Mick Hartley

Brendan O'Neill – Al-Shifa Hospital and the pathological distrust of Israel:

We need to talk about the pathological distrust of Israel. About the speed and relish with which our media elites dismiss every Israeli claim about the war in Gaza. Consider the Battle of al-Shifa Hospital. Israeli officials have offered up ample proof that the hospital was used as a military base by Hamas. They’ve shown us caches of weapons, video footage of gun-toting, knife-wielding men hurrying hostages through corridors, a vast tunnel that is 10 metres down and 55 metres long. And yet it is all breezily discounted. This is not healthy scepticism of ‘war propaganda’ – it’s a dogmatic refusal to accept a single thing the Jewish State says.

The morbid disbelief of Israeli evidence has reached insane levels in recent days. When IDF commanders displayed the Kalashnikovs, ammunition, hand grenades and bullet-proof vests they found at al-Shifa, the woke media shrugged. These are just ‘small stashes’ of weapons, said the BBC in its best haughty voice. This begs the question of how much weaponry Britain’s public broadcaster thinks it is acceptable for a fascist movement to store in a hospital. Ten guns? Twenty? ‘Those piles of Kalashnikovs’ are ‘frankly not convincing’, said the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen with superb derision. Maybe they belong to the hospital’s ‘security department’, he said….

They’re not only dismissing the discoveries of the past few days but also a truth that’s been known for years: that Hamas, unquestionably, has turned al-Shifa into a hellhole base for its sinister operations. The memory-holing of the historical facts we know about al-Shifa has been extraordinary. You won’t believe Israel? Fine, maybe you’ll believe Amnesty International. It published a long, detailed report about Hamas’s torture of Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. That conflict resuscitated Hamas-Fatah civil tensions in Gaza, leading to the commission of ‘serious human-rights abuses’ – including abduction, torture and summary execution – by Hamas terrorists against Palestinians suspected of siding with Fatah….

The proof of Hamas’s criminal misuse of al-Shifa as a base for torture, murder and warmongering is abundant. Palestinian dissidents have pointed to it. Amnesty has documented the Room 101-style horrors committed by Hamas’s ‘Internal Security officers’ there. Israel has shown us weapons, trucks, tunnels, hostages. Anyone still saying ‘Hmm’ following almost two decades’ worth of proof that Hamas exploits al-Shifa has clearly left the realm of reason and entered the hell of dogma. This is not scepticism, it’s denialism. It is not a noble hunt for ‘the truth’ of war – it’s the sickness of post-truth thinking, where nothing as trifling as evidence can ever be allowed to interfere with one’s ideological bias. Which in this case is that Israel is evil and always lies….