RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/07/how-the-media-echoes-hamas-propaganda/

Israel has come to be the most demonized nation on Earth. Its actions in Gaza are continually vilified as ‘genocidal’. Last month’s air strikes against Iran were denounced as ‘unprovoked’ and ‘illegal’. In the one-sided narrative that is now dominant in the West, the Jewish State is the aggressor, while the terror groups and regimes that attack it are cast as innocent victims. Natasha Hausdorff – barrister and legal director at the UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust – joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to debunk the lies we are constantly told about Israel. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How degraded has the debate become around Israel right now?

Natasha Hausdorff: It’s been deteriorating extremely rapidly – but this is perhaps unsurprising. For decades, we have had a media that, for the most part, propagates the lies of terrorist organisations. This has come to a head in everything we have seen being reported, in particular out of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Ultimately, it is misinformation that has been informing – or perhaps disinforming – public debate.

O’Neill: What did you think when you saw a very large crowd of privileged Britons chanting ‘death to the IDF’?

Hausdorff: Let’s be clear that this was essentially calling for death to Jews. It is simply an evolution of ‘From the river to the sea’, which we’ve heard from 7 October onwards.

I saw a distinct lack of pretense to this sort of unbridled Jew hate. Glastonbury has been a very unwelcome place for Jews and Israelis for years. It was reported that there was even a Hitler flag being displayed on some of the tents. This is deeply, deeply concerning – but likely only the tip of the iceberg. There are many people who have been swept up in all this because they think it’s the fashionable thing. Apparently, it’s the way that you demonstrate your moral credentials these days – by siding with internationally proscribed terrorist organisations and saying things like ‘up Hamas’ and ‘up Hezbollah’.

O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim Israel is guilty of genocide?

Hausdorff: Not only is it grotesque, it has no basis in reality whatsoever. But it is being advanced with a very particular purpose. I remember being on SABC – the South African version of the BBC – just after South Africa had brought its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). My counterpart said, ‘Isn’t it marvelous now we can finally use Israel and genocide in the same sentence, and nobody can tell us otherwise?’.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hey-new-york-times-are-we-really-still-touting-gaza-health-ministry-propaganda/?utm_source=recirc-

This is from the Newspaper of Record today, reporting on Trump administration pressure for a ceasefire between Israel, i.e., our ally, and Hamas, i.e., the jihadist Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood designated for three decades as a foreign terrorist organization under federal law:

Israel’s retaliation has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Almost all of the roughly two million Palestinian residents of in Gaza have been displaced at one point during the war, many of them repeatedly, and hunger is widespread.

Sigh.

Just to clarify:

That “Gaza health ministry” is Hamas. If its flacks are moving their lips, they are lying. This is not merely because they are liars. It is doctrinal. In Hamas-dominated schools, Palestinians children are taught the prophet Mohammed’s instruction that “War is deceit.” In warfare against Jews and other infidels, Islamic scripture encourages misdirection, ploys, and broken agreements — indeed, much of the Koran details the military conquests of the first Muslims, and deception was a feature, not a bug. (Muslims are hardly unique in this regard, Mohammed was speaking a timeless military truth. The important point here is that Hamas considers itself engaged in a jihadist war for the destruction of Israel; its statements are in furtherance of the jihad and, perforce, tend to be lies.)
The “Gaza health ministry,” i.e., Hamas, does not distinguish between “civilians” and combatants in totaling deaths because sharia supremacist ideology does not see things that way. First, “citizen” is a Western concept. Sharia societies are not free societies; they have the sharia authority and its subjects (not citizens), most of whom are Muslim; the only obligation of the ruler and the ruled is to adhere to sharia law. Second, to be sure, sharia does distinguish between combatants and other subjects; combatants are esteemed in life and venerated in death, after which Allah is believed to richly reward them. Nevertheless, insofar as the execution of the jihad is concerned, it is the duty of all Muslims — combatants and noncombatants alike — to die if that advances the cause of Allah. In Hamas’s jihad against Israel, Western garment rending about “civilian casualties” is more valuable to the cause than Hamas’s combatant operations because (as we’re seeing yet again) the former yield concessions from the Jewish state that are manifestly more valuable than whatever (increasingly little) is achieved by the latter.
Two million Palestinians have been displaced at one time or another because (a) Hamas atrociously attacked Israel on October 7, requiring Israel to respond by attacking Hamas in its Gaza stronghold, the former safe haven from which it planned, trained, recruited, and raised funds for its eliminationist jihad against Israel; (b) as a terrorist organization that specializes in war crimes, Hamas both hides among and targets civilian infrastructure; (c) Israel encouraged Gazan noncombatants to relocate in the lead-up to its combat operations against Gazan military targets to avoid killing noncombatants – honoring the spirit of international law even though Israel well knew the consequences of this approach: more casualties for its own soldiers while Hamas jihadists evaded attack, and a lengthier war; and (d) if the noncombatants had not been displaced, if Israel had simply attacked targets of military value shielded by noncombatants (which the law of war permits), the Timeswould say that Israel had intentionally “mass-murdered civilians” and committed “war crimes” (which, of course, is what commentators of the Islamist-leftist alliance say anyway).
Hunger is less widespread than the Times would have you believe because Israel is delivering millions of meals to Gazans. To the extent there is and has been hunger, it is because the billions in humanitarian aid that Israel and the West send to Gaza is stolen by Hamas. Historically speaking, some degree of hunger is a tragic fact of life in war-torn territories – it is a big part of why populations are displaced. Yet, the hunger problem in Gaza has been ameliorated because Israel has substantially defanged Hamas – since the terrorist organization has been severely weakened as a fighting and ruling force, Israel has been able to get humanitarian aid directly to the Gazan population, without diversion by Hamas.

