find the necessary courage to stand behind Israel in its fight against this evil enemy.

This is the crazy world we live in.