ABC finally reports Hamas executing Gazans – to blame Israel and undermine Trump
It took Rebel News provocateur Avi Yemini confronting Doran in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square this week to impose some rough justice and seek some ABC accountability for Australian taxpayers.
“Are you gonna finally call Hamas terrorists?” demanded Yemini. “Do you hang your head in shame for the way that you’ve reported in the last two years? Much of the anti-Semitic hate in Australia has to do solely on your reporting, how does it feel?”
As Yemini and his cameraman chased Doran through the square, an Aussie in the crowd chipped in: “The ABC is a complete joke.”
There is no doubt Rebel News was unfair to Doran, holding him single-handedly responsible for the ABC’s appalling coverage of the Gaza war. The blame lies much more broadly with ABC news and current affairs, its practitioners and leadership.
But when the ABC refuses to be accountable elsewhere, an on-the-run interview redolent of the ABC chasing a conservative politician or A Current Affair pursuing a dodgy car dealer certainly did the job. Yemini made a salient point in a dramatic way at a telling time and place.
Just a week earlier Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price tried for answers in a more orthodox manner, questioning ABC managing director Hugh Marks in a Senate estimates hearing. Nampijinpa Price followed up my September Sky News report where I showed verified footage of Hamas terrorists executing alleged Israeli collaborators in Gaza and noted that while even the BBC had reported this atrocity, the ABC had not.
“There’s been broad coverage, obviously, of the way in which Israel have conducted their fight against Hamas, against terrorism, and the loss of life by Gazans,” said Nampijinpa Price, “but when it came to Gazans’ lives being taken by Hamas, why wasn’t this as important?” The ABC boss pleaded ignorance.
“I am not aware of the decision that was made to cover or not cover that particular issue,” Marks answered. “Obviously, I don’t have any doubt that the ABC has covered the atrocities of Hamas and how they operate. I don’t think our audience would be in any doubt about that.”
I would beg to differ. Through simple Google searches and then with the assistance of AI, I found only one ABC report of Hamas murdering Gazans in the two years up to the release of the last hostages this week, even though this Islamist terror group’s violent control of the Palestinian population has been a crucial factor in the conduct of the war.
However, in a noticeable turnaround, the ABC and other leftist media began prominently reporting Hamas executions this week. Such sunlight on the reality in Gaza is welcome and should always have been standard practice but, as it happens, in this case the switch to transparent reporting exposes their bias and how their coverage is driven more by narrative than facts. Clearly the latest executions were reported because they now suited the leftist and anti-Israeli agenda – they were seen as a threat to Trump’s peace plan.
“As US President Donald Trump and other world leaders were promising peace, Hamas fighters dragged seven men into a small square in Gaza City and forced them to kneel on the ground,” The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age reported.
On the ABC they insinuated it was the US President who was responsible for the Hamas murders. The public broadcaster’s online report told audiences about the cold-blooded Hamas executions before adding: “Trump has previously given his blessing to Hamas to reassert some control of Gaza, at least temporarily.”
This about-face in reporting exposes the ongoing media deceptions of the Gaza war. Hamas executions of Palestinians were ignored during the war because they might provide justification for the Israeli military action and act as a distraction from the demonisation of Israel; but now a peace plan is in place, Hamas’s slaughter of Gazans makes the news because it can be blamed on Israel for creating mayhem in Gaza and it fuels the narrative of a failing Trump plan.
Spare a thought for Trump – he cops the blame when Israel kills Gazans as an unintended consequence of attacks against Hamas, and he is blamed even when Hamas executes its own people during a ceasefire he brokered. Spare a thought, too, for ABC journalists – the mental and moral gymnastics to twist the facts so they fit the narrative must be exhausting.
In a long history of entrenched bias over climate change, Indigenous affairs, energy policy and other dominant political issues, the ABC’s Gaza war performance has set a new benchmark. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – they have taken Orwell literally.
They have promulgated claims against Israel of genocide, deliberate starvation and the targeting of civilians without any verifiable evidence. They have breathlessly relayed false reports about hospitals and aid workers being targeted and buried the eventual corrections.
