The ABC should realise that terrorists who had just burnt Jewish babies alive might also lie

The ABC has become a useful idiot for Hamas, spreading the terrorist group’s lies and smearing Israel. It’s time for an inquiry into this toxic broadcaster.

Our ABC has disgraced itself in its coverage of the Hamas war on Israel. It’s become a useful idiot for Hamas, the proscribed terrorist group that runs Gaza, home to more than two million Palestinians.

Here are just five examples of how it’s helped Hamas and smeared Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East.

One

The ABC spread the Hamas lie that Israel deliberately bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinians.

It tweeted: “Israeli air strike has killed hundreds of Palestinians at a Gaza hospital crammed with patients and displaced people, health authorities in the besieged enclave say.”

The ABC has become a useful idiot for Hamas, the proscribed terrorist group that runs Gaza.

“Health authorities” means Hamas. The ABC should realise that terrorists who had just burnt Jewish babies alive might also lie.

In fact, the hospital was not hit. There was an explosion at a carpark outside. “Hundreds” were not killed. The death toll seems in the dozens.

And it was not an Israeli air strike. Israel, Britain and the US independently concluded the explosion, which left a small crater, was a Palestinian rocket that misfired.

Two

Hamas took more than 200 hostages in the bloody raid on Israel three weeks ago that started this war. Last week it freed 85-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz, who said the terrorists attacking her kibbutz went “berserk”, and beat her with sticks.

Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, speaks to the media after being released by Hamas. Picture: Getty

“It was extremely painful,’ she said, but added that once she was taken to the spider-web of Hamas tunnels in Gaza, her captors treated her well.

Yet the ABC AM report on her release inexplicably said nothing about Hamas beating this 85-year-old woman, and instead summed up her kidnapping like this: “Lifshitz says … it was terrifying, but she was treated well in captivity … She described the treatment by Hamas as ‘good’ … They were very friendly to the people who had been captured.”

Three

Israel’s ambassador¸ Amir Maimon, gave a speech at the National Press Club last week listing the grotesque barbarities Hamas had inflicted on Jewish civilians in its assault on Israel, including torture, rape, executions, beheadings, kidnappings and tearing a pregnant woman apart to kill her baby.

Maimon expressed amazement that such cruelties seemed not to move many in the media.

As if to prove his point, ABC journalist Chantelle Al-Khouri, whose Twitter profile includes a Syrian flag, demanded he explain Israel’s “blatant disregard for Palestinian civilians”, and asked “what number of Palestinian people killed is a satisfactory number for the Israeli government?” as if the Israelis were out to cull them.

Four

Immediately after the ambassador’s speech, the ABC brought on an “expert” commentator who repeatedly attacked it.

That “expert” was Nicole Johnston, a former ABC Middle East reporter who’d later worked for anti-Western media outlets based in China, Turkey and Qatar. Her only comment on the many Hamas atrocities the ambassador had listed was that, hang on, he seemed to have exaggerated how many babies Hamas had beheaded.

She even falsely denied Hamas used its civilians as human shields, and falsely suggested it had rewritten its old charter, calling for Jews to be killed, so it could now be read as open to a peace deal with Israel.

What nonsense. Even this revised and sanitised charter makes clear Hamas wants all Israel destroyed: “The establishment of ‘Israel’ is entirely illegal … Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Johnston even praised UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for making an “important point” in claiming the Hamas slaughter of the Jews “didn’t happen in a vacuum” – a vile piece of apologetics implying that whatever horrors Hamas commits against Jews, the Jews are still to blame.

Five

ABC-TV’s News Breakfast show invited Lizzie O’Shea, of the pro-Labor law firm Maurice Blackburn, to comment on the day’s newspapers. She accused Israel of “the genocide, really, that’s unfolding”, and was not challenged by the co-hosts. Only after she later dragged in the Albanese government, saying she’d hoped “you don’t see these kinds of genocides happen under the watch of the Australian government”, did one co-host say “people” might object to that word, and “Israelis will say that they are defending themselves”.

Just five examples. Space stops me from listing more.

Hamas butchers and rapes and tortures and kidnaps and lies. It steals aid meant for its people and rejects peace for war. All that, and still our ABC looks at the bloody misery Hamas has caused, and says – ha, those Israelis. An inquiry into this toxic broadcaster, now.