Journalists’ double standards on Hamas laid bare
The failure of many in the Western media to understand Islamist groups such as Hamas are not part of a resistance movement speaking truth to power is part of the reason so many journalists in Australia assume Israel is always in the wrong in trying to root out terror factions from the Gaza Strip.
Yet a look at its charter and its actions should make clear Hamas is just one more group of medieval fanatics who hate Jews, Christians, the West, freedom of speech, thought and religion, and, more than anything else, reject Western support for the rights of women and gay people.
Young activists who now praise Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American People” have no idea how privileged they are in the West or how downtrodden much of the Arab Street is in countries with no free elections, and ruled by family dynasties grown rich on oil and gas sales to that very same West.
As this column argued soon after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel, not only are most terrorist incidents across the globe perpetrated by Muslim extremists, most of the victims are innocent Muslims. But Islamists are also murdering Christians in Africa, and in the Middle East killing Jews, Druze, Kurds and other Christian groups, such as the Yazidis targeted by ISIS in 2014-15.
In Gaza, Hamas places its own political interests above the safety of innocent Palestinians. Nations that have supported Hamas, such as Qatar and Turkey, last week publicly urged the group to accept the 20-point peace proposal put forward by US President Donald Trump and agreed to by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Arab political journalists across the region have argued for more than a year that Hamas erred on October 7.
The Middle East Media Research Institute has published translations of pieces by Arab journalists last August calling for Hamas and Hezbollah to lay down their arms in the interests of innocent civilians.
Palestinian journalist Abd Al-Bari Fayyad wrote on August 25 in the London-based Emirati daily Al-Arab: “Resistance in the Middle East has long been associated with the aspiration for freedom … but recent events in Gaza and Lebanon … raise profound questions about its true cost.
“Resistance that leads to the destruction of one’s own people is not resistance at all, but rather a crime committed in the name of resistance.”
Egyptian journalist Sobhi Asila wrote on August 20 in the government daily Al-Ahram: “Hezbollah and Hamas stubbornly refuse to give up the status afforded them by their weapons. That is why (they) repeatedly wave the banner of resistance to Israel while disregarding what their weapons have caused in Lebanon and Palestine.”
Yet in Australia, many journalists of the left are in effect siding with anonymous Hamas spokespeople who last week warned against accepting the Trump peace plan’s demand for hostages to the released and militants’ arms to be surrendered.
While these journalists obviously care for the fate of Palestinian civilians, they seem to have much less care for Israelis, whether hostages, those murdered on October 7, military personnel or civilians who have been rocketed by Hamas for two decades. They seem unable to understand Hamas is deliberately risking innocent Palestinian lives for political gain.
Hamas leaders have often conceded the point.
CNN’s Jeremy Diamond on September 26 interviewed Ghazi Hamad, one of the senior Hamas leaders targeted unsuccessfully by Israel in Doha on September 9. Hamad described October 7 as a “golden moment for the Palestinian cause”.
He was unapologetic about the loss of civilian Palestinian lives since, and refused to engage with a video Diamond showed him of ordinary Gazans calling on Hamas to rethink.
One anti-Hamas Gazan protester in the video said: “Our message to Hamas is stop gambling and adventuring with us. You are disconnected from reality. Especially since the Hamas leadership is located outside Gaza. Some people say they killed with our children’s flesh, while they sat in hotels.”
Too few Australian journalists are prepared to acknowledge what Arab and CNN journalists readily do.
ABC’s Americas editor, John Lyons, wrote of Trump’s plan on September 30 that instead of being a peace deal, “in my assessment, this is more of a hostages deal”. His long analysis then diverts to a sustained attack on Netanyahu, effectively putting Lyons at odds with some of the world’s most powerful Islamic nations that openly support the deal and are pressuring Hamas.
How does such analysis look now, given Saturday’s apparent Hamas acceptance of Trump’s plan?
Some journalists seem to think Israel should simply accept Palestinian demands for a separate state even if Hamas leaders have publicly pledged to repeat the atrocities of October 7.
Former political journalist for the Nine mastheads, Mark Kenny, now Professor Kenny of the Australian National University, at Wednesday’s one-sided National Press Club function featuring two Israel critics, Professor Ben Saul and Chris Sidoti, seemed sceptical about Israel’s right to secure its borders and find its hostages.
Kenny asked both panellists whether Israel had any right to cite the presence of Hamas fighters under civilian targets as a defence for civilian Palestinian casualties.
As lawyers, Saul, a UN Rapporteur and professor of international law at Sydney University, and Sidoti, an international human rights lawyer and former Australian Human Rights commissioner, know the use of human shields is a deliberate example of “lawfare” designed to tarnish the reputation of Israel even at the cost of innocent lives Hamas claims to be fighting for.
Add not just the bestial events of October 7 but also the random firing of missiles and mortars into civilian Israeli areas since Hamas defeated the Palestinian Authority in Gaza’s 2006 election and it is clear some of Israel’s critics do in fact believe it’s OK to murder Jews in the name of resisting oppression. No wonder support for a two-state solution is collapsing inside Israel.
Journalistic critics of Israel have not applied the same standards to Russian aggression against Ukraine, where deaths on both sides may now exceed 500,000. Nor do many even mention Islamist pogroms in Nigeria, where 62,000 Christians have been murdered since 2000, or in Sudan, where more than 250,000 have been killed and 14 million displaced in three years.
Most Israelis, most Jews and most Zionists seem to want peace if Israel’s media is any guide. Most Gazans do. Only Hamas was equivocating last week.
Activist journalists in Australia who can see nothing good in Israeli society seem not to know the media inside Israel is full of tough-minded critics of Netanyahu. But how many local activists ever ask the tough questions about Islamism?
People who claimed before October 7 that Gaza was a prison hellhole and now say Israel has deliberately destroyed this seaside home to two million because it wants to commit genocide should be treated with caution.
These are people who marched against Israel at Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023, before it had even begun to respond to Hamas’s crimes. They want to gather there again next Sunday.
Their media backers quickly signed a 2023 journalists’ union petition claiming October 7 could only be understood “in context”. Islamism is the context.
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