RUTHFULLY YOURS

Immediately following the Hamas atrocities in Israel on October 7, key media outlets played a significant role in fomenting antisemitism, bruiting blood libels against Israel and those who support her. Last week, the same week Jews were firebombed in Boulder, Colorado, some publications seem to have by design or bias aided Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.

Background

There is no “genocide” in Gaza.

“Gaza genocide” is a lie, and the people spreading that lie are partially responsible for the crimes these three men committed.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas — an avowedly terrorist organization and the ruling class of Gaza, whose charter specifically calls for the eradication of Israel and the death of all Jews living there — engaged in an act of war. There is no doubt whatsoever that the cross-border invasion and murder of scores of innocent, unarmed Israelis was an act of war under international law. Moreover, international law from the days of St. Thomas Aquinas onward has always recognized the concept of a “just war,” and no war can be more just than waging it against terrorists from a neighboring state who avowedly seek the destruction of your own country and demonstrate the military capacity to do so.

Just wars are NOT “genocide.”

Moreover, the Israeli Defense Forces practice state-of-the-art civilian risk mitigation measures, in full keeping with the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. If you are trying to commit “genocide,” you do not follow the Geneva Conventions. You just don’t.

If you are trying to commit “genocide,” you do not provide civilians early warning that you are about to strike legitimate military targets in their midst.

If you are trying to commit “genocide,” you do not distribute robust food aid to the alleged targets of your genocide.

If you are trying to commit “genocide,” you do not provide humanitarian medical assistance to the alleged targets of your genocide.

If you are trying to commit “genocide,” you do not evacuate sick and wounded children of the alleged targets of your genocide to hospitals.

If you are trying to commit “genocide,” you do not communicate that all armed conflict will end the moment Hamas lays down its guns and stops indiscriminately shooting rockets at Israeli civilians.

No, if you are trying to commit genocide, you do not fight a just war in keeping with the Geneva Conventions. Instead, you line everybody up against the wall and shoot them in the back of the head. That is genocide, and the war the Israelis are waging in Gaza looks nothing like that.

Alleging that Israel is engaged in “genocide” is the blood libel of the modern era, on par with the claim that Jews season their matzos with the blood of Christian babies.

I know, I know, “It’s not that I’m antisemitic; it’s that I oppose Zionism.” Bullcrap. If you have to commit a blood libel lie in order to support your hate, while never once caring about or even mentioning the actual genocides ongoing in places like Darfur and Myanmar, it’s a reasonable assumption that you are a raging antisemite (particularly when I click on your X account and it’s chock full of conspiracy theories about “the Joos”).

“Gaza genocide” is a LIE. It’s a hoax that bears no resemblance to objective reality, and if you are spreading this lie, blame for the blood and fire in Boulder, the ruined mansion in Harrisburg, and the dead bodies on the steps of the Capitol Jewish Museum rest in part on your blood-soaked hands.

Wipe that blood off your hands and start speaking truth, lest the lies consume you.[/quote]

Neither is there a famine in Gaza.

It is established beyond debate that Israeli food shipments into Gaza have been commandeered by Hamas, which sells the food at high prices to fund its terrorist operations. Countless photos of captured Hamas operatives show them well fed. Similarly, you can see on X videos of well-stocked Gazan food markets and restaurants. You can also see videos of Hamas stealing the shipments, beating and shooting poor Gazans trying to reach the Israeli food trucks. And this week, you can see Gazans breaking into a UN warehouse where tons of this food had been locked away from them. As Hamas is losing, it is becoming ever more desperate to hang on to its food monopoly, and the U.S. and Israel, working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), worked out a secured food distribution system which minimizes Hamas’ last hold on the area. Since operations began, approximately 5.8 million meals have been distributed. Unable to break through defensive positions around these distribution centers, Hamas tried overwhelming IDF troops some distance away and were shot at. Here’s the video evidence, and here’s a recording of a Gazan civilian confirming it.

“The people who fired [on Gazans collecting aid] were Hamas terrorists. They don’t want the people to receive aid, they want to foil the plan so that the aid will go to them.”

Nevertheless, beginning with the BBC, a number of major media reported that Israel was shooting at civilians who were trying to get food. No unbiased person would have accepted this nonsense. Why, such a person would ask, would the Israelis go to so much trouble to provide food if only to shoot those trying to get it? Why not just shoot and skip the logistics problem? Jake Simons nailed it:

“So now we are being asked to believe that Israeli forces are simultaneously giving aid to the people of Gaza and gunning them down when they try to collect it? Wouldn’t it have been easier to have skipped the first part?”

Brains must be fried at the BBC, which reported that Israeli tanks attacked the civilians:

Most recently, Hamas reported an Israeli tank attack at a GHF site last weekend.

The media reported it without question. A BBC news summary said, “At least 31 people have been killed after Israeli tanks opened fire near an aid center in Gaza, Hamas-run health ministry says, and 150 Palestinians have also been injured according to the Red Cross hospital in Rafah… ‘We have had an extortionate [sic] amount of people come through the door… The injuries are all gunshot wounds.’”

Gunshot wounds from a tank attack? Oops. [snip] Now — we have come to the central issue. Hamas is losing the war. Its commanders are gone, its tunnels are severely degraded, its weapons are low, Iran largely gone from the region, and — with an alternative source of food — the people of Gaza are turning on them. Hamas is desperate.

