…read the beginning of Brendan O’Neill’s wakeup-call commentary at spiked-online.com and you’ll know better:
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.
Left observers have been alarmingly cavalier about the weapons. ‘A few bits of weaponry’ is how one of the people at Novara Media put it. CNN published a ridiculous ‘exposé’ of how the IDF’s display of Hamas weapons seemed to be ‘rearranged’. In some media clips there were more weapons than in other media clips. Yes, because more ‘terrorist assets’ were discovered ‘throughout the day’, said the IDF. Too late for rational explanations, guys: CNN’s ‘exposé’ had already spread like a pox through social media where Islamists and racists giddily cited it as proof that those sneaky Israelis planted the weapons to try to frame poor Hamas.
Yesterday, following Israel’s release of CCTV footage showing armed men hauling bloodied hostages into al-Shifa, things got really ridiculous. All I see are ‘injured hostages’ being taken for ‘medical treatment’, said Guardian columnist Owen Jones. That does not justify ‘Israel’s massacre of the hospital’, he said. Yes, the famously humanitarian Hamas, always keen to care for the civilians it violates and brutalises. One of the Hamas terrorists in the CCTV clip seems to be wielding a meat cleaver. The others have Kalashnikovs – or a ‘few bits of weaponry’, as I think we’re meant to say. These videos are damning in the extreme. That heavily armed terrorists are able to move with impunity through the hospital’s corridors is strong proof that they enjoy some form of dominion there. Anyone who says otherwise is clearly so blinded by Israelophobia that they can no longer see what’s in front of their faces.
And now there’s the tunnel. Israel has released footage of a vast tunnel found under a canopy on the hospital grounds. Also under the canopy was a pick-up truck packed with weapons, similar to the ones Hamas used in its pogrom of 7 October. The CNN hacks who visited the tunnel last night said, no doubt through gritted teeth, that it looks like ‘compelling’ evidence of Hamas malfeasance. ‘But’ – you knew there was a but – ‘even then it was unclear what [the tunnel] was or how far it went down’. Alex Thomson of Channel 4 News said Israel is ‘gradually building evidence of Hamas military activity [at al-Shifa]’, and you could almost sense the disappointment in his voice. But it does not ‘amount to evidence of a Hamas command and control centre’ in the hospital.
You have the link to Mr. O’Neill’s piece above. I recommend that you use it and read all the rest as well.
Then, one of two things will be true. Either you will have even more understanding of just how anti-Israel biased media are (as if what we’ve seen until now wasn’t enough by itself), or you hate Israel so much that you still can find a rationale for believing the coverage is neutral.
I hope for your sake it is the former.
