Truth is the casualty of journalists’ letter on Hamas

In urging journalists to behave like Palestinian activists or Hamas apologists, influential sections of the Australian media have adopted the values of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery and War is Peace. A petition circulated by the journalists union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, and its ABC and Guardian subcommittees abandons basic tenets of journalism including truth, accuracy, impartiality and balance. The organisers urge newsrooms to scrap what they term “both-sidesism”. They give no more credence to information provided by Israel, a democratic nation (which has been accurate throughout the seven-week war), as to the claims of Hamas terrorists whose mission, backed by Iran, one of the most tyrannical theocracies, is to wipe Israel and Jews from the map.

The union architects of the petition and its signatories urge journalists to give “context” to the war coverage, revealing a limited, myopic view of history. The war did not start on October 7, they claim (which would be news to the loved ones of the 1200 Israelis massacred and the 240 captured as hostages). Instead, the petition laments the “illegal occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel since 1967” (false) and the “expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their native lands in 1948 to make way for the state of Israel”. Events leading up to the establishment of the Jewish state, including the Holocaust and earlier pogroms, are ignored. So, importantly, is the primary source evidence from journalists, often risking their lives, in Gaza.

First-hand interviews, reports, photographs and videos have exposed the misuse of hospitals, refugee camps and innocent Palestinian citizens as human shields as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have turned much of the strip into a vast weapons and terror base. Even veteran Israeli soldiers who have spent decades combating terrorist assaults on their country are amazed by what has been uncovered in Gaza during the current offensive. Last week Israeli combat aircraft unleashed an airstrike targeted at a senior Hamas commander trying to hide among human shields at the crowded Jabalia so-called refugee camp in northern Gaza; the web of Hamas tunnels and command centres located beneath the camp collapsed.

Many of the 400 tunnel shafts discovered so far have been located beneath or near hospitals, schools and other crowded centres to afford them cover from attack. The shafts are a surface sign of the vast, 480km labyrinth of sophisticated, mostly reinforced concrete tunnels known as the Gaza Metro. Some tunnels as deep as 60m below ground have been discovered to be equipped with sophisticated communications centres, electricity, airconditioning and storage for weapons, food and water. Those beneath the al-Shifa hospital have been the nerve centre of the current war, provoked by Hamas.

As the sounds of battle fall silent for at least four days to allow the prisoner swap to take place, anti-Semitism in Australia continues to worsen. While some of it appears to be driven by ignorance (including the protests of gormless schoolchildren), some is driven by deep-seated hatred that is an abrogation of all that more than 100,000 Australians, including those who fought the Nazis, died to defend.

If she had a clue about what she was saying, for example, the 16-year-old schoolgirl at Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station on Thursday was endorsing savagery. Hamas, she declared, was “doing a good job” and Israel “shouldn’t exist”. Before our eyes, Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich said, “we see a generation of anti-Jewish bigots rise, and the ripple effects of this vilification will be felt for many years to come”. Detrimental and offensive as school strikes are, they have exposed the abysmal ignorance of too many young Australians and their brainwashing at the hands of the education system.

This is profoundly worrying, as US journalist Bari Weiss writes in Inquirer. When anti-Semitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, she argues, it is not about Jews. It is “about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system – a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying. It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis – one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since September 11, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defence of civilisation but with a defence of barbarism”.

In joining the anti-Semitic cheer squads, a section of Australia’s free media is letting down the nation. Were Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels alive, he would applaud their world views and warped journalistic values.