Much of the media, many university leaders, student protesters and some of our politicians need to be held accountable for allowing themselves to be used in an Iranian-sponsored propaganda war designed to entrench Islamic fundamentalism.
China’s Confucius institutes have been used in universities here to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. In the 1950s and ’60s, various Soviet friendship societies were used to spread the word from Moscow Central.
Now Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has thanked the international protest movement for pushing the anti-Israel cause across the West.
The US think tank MEMRI – the Middle East Media Research Institute – quoted Khamenei in a speech on May 1: “The pressure exerted by global public opinion against the plundering (Israeli) regime must be increased,” he said.
Palestine must be returned to its people, Khamenei added.
No mention of the fact that Jews predate the birth of Islam’s founding prophet Mohammed by nearly 2000 years or that Jews were the original inhabitants of what Iran now claims is Palestine.
The regime’s online mouthpiece, Kayhan, said on May 6: “Every student at Harvard, Boston, Columbia, Emerson, Texas and so on has become an Iranian student.
“Khamenei’s ideas – reflected in the slogans ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’ and ‘Death to America’ – are currently being chanted by American and European students as they burn the American flag.”
It’s a pity that more Western intellectuals were not prepared to demonstrate in support of the Iranian women jailed or murdered for protesting in favour of women’s rights in the months before October 7. As many as 551 protesters were killed by Iranian security police in the “woman, life, freedom’’ marches, according to the UN.
Useful fools following Iran’s lead include homosexual rights groups that are helping a regime that believes in the execution of homosexuals, the repression of women, and the destruction of the West.
MEMRI has quoted many US Islamic preachers and Palestinian imams urging the execution of homosexuals across the Arab world.
Palestinian Islamic scholar Yousef Makharzah, in a sermon on June 16 last year, said the US was a nation that supports perversion and bestiality, and noted that it backed the idea of legalising homosexuality in the Middle East.
“Your cows, your sheep and even your donkeys have never stooped to the level of perversion that America designs for you,” he said.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad official Samir Zaqout said on October 18, 2022, that Israelis had brought depravity and homosexuality to the Holy Land.
Palestinian Islamic scholar Sheikh Yousef Abu Islam on June 26, 2022, said: “Allah punished male and female adulterers with flogging or stoning, but when He decided to punish homosexuals He said they should be thrown headfirst from the rooftop of the tallest building.”
Who do “queers for Palestine” imagine they are supporting?
US protesters last week showed they despise the Israeli hostages stolen from southern Israel on October 7 last year. They have no regard for the democratically elected government in Israel, the only place in the Middle East that has accepted gay Palestinian refugees fleeing Muslim persecution.
Prominent Australian Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah retweeted criticism by Al Jazeera producer Linah Alsaafin on June 9 of the rescue of four hostages held for eight months in Gaza: “Every news outlet that reported this as a rescue mission has blood on its hands. 210 Palestinians were massacred and 400 others wounded. This was not a rescue operation, this is a mass slaughter.”
Abdel-Fattah and fellow Palestinian supporters need to ask themselves every day if any Gazan civilians would have been killed by Israeli soldiers in the last eight months had it not been for the bestial murders and hostage-taking of October 7.
Palestinian casualty numbers are released by Hamas’s health bureaucracy. The UN last month near-halved the number of women and children killed from 9500 women and 14,500 children on May 6, to 5000 women and 8000 children on May 8.
This column reported the statistical anomalies in Hamas’s numbers on April 7 after an analysis by University of Pennsylvania statistician Professor Abraham Wyner. Clearly the UN realised Hamas’s numbers made no sense.
Add to this the uncritical acceptance by much of the world’s media of claims Israel is targeting Palestinian journalists, most of whom are Hamas operatives. Three of the hostages released in an operation by the IDF last week were being held in the home of Abdallah Aljamal, who has written for the militantly pro-Hamas Al Jazeera network and worked as a spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza labour ministry.
This column on February 19 detailed the Hamas affiliations of various Palestinian journalists who the ABC was claiming had been killed in Gaza. It urged readers to download a study by UK investigative journalist David Collier that found more than half the 107 journalists Gazan authorities claimed had been killed before January 4 actually worked for Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
The truth is – like the Palestinian deaths in the Rafah attack of May 28 and previous strikes on Gazan hospitals – civilian deaths are part of Hamas’s strategy to gain Western sympathy.
Where was the outrage during the hostage release mission at the firefight from Hamas militants trying to prevent the rescue? Did Hamas fire from within a residential quarter kill zero civilians?
Those killed in the Rafah tent fire died in a secondary explosion when a Hamas munitions facility exploded while two Hamas leaders who were 1.7km from the humanitarian zone were being targeted by air. The munitions depot exploded and sent shrapnel into a fuel tank near tents housing civilians.
The IDF has released audio of Hamas conversations that confirm its version of the attack. Reporters here seem unable to accept the real threat to Palestinian civilians is the presence of terrorists in residential areas, hospitals and schools.
Yet in the Arab world, at least, there is some serious analysis of the role of Hamas.
Falah Al-Mash’al, the former chief editor of the Iraqi daily al-Sabah, wrote on December 31 on the Saudi website Elaph that the Arab media does not cover Gaza objectively but sells its consumers illusions. He urged more journalists “to examine the question of Hamas’s responsibility for the war”.
Saudi journalist Abdulaziz Alkhamis in an interview on May 20 put the position of much of the Sunni world succinctly. “(The Gulf States) … must be brave and stand up to Hamas, and all the games of extremist political Islam, and on top of all – Iran. There should be an Arab position that puts forward a good peace agreement, with the support of the UN and … even Russia and China support the existence of Israel as a state. Can you (really) throw the Israelis into the sea?”
One particularly perceptive observation came from the London-based Saudi daily Alsharq Al-Awsat. Its journalist, Abdallah bin Bijad al-Otaibi, blamed the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US for the rise of left-wing support for Hamas.
Qatar has been financing Brotherhood’s operations in the US since the mid-20th century. It also finances Hamas, a rabidly anti-Semitic Brotherhood offshoot, and Al Jazeera.
The thoughtless Western left is doing the bidding of Qatar and Iran, but most protesters would not survive a day under Hamas.
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