RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://melaniephillips.substack.com

In the Gaza war, journalism has become a veritable Ponzi scheme of lies. It uses terrorists posing as journalists to tell lies, it lies about the evidence that they were terrorists and it lies about those lying about the lies.

Israel said it had conducted a targeted killing of the al Jazeera ‘‘journalist” Anas al Sharif because he was also a Hamas commander. It produced screen shots identifying al Sharif as a leader in a Hamas rocket-launching squad and member of the Nukhba force, the stormtroopers who led the depraved attack on Israelis on October 7 2023. It showed that he had joined Hamas in 2013 and even revealed his military ID number.

It further emerged that al Sharif was named in a lawsuit by American victims of October 7 against al Jazeera for providing “substantial assistance” to Hamas. The lawsuit quotes messages al Sharif posted on Telegram on October 7 as the massacre of 1200 Israelis developed. He wrote in one message:

Nine hours later and the heroes are still roaming the country, killing and capturing… God, God, how great you are.

He wrote in another:

It is a jihad, a jihad of victory and martyrdom. Allahu akbar and thank God.

Before the attack, Sharif posted photos of himself smiling alongside Hamas leaders, including the eliminated October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.

None of that cut any ice with Western media outlets that vilified Israel for targeting a journalist. Instead, the media dismissed all this evidence with declarations that Israel’s claims couldn’t be verified and that it had provided “no proof”.

In other words there is simply no evidence, however overwhelming, that is allowed to challenge the foundational lie pumped out by the media echo-chamber that the Israelis are brutal killers mowing down the innocent for daring to resist.

So the media went into mourning for their slain champion of “truth”, presenting that view of al Sharif as unchallengeably correct while ignoring or rubbishing as an Israeli cover-up the evidence that he was a senior Hamas operative.

As Honest Reporting noted, Sky News lauded al Sharif as a “crucial reporting voice,” ignoring the IDF evidence of his affiliation to Hamas. AP stated that Israel had produced no facts, asserting that Israel had said, “without producing evidence, that al-Sharif had led a Hamas cell”. Reuters also declared that Israel did not disclose any evidence. The New York Times eulogised al-Sharif by saying “he and other al Jazeera reporters have become symbols of the determination to broadcast reports about the war and conditions in that enclave to the Arab world,” and downplaying Israel’s evidence as mere accusations.

And The Guardian lamented: “The truth has died” — which would appear for once to be an accurate observation, but of The Guardian’s own reporting.

Remarkably, the BBC actually published something that contradicted this mass lament over a fallen hero by coyly slipping in:

The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war.

What?! But wait: in the next sentence it added:

In social media videos before his death Sharif can be heard criticising the group.

Phew, eh?! Apparently we can all relax. Al Sharif was kind of associated with Hamas, but he was also kind of not. And note “criticising,” as if Hamas was nothing more than a politics debating society.

Indeed, that seems to be the view of none other than the president of the Foreign Press Association, Ian Williams, who remarkably declared:

Frankly, I don’t care whether al Sharif was in Hamas or not. We don’t kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats.

Well, if the president of the Foreign Press Association thinks a terrorist group that slaughters, rapes, beheads, burns alive, tortures and takes hostage innocent people is the same kind of thing as an American political party, who can be surprised that the journalists he represents view Hamas genocidists as professional colleagues?

Moreover, al Jazeera isn’t a media outfit that just happens to employ some terrorists. It is the propaganda arm of Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist regime that’s the sponsor and protector of Hamas, the foe of moderate Muslim states and which wages jihad by stealth against Israel and the west.

Al Jazeera itself is a key asset in the jihadis’ use of “asymmetric warfare”. This transforms propaganda from being merely an adjunct of war into a key strategy of warfare that has weaponised information to manipulate the ignorance, credulousness and profound hatred of Jews in the west to bring about the destruction of Israel that the Islamists can’t achieve by military means.

Al Jazeera is the Islamists’ principal weapon in the war of information that they are waging with such devastating effect to twist the already degraded and demoralised western mind into believing that evil is good and good is evil.

As Collin Anderson of the Washington Free Beacon reported:

Over the decades, al Jazeera has published a number of false reports accusing Israel of atrocities. A 2013 story charged Israel with opening dams to intentionally flood Gaza. Al Jazeera retracted that reporting two years later, issuing an embarrassing editor’s note that acknowledged there “are no dams of the type which can be opened”.