Hope that helps.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-manufactured-genocide-gaza

Concept creep describes the phenomenon in which morally potent terms expand beyond their original definitions into ever broader applications. As these terms become more diluted, they also become politically weaponized, shifting public perceptions, priorities, and policy.

In August 2020, I illustrated in these pages how terms like racism, white supremacy, and privilege saw a dramatic surge in media usage, significantly reshaping public and political perceptions and discourse. The same dynamic, I feared, was beginning to reshape another crucial term: genocide.

Genocide is going the way of racism and white supremacy, I observed on Oct. 19, 2023. Israel hadn’t yet invaded Gaza, but the mainstream media template for response to Hamas’ murderous Oct. 7 attacks was already set. Sure enough, by 2024, mentions of genocide in The New York Times (1.43% of all articles) had eclipsed the paper’s earlier peak for white supremacy (1.41% in 2020) and, though not matching the peak for racism/racist(s) (7.2% in 2020), still reflected a similar pattern of conceptual escalation.

Upon closer examination, however, much like the widespread surge in race-related terminology during the “Great Awokening,” The New York Times was far from alone, as references to genocide reached unprecedented highs across numerous major news outlets, including The Guardian and the Associated Press.

To confirm that these recent spikes were driven primarily by the Israel-Gaza conflict—and to place them in historical context—I analyzed how frequently each of the six outlets paired genocide with countries or groups historically associated with genocide allegations or acts. Using Nexis Uni, I tracked annual coverage associating genocide with well-documented historical cases, including Rwanda (1994), Darfur (2003-2008), Bosnia (1995), Myanmar (2017-present), and the Yazidis (2014-2017).

The results were striking and unambiguous: Coverage linking Israel with genocide has surged far beyond every other agreed-upon historical case of genocide across all examined outlets. In The New York Times, for example, articles pairing Israel and genocide reached levels more than nine times higher than the peak for Rwanda and nearly six times greater than for Darfur. Similarly, in The Guardian, more than 1 percent of all articles now reference both Israel and genocide—a frequency unmatched by any other pairing in recent decades.

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

Next month, the London freelance branch of Britain’s National Union of Journalists is to hold a meeting to discuss ”the ethics and realities of reporting genocide when the only journalists on the scene are being slaughtered.”

The meeting is being sponsored by the hard-left Labour MP and former Corbyn apparatchik John McDonnell, who has accused Israel of murder and called for its economic and military isolation.

So a fair, balanced and objective discussion, then.

Accusing Israel of “genocide,” when it’s fighting a just war against genocidal attack, when it’s allowed into Gaza tens of thousands of tons of food and other aid, when it’s repeatedly moved Gaza’s civilians out of harm’s way and has killed a far lower proportion of civilians to combatants than any other military in war, denotes either illiteracy, imbecilism or malice.

As for “the only journalists on the scene being slaughtered,” a number of those individuals have been exposed as terrorists masquerading as journalists.

Yesterday, the Israel Defence Forces said it had killed two Islamic jihadi terrorists who had posed as journalists and who had operated from a command centre in the courtyard of the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza. So not only were these individuals not journalists but they were terrorists engaged in the war crime of using a hospital as cover for terrorism.

Will the NUJ meeting discuss the “ethics and realities” of that?

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/06/06/taking_sides_wikipedia_advances_anti-israel_narratives_1115040.html

Wikipedia, the world’s go-to site for information that professes to take a neutral point of view, is coming under fire for alleged anti-Israel bias in the sources it favors and content it delivers to millions of readers. 

The criticism is coming from several quarters, including a bipartisan group of 23 members of Congress who, in an April letter, expressed “deep concern regarding antisemitism” found in the online encyclopedia. The entries routinely highlight the work of anti-Zionist scholars and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), according to a review by RealClearInvestigations, while dismissing the views of Israel’s defenders. Amnesty International, which casts Israel as genocidal, is considered a reliable source for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while the Anti-Defamation League, which rejects that view, is not. 

A vigil for victims of antisemitic violence, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Pilgrim, gunned down last month in Washington, D.C.
AP

The controversy has emerged during a sharp rise in antisemitism around the world, including the recent murders of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing in Boulder of protesters demanding the release of hostages taken by Hamas. Critics argue that the online encyclopedia is fueling this hatred by publishing biased entries that are presented as objective statements of fact. 

Wikipedia is produced by volunteer editors who are instructed to follow a set of rules as they summarize the work of authoritative sources, which can include those that appear to be biased. Its consensus model encourages editors to work out their differences collegially and reach a compromise that balances the different viewpoints of sources to ensure neutrality. But critics say that so many academics and NGOs hold left-leaning views that cast Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed that it is hard for editors to avoid publishing biased statements as neutral ones. 

Consider Wiki’s entry for “Gaza genocide” – a title that, critics argue, takes sides. It begins with this statement: “According to a United Nations Special Committee, Amnesty International, and other experts and human rights organizations, Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people during its ongoing invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the Gaza war.” The entry then lists several paragraphs of evidence, including large-scale deaths of Palestinians, the forced displacement of most of the population, and starvation. 

Where’s the other side of the story to establish neutrality? Not until the seventh paragraph do readers learn that Hamas’ attack in Israel, killing 1,139 people, sparked the invasion of Gaza. But rather than calling Hamas a terrorist group – a classification used by the U.S., EU, U.K., Canada, and other democratic nations – whose avowed goal is the destruction of Israel, the entry describes the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas as a response to Israel’s historic treatment of Palestinians. 

Leading With Bias