They have constantly repeated statistics and claims that actually come from Hamas, disguising that reality by using benign euphemisms such as “Gazan authorities” or “the Gazan health ministry”. Routinely their stories have been sourced from Gaza via freelance media operatives, clearly working with the approval of Hamas, yet with no way of verifying the claims they have passed off the stories as the ABC’s work.
They have portrayed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal rather than a democratically elected wartime leader subjected to outrageous, highly politicised and extra-jurisdictional war-crime slurs by the International Criminal Court. They have ignored the Islamist extremist motivations and charter of Hamas and characterised the terror group as a liberation army fighting for statehood.
In this way, they have fuelled anti-Semitism by demonising Israel. They have downplayed or even censored out of their coverage the Islamist extremist and Socialist Alliance elements of the pro-Palestinian protests in Australia, portraying them as mainstream and reasonable.
They employed Antoinette Lattouf partly because of her anti-Israel posturing and then they sacked her when they could not stand the criticism. The list goes on – there is probably a thesis to be done on these past two years of unrelenting anti-Israel propaganda funded by taxpayers.
On Monday night, after the last living Israeli hostages were freed and Trump was in Israel to address the Knesset as the highlight of a historic visit, the ABC ran a Four Corners hit job by John Lyons on the President’s family businesses being enriched while he is in the White House.
This embarrassment provides a hilarious counterpoint to four years of incuriosity from the ABC about Joe Biden’s business dealings and Hunter Biden’s laptop. (Remember Four Corners and Sarah Ferguson also gave us a three-part “story of the century” that falsely asserted that Trump was elected in 2016 thanks to Vladimir Putin and a deep Russian conspiracy. Now they are chasing the Trump billions – we are paying grown men and women to indulge their Walter Mitty journalism fantasies.)
In a letter published in The Newcastle Herald on Thursday Alan Hamilton of Hamilton East focused on the ABC’s delinquency. “Many thanks to the national broadcaster Sky News Australia for taking the live feed of Trump’s historic address to Israel’s Knesset while other taxpayer-funded entities sulked in the corner.”
ABC TV news the following night included joyful scenes of the Israeli hostages being reunited with their families and the celebrations in Hostages Square, but Doran’s coverage did not mention the hostages’ torture, starvation and mistreatment or how they were innocents taken in a terrorist raid, nor did he mention 100 of the hostages had been killed.
The bulletin’s next report was filed from the West Bank where another reporter, Eric Tlozek, covered the celebrations as Palestinian prisoners and detainees were released.
He did not tell viewers this was the compromise that sickened Israelis, reluctantly accepting that they needed to hand over terrorists and murderers to get their hostages home. Tlozek did not mention that many of those released had been convicted of terrorist atrocities and murdering innocents, while others were terror suspects; instead, he referred to the anodyne catch-all of “security offences” and had a number of the newly freed Palestinians making unverified claims of torture at the hands of the Israelis (an allegation terrorists are trained to make).
False equivalence has been the hallmark of the ABC’s tendentious coverage: finding no distinction between innocent hostages and convicted terrorists; between aggressors and victims; between an accountable military carrying out the orders of a democratic government under the rule of law and an Islamist extremist terrorist organisation intent on the elimination of Jews and Israel.
Our public broadcaster, of course, has been no orphan. This deceptive coverage has been standard for the leftist media across the Western world, informed by UN malfeasance, Hamas propaganda and the lead given by Qatar’s instrumental and tainted Al Jazeera network. Until a few years ago the ABC ran Al Jazeera reportage – thankfully that no longer happens, but incredibly SBS still broadcasts Al Jazeera stories.
Media perversity over Gaza has had real-world consequences, turning public opinion against Israel, leading countries such as our own to recognise the non-existent state of Palestine and thereby fuelling anti-Semitism around the world while providing encouragement to Hamas.
Fair and honest reporting might have helped keep more pressure on Hamas and encouraged more support for Israel. It could have shortened the war and saved lives. We will never know.
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“If you have a concern, please write a formal complaint to the ABC,” the ABC’s Middle East correspondent Matthew Doran said. “I am not talking to you any further … you are just trying to catch me out here.”