Years later, al Jazeera corrected a report that referred to the Israeli coastal city of Haifa as “northern occupied Palestine”. Al Sharif was not the only al Jazeera “journalist” mentioned in the declassified Israeli documents that revealed al Sharif’s Hamas affiliation. Also referenced were Alaa Salama, Hossam Shabat, Ashraf al Saraj, Ismail Abu Omar, and Talal Aruki, all of whom are affiliated with either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to the documents.

Al Jazeera has played a central role in framing the Gaza war in such a way that it’s now a mainstream belief that Israel commits war crimes, starves children to death and targets for assassination those who are heroically bringing the truth to light — all an eye-popping inversion of the truth.

The western media commonly pass off terrorists as journalists. Last year, Lahav Harkov reported that one third of the Arab journalists listed by the Committee to Protect Journalists as having been killed in the Gaza war were employed by terrorist groups. The head of Reporters Without Borders US admitted that it used different criteria for identifying Gazans as bona fide journalists because they were “trapped inside the territory, within a wider context of targeting the press”.

Whether or not editors and news desks realise they are platforming terrorists and their supporters, the media use them because they deliver the malicious and false narrative of Israeli abuses and Palestinian victimisation that must not be challenged.

The media act in concert with the human rights and humanitarian establishment, which is similarly deployed to push blood libels against Israel to further the Islamists’ strategy of weaponised deceit. Thus Amnesty, which gave Anas al Sharif a “Human Rights Defender” award, claimed that Israel had killed at least 242 Arab journalists in Gaza compared with a mere 69 journalists killed in World War Two — and that it had killed more journalists than in any other conflict in modern history.

This comparison is invidious, because there were far fewer journalists involved in reporting that war and statistics are deeply unreliable. That said, at least 225 Soviet journalists were reportedly killed on the Eastern Front during the war, and there are bound to have been more killed in Germany, Japan and other military theatres. And presumably, in Amnesty’s mindset the more than 1400 Jewish journalists killed between 1939 and 1945, according to Yad Vashem, don’t count as victims at all.

Do Amnesty staffers, one has to wonder, bound out of bed in the morning panting with excitement at inventing yet another vicious claim with which to stick it to the Jews and render Israel powerless to resist its own destruction?

But this onslaught is relentless and global. Adam Kredo reports in the Washington Free Beacon that the UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification watchdog (IPC) manipulated its own metrics to make it easier to declare famine in Gaza. In a July 29 report the IPC said “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” claiming that “mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths”. Kredo writes:

The UN-affiliated watchdog group that recently declared a “worst-case scenario of famine” in Gaza quietly changed one of its key reporting metrics while doing so, making it easier to formally declare that there is a famine in the Hamas-controlled territory. One veteran aid practitioner told the Free Beacon that in previous famine declarations the IPC issued in Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan it used different metrics. For Gaza it quietly cut a key metric by half…

Media outlets like the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and ABC News relied on the IPC report to claim that Israeli policies have led to mass starvation, with the Times stating that “months of severe aid restrictions imposed by Israel on the territory” have caused a famine “across most of Gaza”.

Of course they did. The Western media front in this war has been deployed to pump out first the libel of Israeli genocide, then the libel that Israel deliberately targets hospitals, then the libel that Israel is starving children to death, then the libel that Israel is deliberately killing aid workers and Gazans queuing for food, and now the libel that Israel is deliberately targeting for assassination the journalists heroically trying to bring these crimes to light.

As a result, countless numbers of people are now absolutely convinced they have “seen” the evidence of all this. It never occurs to them to ask the obvious questions: how come the “starving” children they have “seen” begging piteously for food are obviously well fed; how come the adults they have seen with them ditto; how come they have not seen large numbers of people with bellies swollen from malnutrition; how come Israel is supposed to be starving the Gazans when it’s supplied them with tens of thousands of tons of food; and so on and on.

The evidence that’s actually playing out before us is of millions of people being manipulated and lied to. It’s utterly shocking how so many can be implacably convinced that black is white. They believe it because they want to — as the Islamists understand very well. That’s why the strategy is so wicked. It has cleverly weaponised the profound desire in the West to be rid once and for all of the Jews’ historic victim status which lies so heavily on the Western conscience; and the desire also, at an even deeper level, to be rid of the Jews themselves.

It is a brilliant, diabolical strategy, it is poisoning an entire society and the media is its instrument. Rather than exposing the abuse of power, journalism has itself become an abuse of power.

The scale of this exercise in global manipulation to advance an agenda of sheer evil, and the extent to which it has succeeded, is beyond belief and should terrify us all.