Journalists here struggling to speak with moral clarity should read the work of Israeli Arab journalists and activists to see how some Palestinians can grieve for Gaza yet react in horror to the barbaric massacre of civilian Jews in their homes on October 7 and understand Israel’s need to take military action to ensure such crimes never happen again.
Highlighting the idiocy of arguments by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese across ABC platforms last week that Israel is an apartheid state, many Israeli Arabs have spoken passionately about the Jewish homeland in which they live as Muslims who vote and elect Arab members to the Knesset.
For heart-breaking honesty, nothing beats the live to air October 11 news broadcast of prominent journalist and Channel 13 presenter Lucy Aharish, an Arab married to popular Jewish actor Tzahi Halevi. The pair launched their own personal rescue mission, coordinated by phone as Aharish spoke with residents in Kfar Aza while terrorists were attempting to break into their safe room. Halevi and his reservist unit rescued the trapped family.
A video in English of Aharish’s on-air plea to the world to try to understand what had happened on October 7 is available on YouTube.
Just as confronting is the interview she did with CNN on October 13.
She concludes the almost nine-minute interview saying what is happening to Israel is an “Awful truth. A brutal truth. Catastrophic truth.” She calls on fellow journalists around the world and social media platforms to “stop the lies” she says are discounting October 7 and portraying Israel as an aggressor – even though it had not occupied Gaza since 2005.
Aharish concludes: “As a Muslim, this is not Islam. What Hamas is doing in the name of religion is not being a Muslim. This is being a monster.”
Fantastic interview with Arab Israeli Muslim journalist Lucy Aharish on CNN about how all of Israel's Arab and Jewish communities are united against Hamas terror. pic.twitter.com/JxDfwhBlt3
— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) October 14, 2023
At our ABC, news and current affairs broadcasts continue to quote Hamas spokespeople denying the massacre or denying Hamas is hiding rockets under schools and hospitals. It’s like quoting a spokesman for Osama bin Laden denying al-Qa’ida flew planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
LGBTQ activists in effect standing with Hamas, the ideological soulmate of the ISIS fighters who threw gays from rooftops in Syria eight years ago, might care to read Tel Aviv-based queer activist Muhammad Zoabi, an Arab Israeli supporter of Palestinian rights. He wrote in Newsweek on November 1 that October 7 “made us feel more Israeli than ever – when we saw not only footage of our mass murder (100 Arab Israelis were killed in the Hamas massacre), but the celebration of it in Gaza”.
He quotes published polling showing 80 per cent of Arab Israelis reject that attack on innocent civilians and 70 per cent support Israel’s right to respond militarily. He says historically conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has created sympathy for fellow Arabs among his community. No longer.
Also worth a read is Arab Israeli vlogger Nuseir Yassin, who on October 22 told Globes business news, “This is Israel’s 9/11, unfortunately. When 9/11 happened, Muslim Americans were American first, so now I am Israeli first. When there is a Hitler-level event, you cannot be neutral.”
Here lies the problem with much of the media’s moral equivalence over reporting in Gaza the past six weeks. Journalists show no understanding of the existential threat Israelis of all ethnicities and political persuasions felt on October 7.
Why do so many reporters at the ABC raise the dangers of Islamophobia when it was Islamic protesters who threatened Jews at Friday Shabbat in Melbourne’s Caulfield Synagogue last Friday week and Islamic bike riders who intimidated peaceful protesters in Sydney’s heavily Jewish Coogee the following day?
Why haven’t more journalists been clear about the outrageous Sydney protesters on Monday October 9 chanting “gas the Jews” within a couple of days of the worst loss of Jewish life in a single day since the Holocaust. How do journalists think that makes local Holocaust survivors and their descendants here feel?
A young journalistic generation is falling into classic anti-Semitism. By inadvertently repeating the sly lies of Islamist social media activists, journalists here are perpetuating stereotypes about Jews, a tiny group of 16 million globally compared with the world’s two billion Muslims.
Israel is not a European coloniser. More than half its Jewish citizens are Mizrahi and had always lived in the Middle East. When 700,000 Palestinians left Israel in 1948 after Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon attacked Israel and lost, another 850,000 Middle Eastern Jews were forced out of their homes in those countries to come to Israel.
Nor can any serious lawyer accuse Israel of genocide. Genocide requires a population to decline, as the Jewish world did during the Holocaust. The Palestinian population is the fastest growing in the Arab world.
When journalists compare Israel to Germany’s Nazi regime, they are slyly denying the realities of both the Holocaust and the Palestinians’ own history of allegiance with the Third Reich and the Arab anti-Semitism discussed in this column on October 14, October 29 and November 7.
When ABC reporters quote Hamas spokespeople as if they were civilian bureaucrats, they privilege a racist Islamist ideology committed in Article 7 of its own 1988 original charter to the mass murder of the Jews and destruction is Israel.
When supporters of Israel say Arab extremism is the greatest threat to Palestinians, they are correct. Had Israel’s neighbours accepted the boundaries set out by the UN, Palestinians would not have lost a series of wars that cost them land in 1948, the Six Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. No doubt they will lose more after this war.
How can ABC journalists not know Hamas has been using Palestinians as shields in hospitals and schools for years. Even UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it last week: “Hamas and other militants use civilians as shields and continue to launch rockets indiscriminately at Israel.”
The UN’s own investigation under former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon found exactly that in 2015. Why don’t ABC editorial executives know this?
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday editorialised that Human Rights Watch had admitted as far back as 2007 that Hamas was using the Al-Shifa hospital to fire rockets at Palestinian rival Fatah. The New York Times reported Hamas openly used the hospital as a base in the 2008-09 war. The Washington Post in 2014 described Al-Shifa as Hamas’s de facto headquarters.
Yet as recently as last Thursday, ABC AM was still quoting unnamed Hamas officials denying it had used the hospital to launch attacks against Israel. And despite a week of claims the hospital was under attack, AM failed to point out no patients or staff had been hurt by Israeli soldiers who took control of the largely undamaged building last Wednesday.
Israel has little choice but to ignore the useful fools of the Western media.
As Yossi Klein Halevi wrote on his blog on The Times of Israel on November 12, “The Jews of Israel must remain the ‘lonely people of history’.
“Naively we had assumed that the October 7 massacre would linger in the world’s consciousness. Surely those who played down Israel’s security fears would now understand the nature of the threat we face on our borders. No, we patiently explain, the massacre was not in response to anything Israel does but to what Israel is.”
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