by Jonathan Cook, The Unz Review:
The BBC and others keep revisiting Hamas crimes that day, but fail to report on growing evidence that Israel killed its own citizens, often in grotesque fashion
Barely a day has passed since the 7 October attack by Hamas when the western media has not revisited those events, often to reveal what it claims are new details of astonishing atrocities carried out by the Palestinian group.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
These disclosures have served to sustain public indignation in the West, and kept Palestinian solidarity activists on the back foot.
In turn, the outrage has smoothed Israel’s path as it has levelled vast swaths of Gaza; killed more than 18,700 Palestinians, most of them women and children; and denied the enclave’s population of 2.3 million access to food, water and fuel.
Critically, it has also made it far easier for western governments to throw their weight behind Israel – and arm it – even as Israeli leaders have repeatedly engaged in genocidal talk and carried out ethnic cleansing operations.
Israel’s intense bombing campaigns have herded nearly two million Palestinians into a small section of Gaza, pressed up against its short border with Egypt, while starvation and fatal disease start to take their toll.
Many of the claims about 7 October have been shocking beyond belief, such as stories that Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even described in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.”
Little evidence
Atrocities were undoubtedly committed that day by Hamas and other gunmen in Israel, as groups like Human Rights Watch have been documenting.
They have continued to occur in Gaza every day since, not least through Israel’s continuing and relentless bombing of civilians, and through Hamas’ refusal to free the remaining Israeli hostages without an exchange of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
But in respect of the more shocking allegations against Hamas promoted by the western media – which have bolstered the case for Israel’s two-month rampage in Gaza – often little or no evidence has been forthcoming beyond claims made by Israeli officials and highly partisan and unreliable first responders.
Last week the BBC and others led again with stories of systematic Hamas mass rapes on 7 October. Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims are being obstructed by Israel.
Nonetheless, once more, coverage of the growing devastation in Gaza was sidelined.
Media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place has operated within strict limits, however. Only claims that support Israel’s narrative about what happened that day are being aired.
A growing body of evidence suggesting a far more complex reality, one that paints Israel’s own actions in a far more troubling light, is being ignored or suppressed.
This deeply dishonest approach from the western media indicates that they are not, as they declare, fearlessly pursuing the truth. Rather, they are regurgitating talking points being fed to them by Israel.
That is not only unconscionable – particularly given Israel’s long track record of promoting lies, both small and large – but it violates all basic journalistic codes.
And, worse still, the media’s credulous amplification of Israel’s version of 7 October continues to breathe life into the Israeli case that wrecking Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.
Active cheerleaders
Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in at least some of the killings attributed to Hamas.
This week the Israeli military finally conceded that it had killed Israelis on October 7 in incidents of an “immense and complex quantity”. Given this, it added with transparent non-logic: “It would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents.”
How is it possible, given their continuing interest in scrutinising the events of 7 October, that none of the western media has picked up on any of this distressing evidence, let alone investigated it?
It is hard not to conclude that the western media are only interested in stories – and largely indifferent to whether they are true or false – that portray Hamas, but not Israel, as the bad guys. That would mean the media are not dispassionate reporters, but have been recruited by Israel as its active cheerleaders.
