The ABC, Guardian Australia and other left wing media often cry “disinformation” on issues driven by the conservative media or right wing social media sources, but seem blind to the disinformation they publish.
Much of the coverage of the war in Gaza by our national broadcaster feels like it’s taking its line from Al-Jazeera and the social media feeds of the Qatari network’s journalists working in Gaza, some Hamas fighters.
This column on February 12 asked why Nine’s newspapers and the ABC were uncritically reporting claims by the US Committee for Protecting Journalists that 107 media workers had been killed, perhaps even deliberately targeted, by the Israel Defence Force between October 7 and January 4.
Yet those same news sources ignored a lengthy study by British investigative reporter David Collier who found at least half the 70 dead the CPJ claimed were verified journalists were in fact Hamas operatives.
This column went on to cite the examples of two further Al-Jazeera reporters who were also Hamas fighters.
The Jerusalem Post on February 11 said killed reporter Mohammed Wishah had been commander of a Hamas antitank unit. Another Al-Jazeera reporter, Ismail Abu Omar, injured in Rafah, was revealed by the Times of Israel on February 14 to be a Hamas commander who filmed himself on the day of the October 7 massacre inside Israeli Kibbutz Nir Oz.
Now another Al-Jazeera journalist, mourned extensively by activists in this country on social media, has been shown to be a Hamas fighter who also crossed into Israel on October 7.
The Times of Israel on August 3 reported Ismail al-Ghoul, killed in a Gaza City drone strike on July 31, was a member of Hamas’s elite Nukhba force involved “in instructing terror operatives in how to film and distribute videos of attacks on Israeli troops”.
Al-Jazeera denies the revelations but the IDF has released his Hamas file and military ID number, obtained from computers seized in raids on Hamas tunnels beneath Gaza.
Those in Australia who published extensively on social media about what many called a war crime seem to have ignored these IDF revelations.
President of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashni, a frequent guest on the ABC, criticised the ABC, Melbourne radio and the Victorian newspapers for not reporting al-Ghoul’s death: “There is no solidarity with your colleagues. This is no accident, Israel is deliberately silencing Gaza,” he posted on social media platform X.
Former ABC Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill, now a Greens candidate in Western Australia, on August 2 retweeted a post from the International Committee of the Red Cross deploring the deaths of Al-Ghoul and Al Jazeera photographer Rami Al-Reefi. McNeill has not posted the IDF’s revelations about al-Ghoul.
Academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, another ABC regular and recipient of an $800,000 federal grant for her work on Muslim-Australian social movements, reposted Al-Ghoul’s tribute to himself and Gaza’s child victims. She also reposted comments by Mashni, Francesca Albanese – the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights situation in Palestinian territories – and several others who offered praise for Al-Jazeera Arabic’s journalists for a silent studio protest over al-Ghoul’s death.
Abdel-Fattah has not mentioned the IDF’s claims about al-Ghoul. But like many on the left she has reposted criticisms of a report completed for Foreign Minister Penny Wong by retired Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin and released publicly on August 5.
Like many on social media, Abdel-Fattah seems not to have been able to come to terms with Binskin’s finding that the IDF handled its investigation into the killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers on April 1 appropriately.
Social media in Australia, much of it from experienced journalists who should have known much better, at the time accused Israel of deliberately killing the WCK aid workers. This is blatant anti-Semitism because, without evidence of deliberate wrongdoing, it is underpinned by the idea Israel’s army and its individual soldiers lack basic human empathy.
Wong herself was guilty of misrepresenting both Israel and Binskin’s report. Wong, who claimed the killings were “an intentional strike by the IDF”, did not mention the various steps Binskin found the IDF had taken to reduce the possibility of such accidents in a war zone.
Nor did Wong mention Binskin’s conclusion the attack was “not knowingly or deliberately” directed at the WCK aid convoy.
Neither did Wong mention the criticism in Binskin’s report of WCK’s decision to employ armed guards who were spotted by IDF night drones on the night of the strike on innocent workers, including Australian Zomi Frankcom.
A careful examination of Al-Jazeera’s history might help explain why so much of the media’s coverage is reflexively anti-Israel, even though Israel is responding to an unprovoked Hamas attack across its border on October 7 and the promise by Hamas of more such attacks.
Al-Jazeera was founded in 1996 by a group of media workers who were also members of the Egyptian and Syrian chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which Hamas owes its existence, its ideology and its charter.
US Middle East think tank MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) says: “The network’s director for many of those early formative years (2003-2011) was Palestinian Wadah Khanfar. And looming over all the channel’s staff … was Qatar’s openly Islamist foreign policy, not just strongly pro-Palestinian but strongly Palestinian Islamist.
“The cross-fertilisation on the screen among Al-Jazeera’s (and Qatar’s) various pet causes and favourites – Hamas, Erdogan’s Turkey, Jihadism, political Islam and anti-Semitism – was always there. As early as November 1999 Al-Jazeera had invited Hamas leaders to talk about their ‘resistance’ operations against Israel, and in doing so shattered the longstanding Arab media hegemony of Fatah and the PLO. In 2005, after the full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Al-Jazeera carried footage of Hamas Friday sermons and military parades held in abandoned Israeli compounds to celebrate the withdrawal.”
It also quoted Hamas spokesman Mushir al-Masri, saying: “Liberating Gaza was like liberating Tel Aviv.
“The weapons of the resistance that you see here will remain, Allah willing, so that we can liberate Palestine … from the sea to the river, whether they like it or not.”
Remember here that Qatar, like Iran, openly finances various Middle Eastern terror groups and publicly calls for the destruction of Israel. MEMRI on August 8 published an extensive list of Al-Jazeera interviews with Hamas’s new political boss Yahya Sinwar, pledging on live TV to destroy Israel.
Yet for much of our left wing journalistic class, Al-Jazeera remains a source of truth about events in Gaza. To the extent that any quote Israel’s dynamic free press, it’s usually only the avowedly left wing Haaretz.
Reflect too on Al-Jazeera’s report of ABC Australia’s staff protest to ABC management about the use of language in news reports. The March 26 Al-Jazeera report, obtained in a Freedom of Information request, says: “Staff at Australia’s national broadcaster warned that its coverage of the war in Gaza relied too much on Israeli sources and used language that ‘favoured the Israeli narrative over objective reporting’.”
Not the ABC coverage this column sees, hears and reads.
More Coverage
Kim holds hand out after big bucks splashed on ABC ‘rebrand’
A day after ABC’s chief financial officer Melanie Kleyn let slip the exorbitant cost of a makeover, chairman Kim Williams was again calling for an increase in government funding.
Fired Nine news boss calls in lawyers
A senior Nine news executive engaged lawyers within 24 hours of her sudden exit from the media giant last week, amid concerns the staff clean-out could be met with a wave of legal claims.