“Aid” agencies are desperate to help. Part is reputational — having claimed to be feeding starving Gazans, they are not happy to see Gazans welcoming food from the US in cooperation with Israel.

The uglier part is financial — having received billions in aid money, as the world finds out that Hamas was not only stealing the food but charging “starving people” exorbitant prices for donated goods, they are understood to be thieves. The media fronted for all of it. The ugliest part is anti-Zionist/antisemitism; they can’t be separated from each other or from their proponents.

Deliberate Bias

The hoax was widely published. The most incendiary and false coverage was by the Washington Post and the BBC. A clue as to the underlying bias is whom the press relies on to report from Gaza. The Post reporters were three Brits stationed in the Middle East, one of whom was a former Al Jazeera reporter, one of whom earlier reported a lie that Israel was keeping mothers away from visiting their children who had been brought to Israel for medical treatment, (a lie the Post had to walk back) and a fourth person, a Gazan. What kind of newsroom again hires someone who earlier provided fake news it had to retract? We have already learned from CNN in Baghdad, the Green Helmet charade, and other Middle East press hoaxes that reporters stationed in these countries are mere mouthpieces for the Islamist autocrats who run them.

Not only were the BBC and Washington Post guilty of spreading Hamas propaganda without using the simplest of logical tests and without considering the sources of the information upon which they relied, they are both disingenuously responding to criticism, one saying it continually updated information as it came in, the other leaving the original fake report online.

The Post took a different approach from other mainstream outlets in its coverage of the story. While the New York Times did report that “Palestinians who had gathered overnight in the hope of obtaining food from an aid distribution center in Gaza came under fire, according to local health officials,” it did not use the Gaza Health Ministry’s accusations against Israel in its headline.

The Wall Street Journal used similar language, writing, “More than 20 Gazans were killed as they made their way to a U.S.-Israeli aid distribution center, Palestinian authorities said.”

The result of the Post‘s coverage was a comment section in which readers described “Israel’s actions near aid distribution sites in Gaza” as “genocidal,” accused the Jewish state of “committing war crimes” and implementing “a broader strategy of ethnic cleansing,” and called for “an end to U.S. support for Israel,” according to the Post‘s AI-generated summary.

The false stories have taken on a life of their own. In any event, further investigation makes it clear that the video which the press claimed supported the ludicrous charge was first posted by Drop Site reporter Ryan Grim, a Palestinian who works for al Jazeera.

The BBC on Monday issued results of an investigation determining the video, which shows masked gunmen firing into a crowd, does not line up with claims that the IDF massacred Gazan civilians on Sunday

The original video — which amassed nearly 400,000 views on X — was posted by a Palestinian who works for the Qatar-funded Al Jazeera news network, which is known to fabricate anti-Israel narratives. The BBC found on Monday that the video, which does not depict a single IDF soldier, was filmed nearly three miles from the nearest aid distribution site at an hour of day that does not align with the timing of the purported massacre. It is now believed the attack was carried out by Hamas.

Grim’s tweet, which is still live after both the BBC and IDF debunked its contents, has drawn more than 133,000 views and promotion from a network of prominent anti-Israel agitators. The group includes former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft scholar Annelle Sheline, and Raed Jarrar, a policy analyst with the anti-Israel advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now.

The false story also gained widespread traction in the mainstream media, with the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, BBC, and others relying on Hamas officials to claim that Israel gunned down over 30 civilians. Many of these outlets, including the BBC, subsequently walked back their initial reports, but not before they had spread across social media and fomented another public relations nightmare for Israel.

Grim and his Drop Site News outlet are the original purveyors of false claims that a White House National Security Council staffer previously worked for the Israeli government, an allegation that generated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and was quickly disproven by the Trump administration.

The Quincy Institute, an isolationist think tank funded by George Soros and Charles Koch that advocates for normalized relations with Iran, boosted that story and Grim’s Gaza massacre tweet.

While some social media observers informed Grim that his tweet about the events in Gaza was false, others have used it to promote blood libels about the Jewish state and its war effort.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror spree, anti-Semitism has skyrocketed across the globe, leading to the killing earlier this month of two Israeli embassy staffers in downtown Washington, D.C., and a terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators this weekend in Boulder, Colorado.

An IDF spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon that misinformation about the incident in Gaza continues to spread.

“In recent hours, false reports have been spread, including serious allegations against the IDF regarding fire toward Gazan residents in the area of the humanitarian aid distribution site in the Gaza Strip,” the spokesman said. “The IDF calls on the media to be cautious with information published by the Hamas terrorist organization, as proven in several previous incidents.”

Findings from an initial IDF inquiry into the matter indicate that soldiers “did not fire at civilians while they were near or within the humanitarian aid distribution site and that reports to this effect are false.”

These findings are consistent with the BCC’s own investigation of the video Grim, Al Jazeera, and others promoted online.

“We have geolocated the clip to a spot in Khan Younis about 4.5km (2.8 miles) from the nearest aid distribution point,” the outlet reported on Monday.

If you want the propaganda from Hamas’ financier Qatar, skip the middlemen like the BBC and Washington Post and go straight to Al Jazeera. In the meantime, I hope some younger, more energetic lawyers than I am study whether 18 USC Sec 2339B, which criminalizes providing material support to terrorist organizations applies to press outlets which knowingly rely on absurd allegations made by operatives of terrorist organizations to advance their nefarious interests.