by Gary Willig
The idea that maybe things Hamas says should not be instantly believed in their entirety never occurrs to the people who are supposed to value the truth.
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| UN flag at half mast for those killed in GazaEvan Schneider/U.N. Photo. |
Hamas keeps fooling the media because they want to be fooled
Another study has come out demonstrating what was obvious, the mainstream media have been using statistics provided and deliberately inflated by Hamas in their reporting on the war in Gaza.
The study by the Henry Jackson Society found that media outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and more uncritically cite and parrot the casualty figures provided by Hamas via the Gaza Health Ministry, even as those figures turn men into women, adults into children, and combatants into civilians, while claiming people killed by Hamas and other terrorist organizations as well as people who died of natural causes were killed by the IDF.
Hamas played the media for fools and has done so for the entire war. But don’t expect any anger from the New York Times or the BBC at the terrorists who tricked them into writing fiction instead of the news. A thousand reports all proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hamas is lying about the casualties in Gaza can be released, and still the mainstream media will report their lies as facts without question.
History proves that the media will ignore all the evidence and continue to report lies as the truth as long as those lies make Israel look bad.
In June, the Associated Press conducted its own study that found that the percentage of women and children killed in Gaza had fallen to 34% despite Hamas’ continued false claims that the figure was a constant 70% or higher.
Despite this, just yesterday, AP published an article about Hamas’ latest claims on the Gaza death toll, including its claims that more than half of the casualties have been women and children. Ignoring and never mentioning its own study showing that Hamas figures have long been known to be false, the AP never questioned the figures provided by Hamas. The only lip service it paid to reality was to note that Hamas does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its figures. Instead, it chose to say that it is Israel that claimed “without providing evidence” that 17,000 terrorist combatants have been killed.
How does a major news organization go from publishing a study proving Hamas lies about casualty figures to reporting as if Hamas is telling the truth and it is Israel that is lying?
The sad truth is, these media organizations are fooled by Hamas because they want to be fooled. They want the story to be the noble Palestinian Arab resistance bravely defending itself against the evil Israelis. The fact that the war only started because Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the fact that Hamas exists for the sole purpose of committing genocide, are all irrelevant. Facts don’t matter when they get in the way of “the narrative.”
The media never learn. The fake reports of a nonexistent massacre in Jenin in 2002 caused no soul-searching, no questioning, and no change. As the facts came out following the 2009 and 2014 conflicts with Hamas and even Hamas eventually admitted that its original casualty figures were wrong and Israel’s were right, almost no one at the New York Times, CNN, or the AP took notice.
This consistent pattern of believing every Hamas lie against Israel continued throughout this entire war. You would think media outlets would be embarrassed by having fallen for the lie that Israel had killed hundreds of civilians by bombing the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City when it was so quickly proven that every aspect of the accusation against Israel was a lie. The hospital was struck by an errant rocket fired by Islamic Jihad and the death toll was a small fraction of what was claimed. But as with every other lie against the media has swallowed hook, line, and sinker over the decades, no lessons were learned, no conclusions were drawn. The idea that maybe things Hamas says should not be instantly believed in their entirety never occurred to the people who are supposed to value the truth.
In 2014, former AP correspondent revealed the inner workings of how this media machine works against Israel. In a piece for Tablet Magazine titled ‘An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth,’ he documented how mainstream media organizations refused to report on Hamas intimidation against journalists in Gaza and how AP’s editorials refused to publish a bombshell story showing the extent of the offer made by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
A story that proved an Israeli leader was serious about peace and that the PA leader refused his generous terms that would have created a Palestinian state did not fit the narrative, so it had to be killed. When the facts are not what the reporters want, they don’t report them.
This agenda-driven ‘reporting’ has dangerous real-word consequences. It lends credence to the attempts to punish Israelis for the crime of living at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. It gives politicians cause to criticize Israel for things they would do if they were in Israel’s shoes and to push to cut off arms sales to the Jewish State.
Most egregiously, by pursuing a narrative instead of facts, these mainstream media outlets feed the antisemitism that has made the world a far less safe place to be a Jew over the last year.
How different would the world be if the New York Times, the BBC, the AP, the Washington Post, CNN, and so many other news organizations were more interested in telling their readers and listeners the truth instead of feeding their preferred narrative? Would the Biden Administration have spent all of 2014 trying to stop Israel from winning the war if news organizations accurately reported from Gaza or if they treated Hamas’ casualty claims with even the slightest amount of the scepticism these claims warranted?
Would the ICC and ICJ have chosen to target Israel for nonexistent crimes if the media had done its job and reported the truth that these crimes never happened, giving the cases against Israel no leg to stand on?
Would the antisemites who have spent the last 14 months doing everything they can to make life a living hell for Jews and calling for another Holocaust be given any of the social power they have seized if the public was told the truth that their claims of Israel committing “genocide” are a lie?
Just imagine a world in which the AP cited its own study and told its readers the truth that it was Hamas that made claims “without providing evidence.”
The saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But there is no saying about being fooled a hundred times by the same lies. Shame is nonexistent at that point.
The Henry Jackson Society has done a great service in providing more conclusive evidence against the narrative of Hamas and its supporters. But it will make no difference to the mainstream media, which shows no compunction about being made fools of every time they listen to the lies of their chosen heroes.
The emperor has no clothes, the man behind the curtain is exposed, but they will never admit it. They want Hamas and its supporters to continue to fool them so they can fool their audiences. There is no greater enemy of truth than the fool who wants to be fooled.
Gary Willig
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/400956
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