After the Hamas Massacre, UK Paper Hates Israel Even More
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
In his Wall Street Journal column (“Why Hamas Atrocities Lead the Left to Hate Israel More,” Oct. 20) Shany Mor wrote that “many would think that an atrocity like Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel would lead opponents of the Jewish state to temper their attacks.”
Instead, he observed, “from college campuses to mainstream media outlets, elite left-wing circles have responded to the terror group’s barbarism by intensifying their denunciations of Israel.”
Mor argues that this behavior is “an example of cognitive-dissonance reduction, the process by which people reconcile new information that contradicts their firmly held priors.”
“Western activists for Palestinians,” he added, “are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome.” Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.”
No British institution has demonstrated this pathology more than The Guardian, which, since Hamas’ Oct. 7 ISIS-style massacre of more than 1,400 Jews — which included rape, and murdering scores children and even babies in cold blood, and which forced hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens of those border communities from their homes — has published multiple pieces accusing not Hamas, but Israel, of ethnic cleansing.
On. Oct. 14, Sara Helm’s column in The Guardian was titled, “Netanyahu told 1.1 million Palestinians they had 24 hours to evacuate. What is that if not ethnic cleansing?” [emphasis added] On Oct. 16, Ken Roth’s column at the outlet was titled “Israel appears to be on the verge of ethnic cleansing.” [emphasis added] Both columns perversely argued that Israel’s call on civilians in northern Gaza to move south to keep them away from harm’s way — and to detract from Hamas’ ability to use them as human shields — is a form of “ethnic cleansing.”
Also on Oct. 16, Chris McGreal, the journalist at the outlet with the most visceral animosity towards Israel and diaspora Jewish supporters of the state, published a piece titled “The language being used to describe Palestinians is genocidal.“ [emphasis added]
A third piece, published on Oct. 16 by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) leader Omar Barghouti, cited an anti-Zionist writer to allege that Gaza is “a textbook case of genocide.” [emphasis added]
On Oct. 17, The Guardian published an op-ed by Moustafa Bayoumi which demanded the we “stop the imminent ethnic cleansing of Gaza” and added that “We hear Israel present the situation as if it has no choice but genocide.” [emphasis added]
Also on Oct. 17, Nimer Sultany published a Guardian piece which claimed that as “UN experts warn of ethnic cleansing, and scholars warn of genocide, more demonstrations are needed to save civilian lives.” [emphasis added]
Also on Oct. 18, the outlet published an op-ed by Ellen Brotsky and Ariel Koren, “We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza,” which, in addition to accusing Israel of genocide, claimed that the Hamas attack was “the result of decades-long Israeli crimes and besiegement.” [emphasis added]
On Oct. 20, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, in a Guardian piece titled “Israel’s endgame is to push Palestinians into Egypt — and the west is cheering it on,” wrote that Israel “might be trying to drive them out of Gaza altogether,” and positively cited a Gazan charging that is Israel is engaging in “ethnic cleansing and genocide all wrapped into one.” [emphasis added]
On Oct. 21, Ahmed Moor wrote in The Guardian that “Ethnic cleansing is likely a strategic objective for the Israelis in Gaza.” [emphasis added]
An Oct. 23 Guardian piece by Yugoslav-born writer Lana Bastašić included the observation that “Living in Germany, I see it as my human responsibility to call it out for its one-sidedness, its hypocrisy and its acquiesence in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.” [emphasis added]
There were 11 pieces published by Guardian editors in the span of only 13 days accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing or genocide. Yet, we were unable to find any content published at the outlet since Oct. 7 mentioning Hamas’ genocidal charter.
Additionally, while they’ve devoted some coverage to the Jewish victims of the Hamas massacre, most of the content on their Israel and Palestinian territories pages is devoted to Palestinian suffering, and Palestinian voices expressing extreme, incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric. This includes one piece by Dafna Baram published on Oct. 11, which referred to Gaza as a “concentration camp” — this is antisemitic language that The Guardian defended in response to our complaint, citing, as one example, the fact that Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy used the term in an op-ed.
Worse, the use of the term “concentration camp” was used by Baram in a way to, in effect, justify the slaughter.
What we couldn’t imagine, but always knew: that if you keep 2 million people in the largest concentration camp on Earth and bomb to death thousands of them on occasion, you create a volcano that is bound to erupt in your face one day, causing horrific atrocities in its wake.
As Mor suggested, the secular theology of anti-Israel advocacy demands that Palestinian action can ever be connected to any Palestinian outcome. Medieval cruelty and barbarism inflicted upon Jewish babies by Palestinians must, according to their Precepts, have a Jewish root cause.
The IDF recently showed international journalists unedited video of some of the massacres from security cameras, mobile phones, and Hamas body cameras. Here’s one account.
We warn you that, though there are no images in this tweet, the description of the evil committed by Hamas is extraordinarily disturbing:
The videos show pure, predatory sadism; no effort to spare those who pose no threat; and an eagerness to kill nearly matched by eagerness to disfigure the bodies of the victims. In several clips, the Hamas killers fire shots into the heads of people who are already dead. They count corpses, taking their time, and then shoot them again. Some of the clips I had not previously seen simply show the victims in a state of terror as they wait to be murdered, or covered with bits of their friends and loved ones as they are loaded into trucks and brought to Gaza as hostages. There was no footage of rape, although there was footage of young women huddling in fear and then being executed in a leisurely manner.
But, The Guardian will not allow the story to be about the Jewish victims of such unimaginable Hamas cruelty, and the fact that the worst antisemitic attack in the world since the Holocaust was perpetrated by Palestinians. The paper also won’t objectively report on the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, which can accurately be described, as the CST’s Dave Rich observed, as rallies to celebrate murder.
The media institution has invested too much in the Palestinian cause, have argued for too many years in the righteousness of the Palestinians and their supporters in the UK, that the root of the conflict is Zionist malevolence and that the Israel’s fears of the threat posed by terror groups on its borders is exaggerated.
They refuse to abandon their blind support of dangerous Palestinians against Israel. Instead, they’ve doubled down. Prior to Oct. 7, we didn’t think, at this point, that there was any act of antisemitic malevolence that could truly shock us, bring us to despair and shake our very core. Hamas proved us wrong.
We also likely wouldn’t have thought that even The Guardian, when confronted with a modern-day pogrom where Jewish babies were murdered in their cribs, children tortured and killed in front of their parents, the young and old burned alive by antisemitic death squads, some of whom boasted of how many Jews they killed, and who then decapitated and mutilated corpses, would react by doubling down, publishing content that, as Shany Mor wrote, incites “even greater revulsion at the victim.”
We would have been wrong.
Adam Levick serves as co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.
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