RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/01/the-myth-of-israels-killing-fields/

Andrew Fox is a former British Army officer and an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, specialising in defence and the Middle East.

You do not need to invent facts to spread propaganda. You only need to stretch them.

Haaretz’s latest ‘exposé’ on Israeli military conduct in Gaza is a prime case in point. This week, the Jewish State’s oldest daily newspaper reported that soldiers belonging to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had ‘deliberately fired’ at Palestinians as they tried to access aid-distribution centres. Since May, these distribution centres have been operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – a private, American-run organisation that is supported by the IDF. Haaretz’s reporting has been repeated, without question, by an almost ubiquitously anti-Israel media.

It is a grim, morally explosive accusation. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Israel Katz say it is ‘malicious’ and ‘designed to defame’. The IDF says it is investigating the allegation, but rejects any claims soldiers were instructed to fire at Palestinians accessing aid.

While the facts aren’t always easy to discern in the fog of war, there are a number of problems with the Haaretz report. The most significant is that the original Hebrew version of the article says something quite different to the widely reported English version. It reports that soldiers were ordered to fire toward crowds, not at them. This is not a subtle difference. ‘Toward’ is what soldiers call warning shots. It is a common practice for militaries, and one the British Army frequently used in Afghanistan. ‘At’ is to fire at a crowd or an individual – in other words, ‘at’ is the preposition you would use if you wanted to accuse the IDF of war crimes, instead of employing a common tactic.

The report has other flaws – flaws that should not be hard to pick up on, even for the untrained eye. The anonymous soldier quoted by Haaretz claims that the IDF has used machine guns, grenade launchers and mortars on unarmed crowds queuing for aid. Yet, according to the source, this ‘killing field’, in which soldiers use ‘everything imaginable’, results in around ‘one [to] five’ deaths a day. One to five deaths a day, in the middle of a war zone, involving thousands of people and countless flashpoints, from the heaviest weapon systems any infantry can bring to bear? That is not a ‘killing field’, unless the IDF are the worst shots in military history. This is clearly not the number of deaths you would expect to see if one of the world’s most advanced militaries had been instructed to target crowds of unarmed civilians with ‘everything imaginable’, as the source does.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/let_s_talk_about_proportionality.html

“But it’s so disproportionate!” Comment from an Israel loathing liberal.

It’s not often that you have a ready answer for people with whom you disagree.  Usually, you think of the perfect comeback when you wake up at two in the morning.

But as it happened, I simply had the cold, hard facts on my side, so it was almost shooting fish in a barrel to answer this Jew-hating, Israel-loathing liberal.

Do You Remember?

My response to her came in a series of questions.

“Do you remember,” I asked her, “when we watched the entire Iraq War — from 2003 to 2011 — on TV, for years?  And the endless articles and commentaries and news coverage, all day and all night?”

“Of course,” she responded.

“Well, even before that, going back to the sixties, do you remember the years-on end coverage of the Vietnam War — from 1964 to 1973 — and the morning and afternoon and nightly news coverage and commentaries the impassioned anti-war demonstrations across the country protesting this war?”

“You know I do.  I was on the frontline of those protests.  I was with the so-called traitor Jane Fonda all the way!”

“How about the Korean War in the 1950s, which wasn’t covered so extensively on TV — TV was relatively new in that decade — but which a million articles were written about, not to mention the extensive radio commentary?”

“Okay,” she said, “and your point?”

“One more question: How about World War II in the 1940s, when we dropped the bombs, and 140,000 died in Hiroshima and 74,000 died in Nagasaki?”  And that is not to omit the massive, overwhelming loss of life from that war — 70–85 million deaths.

“Stop with the statistics, already!” she blurted out.  “What is your point?”