Mick Hartley

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The willingness to believe the very worst of the Jewish State

Jake Wallis Simons on the new wave of antisemitism – Israelophobia, he calls it – sparked by the October 7th pogrom:

The ease with which supposedly impartial observers have unwittingly become activists belies something darker – the willingness to believe the very worst of the Jewish State. It has become commonplace to airily assert that Israel is committing ‘genocide’. And it has become commonplace to talk of its disregard for Palestinian life, especially the life of Palestinian children….

Hamas leaders understand very well what makes us in the West tick. They know that if they refuse to tell the press how many of the dead were terrorists, the media will repeat its figures unthinkingly. They know that normally rigorous Western journalists will fail to ask how the civilian death toll can be totted up so quickly after every attack on Gaza. The number of Israeli victims on 7 October, for example, was initially estimated at nearly 1,400, but was later revised downwards to 1,200 once the investigation was concluded. By contrast, when the world’s media wrongly reported that Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital had been struck by an Israeli missile, it accompanied the claim with a figure of 500 dead. The truth was likely in double digits, if that.

The same wilful credulity applies to the absence of footage of dead or injured Hamas combatants. In the eyes of Western media, Israel appears to be waging a war without an enemy. Has any reporter wondered why dead Hamas men are never pictured, only dead civilians?

The message we are being fed is that Israel, a liberal democracy, is sending its sons into mortal danger simply to murder Palestinian babies. To any thinking person this is preposterous. But this is the impression created by the footage emerging from the Gaza Strip, which is, of course, tightly controlled by Hamas. And nobody asks any questions.

It's not just the images – of weeping women and bandaged children and the rest. The total numbers killed in Gaza – 15,000, 20,000, 25,000, going up and up – where do they come from? From Hamas, of course. They have no interest in providing accurate figures. For them, the higher the better. And these figures are taken seriously, quoted in the news, cited as evidence of "genocide".

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8 responses to “The willingness to believe the very worst of the Jewish State”

  1. Alan Avatar
    Alan

    What is the Israeli account of what is happening? Are the British media ignoring it?
    When a civilian structure/location is bombed/destroyed, do the Israelis say we attacked that place because we knew x Hamas fighters were there? That’s where the rockets were coming from!
    How many Hamas fighters are there? How many have been killed, captured?
    What about all those tunnels? It seems to me that the Israelis must have a pretty good map of where they all are. It was a major civil engineering project. How could that have been hidden?
    BTW Even if those Hamas figures are wrong, it’s not 20,000 civilians killed, its “only” 10,000, Israel is still losing.

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  2. Joanne Avatar
    Joanne

    If Israel is still “losing,” that is exactly what Hamas had planned all along. This is a win-win situation for Hamas. If the Israelis mount a major offensive, they lose the propaganda war worldwide; if they hold back, they lose the military war and put themselves in grave danger.
    I don’t know what Israel could do as an alternative.
    I’m very worried about the country’s future, as Hezbollah is growing more active in the north. What is really needed is not to destroy Hamas/Hezbollah, or at least not just that, but to overthrow the regime in Iran. Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen.

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  3. Graham Avatar
    Graham

    Whatever Hamas / BBC/ the UN’s fantasy numbers, the real total of dead Gazan Arabs who were members of Hamas, as of 21 December, is at least 9,000, and likely more: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-has-killed-2000-hamas-operatives-since-truce-ended-on-december-1-spokesman/
    That’s excluding the fatalities resulting from the minimum 10% Hamas rockets which misfire, fall short and kill Arabs in Gaza, like at al Ahli hospital.
    Obviously, for several decades now Israel has ‘lost’ any propaganda war before anything has even happened but in real, objective terms has killed a substantially smaller percentage of civilians relative to terrorist / military targets than any other military has ever achieved. The media reward them by reliably pretending the opposite. Gaza is a stage set controlled by the most vile, merciless gangster terrorists imaginable. It’s also easily accessible and equipped with comfortable European quality hotels which amoral, posturing, privileged western ‘reporters’ can stay in as they burnish their credentials with their peers and award each other reporting trophies by repeating the narratives fed to them by their islamist stringers whilst frowning, sombrely into the camera lens as they lie about the latest manifestation of the blood libel.

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  4. Alan Avatar
    Alan

    Both sides are in the grip of religious extremists. Hamas is an acronym of the movement’s official name, the Islamic Resistance Movement. Its founding charter describes all of Palestine as an Islamic endowment and calls for fighting Jews, the destruction of Israel, and the creation of an Islamic state in its place.
    Netanyahu leads a coalition of the Likud and six far-right and pro-settler parties. They have agreed to expand settlements and to consider annexation of the West Bank.
    Yet, modern archaeology tells us the Biblical accounts of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan, are very largely myth* No land was promised, no walls came tumbling down!
    What a shame, here we are in the 21st century and ancient myths still have this horrible influence.
    * “The Bible Unearthed” by Israel Finkelstein, professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, head of the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa.

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  5. Graham Avatar
    Graham

    There’s no equivalence between Israel and the palestinians. The Arabs have had nine opportunities to create a palestinian state and rejected every one, for the simple reason the only state they want is the Jewish one. The only reason the identity ‘palestinian’ was invented was as a tactic to delegitimise Israel, turn islamist Goliath into oppressed David and pretend there was a distinct people with an ancestry in the land and a rival – at least equal – claim to it, when in reality the vast majority of ‘palestinian’ Arabs have no connection with Israel or the disputed territories before the advent of modern Zionism. Palestinianism is exclusively driven by islamist supremacism and jew-hatred. Israel is a democratic, pluralist society and the homeland of the Jews. When someone plays the ‘both sides’ equivocation trope it is a guarantee you can’t trust their judgement or intentions.

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  6. Alan Avatar
    Alan

    The population of Palestine at the end of the First World War was of the order of 700,000. Nearly 80% were Muslim, rather more than 10% Christian and rather less than 10% Jewish.
    It seems to me the nearly 560,000 Muslims (whose ancestors had been there for some time!!) and their descendants have some right to a share of that land.

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  7. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    And Jews have some rights to their ancestral homeland. That’s what she’s talking about.

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  8. Alan Avatar
    Alan

    The rather less than 10% Jewish people at that time certainly did. And, if given the potential of the land, they became significantly more than 10%, then so be it!

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