‘Words as gospel’: Warped moral code of Hamas’s media enablers
Left-wing journalists continue to deny the barbaric pogrom committed against Israeli civilians, and amplify any malicious allegation against the Jewish state.
Mass moral posturing, especially on social media, has destroyed the search for truth in journalism and politics.
But Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is allowing the decline of truth to threaten the world’s acceptance of the Jewish State and turbocharge anti-Semitism.
Left-wing journalists have since October 7, 2023 denied the barbaric pogrom committed against Israeli civilians and amplified any malicious allegation against the Jewish state by Hamas or its health and media workers.
Many continue to claim two-year-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, pictured on the front of newspapers around the world and The Age here, is a victim of Israel’s starvation policies when they know he has a genetic condition and his brother and mother are well fed.
The picture remains pinned at the top of pro-Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah’s feed on social media platform X, and has been since July 25. She stood with former NSW premier Bob Carr at the front of the Sydney Harbour Bridge protest on August 3.
Footage of Gazans attending food drops for months has shown people who look anything but starving. Journalists not there insist Gazans are starving.
Our media holds Israel responsible for Hamas’s pilfering of aid and its murders of Gazans trying to get that aid. Israel should allow Western journalists into Gaza to see for themselves.
US President Donald Trump last Thursday agreed foreign journalists should be allowed in to tell the truth.
Two glaring examples of anti-Israel bias from the ABC: 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson on Thursday cut off US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee every time he said people should not believe what Hamas’s health ministry says, and Radio National breakfast show host Sally Sara, interviewing Israel Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel on Friday, insisted Haskel was wrong and Gazans are starving.
Never mind the Gaza health ministry has claimed mass famine for more than a year and it has proven untrue.
For sceptics who don’t believe Hamas steals aid, The Free Press on August 12 published an excellent piece on the issue under the headline “Why Is Reuters Carrying Water for Hamas?”, which details misleading reporting of USAID investigations of the issue.
The false starvation photo and others like it outed by Netanyahu in a fiery press conference last week are like the lie spun by the BBC and the ABC that there is no evidence to support Israel’s claim Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, killed last week in Gaza City, was a Hamas operative.
Eighteen months ago, UK investigative journalist David Collier published the Hamas associations of Gazan journalists the International Committee to Protect Journalists had claimed were killed by Israel for simply doing their jobs. In fact many were using journalism to hide their military roles.
Collier reminded the BBC of this last week after it claimed Israel was concocting evidence against Sharif.
He published details of the Al Jazeera bureau chief’s Hamas affiliation, pro-Hamas social media activity and a photo of Sharif hugging now dead Hamas military chief Yahya Sinwar.
Collier also published a Telegram post by Sharif from January 27, 2023, celebrating the murder of seven Jews with a cartoon picture of a bullet capped by a Dome of the Rock.
Western reporters should by now know almost all journalists, doctors, nurses and teachers in Gaza are Hamas members, just as some UN employees are Hamas militants. Yet our reporters treat the words of such people as gospel.
Now a communique signed by the Arab League, European countries and Canada is trying to use recognition of Palestine as a lever to force Netanyahu’s hand on plans to occupy Gaza City in the next two weeks.
In Australia, journalists fixated on what this country can do to stop the war spent weeks demanding Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declare when he would join the other signatories, led by France’s Emmanuel Macron – as if Australia has any influence on Israel’s decision-making.
Albanese folded on Monday after saying only a fortnight earlier on ABC Insiders that he would not recognise an independent Palestinian state. This earned him praise from Hamas.
Yet Israel alone, with US support, will set the conditions for a Palestinian state, as Huckabee tried to tell Ferguson. It won’t be soon because Hamas has undermined Israeli support for a two-state solution.
Remember, Israelis effectively voted in the early 1990s to surrender their own lands in places such as the Golan Heights to achieve peace. PLO leader Yasser Arafat could not deliver the deal for his people.
On February 5 last year this column said: “The truth is Israelis who once supported the two-state solution now have a clear understanding of what a two-state solution would look like: Gaza.”
That’s because former prime minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally left Gaza in 2005, and in a subsequent election the Islamist Hamas death cult defeated the Palestinian Authority and went on to murder the PA candidates.
Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong are recognising Palestine when it has no prospect for statehood. Albanese repeats assurances from PA leader Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas will have no role in a future Palestinian state, which he says will recognise Israel’s right to exist.
This from an 89-year-old failed leader and Holocaust denier who has not taken the PA to an election for 20 years and is far less popular than Hamas. His guarantee is worthless.
Seth Mandel in Commentary magazine on August 11 quoted US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who correctly noted three days earlier: “Talks with Hamas fell apart on the day Macron made the unilateral decision that he’s going to recognise the Palestinian state … (making) it harder to get peace and harder to achieve a deal with Hamas.”
Mandel goes on to quote from a New York Times video: “Mr Macron told (German Chancellor Friedrich) Merz that he was under immense pressure at home”, and would have to recognise Palestine.
That’s the real reason for Australia’s action – domestic pressure.
Facts about the Middle East trouble neither Albanese and Wong, nor the journalists who interview them. Both politicians, and the ABC’s Sally Sara, have parroted false claims that Palestine has been denied a state for 77 years. Wrong.
Resolution 181 in November 1947 provided for separate Jewish and Palestinian states but the Arabs of Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria rejected this and invaded the newly proclaimed Israel.
Arabs had earlier rejected a 1922 League of Rights proposal to establish separate Jewish and Palestinian states. Nazi collaborator Haj Amin el-Husseini rejected a proposed partition put forward by the 1937 British Peel Commission, which would have given Jews a small state by the sea and Arabs the rest of British Mandate Palestine.
The Palestinians rejected formal offers of their own state under the Oslo Accord between prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat in 1993-94.
They again rejected a peace deal put forward by US president Bill Clinton and Israeli PM Ehud Barak in 2000, and another by prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008.
The truth is, just like Hamas and Iran, too many Palestinians want one Palestinian Muslim state, the destruction of Israel and the expulsion or murder of its Jews. The original 1989 Hamas constitution is explicit, as are Hamas’s financial backers in Iran.
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout