In the article I argue that it is not Holocaust
trauma but the trauma of settler-colonials, for whom the rising up of the
indigenous Palestinians, is their nightmare scenario. I compare Israel’s
situation with that of the Caribbean slave owners and South Africa’s Whites.
In the Times
of Israel two Israeli holocaust academics, Avinoam
Patt and Liat Steir-Livny lazily claim
that
Just as the
Nazis aimed to annihilate the Jews, Hamas and affiliated terrorist
organizations share the same objective: the destruction of Jews.
White 'trauma' in Kenya led Britain to set up a series of concentration camps
It
is an evidence free assertion. What do they base this claim on? The 1988 Hamas Charter. It is true that the 1988
Hamas Charter referred to Jews and was anti-Semitic but the point is that it
never informed the practice and politics of Hamas and in 2017 was discarded in
favour of a ‘“Document
of General Principles and Policies’.
Of
course the think tanks of US imperialism have done their best to suggest that
the changes are cosmetic. As Mandy Rice-Davies of Profumo fame once said,
they would say that wouldn’t they. It is in the interests of Zionism to portray
Hamas as a genocidal, anti-Semitic organisation.
Matthew
Levitt and Maxine Rich of the neo-con Washington Institute for Near East Policy
argue
in ‘Hamas's
Moderate Rhetoric Belies Militant Activities’
The
international community should judge Hamas not by any moderation in the group's
rhetoric but by its actions on the ground. So long as the latter remain
militant and extreme, the relative moderation of the former means not much at
all.
What
concerned them was not that Hamas had abandoned its anti-Jewish rhetoric but
that they were still militantly opposed to Israel’s occupation, siege and
subjugation of the Palestinian people.
This
is typical of the dishonesty of western academics who conflate the Nazi’s extermination
of Jews with opposition to Israeli settler colonialism. The suggestion being that
Hamas and the Palestinians oppose Israel’s Jewish Supremacist regime not because
of what it does but because their oppressors happen to be Jewish!
Amira
Hass in Ha’aretz explained
the background to the original Charter and how it came to be adopted and the fact
that it had little influence on Hamas’s day to day practice or ideological
outlook.
The
new document contains none of the anti-Semitic articles and sentences that
characterized the charter. Supporters of the movement, especially in the West,
advised it long ago to change these provisions.
One
Hamas member told Haaretz that almost immediately after the charter was
published in 1988, people in the movement urged that these sections be changed.
The charter wasn’t written in a cooperative process, he explained, and it isn’t
“scientifically or legally” accurate.
He
said the Hamas members deported to Marj El Zhour in Lebanon in 1992-93 were the
first to seriously discuss the need for changes. But the changes were never
made because doing so required a lengthy, complex process of thought and
consultation during difficult periods of military escalation.
The
charter itself hasn’t been canceled. It’s a historic document that relates to a
particular moment in the organization’s history, and Hamas isn’t renouncing it;
nor is the new document called a “charter.” Cancelling the charter would repeat
the humiliation undergone by the PLO when it had to announce the repeal of
certain provisions of its 1968 charter because they contradicted the Oslo
Accords. But the Hamas charter is no longer the organization’s official
ideological platform.
‘Presumably
if Gaza’s occupiers had been Christians then the Palestinians would have
happily accepted their fate!’.
Levitt
and Rich typify the superficiality of the ‘academics’ that adorn American think
thanks and universities. To say nothing of Israel’s fake holocaust ‘scholars’ such
as Patt and Steir-Livny.
Nazi
anti-Semitism targeted Jews because they were Jews and extermination was a
culmination of a process that began with ethnic cleansing. When Hamas attacked Jews
it was understandable because Israel’s soldiers came to their homes to kill them
in the name of ‘the Jews’. That is why Palestinians refer to Yahud (Jew)
because that is how their oppressor appears to them.
However
Hamas matured in the 30 years between the 1988 Charter and the 2017 document.
They learnt to distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Nor was this simply a
matter of rhetoric or verbal accommodation.
No less
than the Times of Israel quoted
a statement of senior Hamas official Basem Naim that the group was “sorry to hear about the terror attack” in
2018 on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh which claimed 11 lives. Naim explained
that
As Palestinians and
victims of the terror of Israeli occupation, we know the meaning of terror and
its horrific outcomes. This heinous attack, especially in a place of worship,
proves that terror has no religion or nationality.
Can one
imagine the Nazi party condemning an attack on Jews? The attack was perpetrated by Robert Bowers, a supporter of
Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of the Israeli state.
at the same
time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the
Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by
the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of
the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against
us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan
Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".
The Nazi state
had journals and papers devoted to propagating anti-Semitism. It established
and funded ‘scientific’ institutes whose task was to ‘prove’ that Jews were subhuman.
Pivotal to the attempts to set Nazi ideology on a scientific basis was the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. The
Institute was founded with money from America’s Rockerfeller Foundation whose
money kept it going during the Great Depression.
Eugen Fischer - from genocide in Africa to the Holocaust
Eugen Fischer, who first began with medical experiments on the Herero and Nama
people at Shark Island concentration camp in SW Africa (Namibia), the first
genocide of the 20th century, went on to train SS doctors such as
Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor.
Hamas has never sought to establish ‘academic’
institutions whose purpose was to theorise anti-Semitism. Hamas make a sharp
distinction between Jews and Zionists. Many of the released captives testified
to their humane treatment at the hands of Hamas. These are very strange Nazis!
Those who equate Hamas with the Nazis or suggest
that their goal is the elimination of Jews are projecting their own genocidal thoughts
onto their victims. In is one more case of serial Zionist dishonesty.
I quote in my article
Hannah Starman, who as a child was baffled at Israel’s portrayal of the people
they were bombing in Beirut as Nazis. Hannah was only 7 but as she said:
when I looked among the
images of people in Beirut to find the Nazis, all I could see were people who
looked poor, quiet or scared.
Nothing like the tall and
erect Nazis, shouting out orders in their uniforms and shiny boots. I was confused.
And this confusion bred a lifelong interest in what was really going on in
Israel. How could a people that had suffered so much cause so much suffering?
Why were they telling the world that they were fighting the Nazis? And why did
the world believe them?
What a child could see with her own eyes, Biden,
Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz and the other war criminals are unable to see. Not because
they are blind but because they have deliberately created a narrative that
portrays the victims of genocide as ‘Nazis’.
What western leaders are unwittingly doing is
normalising the Nazis which is one reason why so many neo-Nazis today, like the
White Zionist Richard Spencer and Dutch
political leader Geert
Wilders, adore the Israeli state.
It is also the reason why Germany’s leaders have
fallen over themselves in the rush to endorse Israel’s genocide. It is ironic
that the ‘Jewish state’ is helping to rehabilitate the Nazis but when one looks
at the history of the period, alone amongst the Jews the Zionists saw only good
coming out of the Nazi rise to power.
As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister remarked
‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.” ‘ [Tom Segev,
The Seventh Million, p. 18].
Having Refused to Take Part in the National Palestine Demonstrations Against Genocide
Graham Writes to the Palestinian Trade Unions after Israel Bombed Their
Offices Boasting About Her Support
For
once I was lost for words. Never was the saying that Hypocrisy is the Tribute
that Vice Pays to Virtue truer. It takes a special kind of gall to have done absolutely nothing in support of the Palestinians
as they are bombed and ethnically cleansed in Gaza, to have held hands with the
far-right Campaign
Against Antisemitismas she banned Jeremy
Corbyn – The Big Lie from Unite premises and then to write to the General
Secretary of the Palestinian General
Federation of Trade Unions boasting of Unite’s record.
On
March 7, as part of its ‘war against Hamas’ Israel bombed the
headquarters of the PGFTU in Gaza City. The Federation’s five-story
building had attached to it several other facilities providing services to the
Palestinians, including a kindergarten that served 380 children, as well as a
large automatic bakery.
The PGFTU Offices in Gaza After Israel Bombed Them
In a statement,
signed by Basheer Al-Sisi, a member of their General Secretariat, he spoke of
how the Federation has “lost thousands of
members, union offices, facilities, and other institutions” as a result of
the “wholesale slaughter and forced
dislocation—ethnic cleansing” committed against the Palestinian people in
the last six months.
We send our solidarity greetings to our friends, the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions at this terrible time.
— General Federation of Trade Unions (@GFTU1) March 12, 2024
Palestinian
workers from Gaza who were in Israel at the time of October 7 were rounded up,
imprisoned and tortured. A number of them died yet Graham kept her silence
throughout.
The PGFTU
is controlled by Fatah, not Hamas, but that did not stop Israel bombing its
offices. The ‘war against Hamas’ is a fiction meant only for stupid westerners
and the BBC/Sky.
It is of
course welcome that Graham has, at last, written expressing her solidarity with
the Palestinians in Gaza. But it is long overdue. It is also welcome that she
has, for the first time, condemned Israel’s
‘war crimes’ but we will never forget that this only came nearly 6 months after Israel’s
attack and with deaths and injuries over 100,000.
Graham
even boasted that Unite has donated £50,000 to Medicins Sans Frontiere, which isn’t even a Palestinian organisation
when Unite could have donated a much larger sum to Medical
Aid for Palestinians, which is permanently on the ground in Gaza, as a host
of Unite branches have done.
Demonstration Outside Unite Exec Meeting by Unite Members, March 11
£50,000
is chicken feed. It is reported
that Graham and Unite’s legal bill for defending itself in a labour court in
Dublin, against its former Regional Organiser Brendan Ogle is over £1m (1.35m
Euros) and that is before Graham starts defending herself against a libel
action by Ogle which no doubt Unite will pay for.
There
have been regular demonstrations in London against genocide in Gaza ever since
October 7. Not only has Sharon Graham refused to attend or speak but she has forbidden
Unite’s national banner being taken on the march.
Will
Sharon Graham be attending the Demonstration next Saturday 30 March. I won’t be
holding my breath. Graham even tried
to prevent Peter Kavanagh, Regional Organiser for the London & Eastern
Region speaking at the demonstration on January 13th and threatened him
with loss of a pension bonus if he did.
This is
in addition to suspending
Simon Dubbins, a Unite official who organised a meeting on Palestine at the Labour
Party Conference in defiance of her wishes.
Graham
also didn’t mention that Unite members had staged a demonstration/lobby
outside Unite headquarters on March 11th at the beginning of the
Executive Meeting in protest at Unite’s complete inactivity on Palestine.
Suffice
to say that Graham also failed to mention that she and her supporters had opposed
any discussion of Palestine at the meeting and in response to those who did
wish to discuss it told them that ‘Palestine
is not a service that Unite offers to its members.’
Perhaps
the height of Graham’s hypocrisy was her boast that ‘I am sure you are aware that Unite has a longstanding policy in
support for the Palestinian people.’ How would the PGFTU be aware when she
has refused to put the policy on Unite’s website. Is Shaher Saed, the General
Secretary of the PGFTU expected to be telepathic?
Tonight we
will be holding a meeting of Unite activists who do want Unite to start giving
real solidarity to the Palestinians – this includes
1.Unite being present
on all future national
demonstrations
2.Instructing dockers
and Unite workers to boycott all arm shipments to Israel and all trade with Israel
as and until its genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza stops.
3.To fund members
wanting to attend the demonstrations and to publicising the demonstrations on
the website and internally.
4.Unite policy on Palestine
to be displayed on Unite’s website
5.That Unite donate
£250,000 to Medical Aid for the Palestinians
6.That an Emergency
Executive Committee Meeting be called in order to discuss what Unite can now do
on Palestine.
7.That Unite let Keir
Starmer and the Labour Party know that until they reverse their position of
support for Israel’s genocide they won’t get another farthing from Unite.
Let us
hope that Sharon Graham’s letter to the PGFTU is a sign that she has at last
recognised that her previous stance of support for Israel’s genocide is
unacceptable and that the Union must revert to its traditional position of
support for the oppressed not the oppressor. I fear though that Graham’s letter
is about as far as she intends to go and that these are mere empty words.
Zionist Accusations that Palestinian Men are Sexual Predators
Mirrors Nazi Tropes about Jewish men – Western Feminists Are Complicit in how Racists
Weaponise Rape
Excerpt from an Interview on Ha’aretz podcast ‘The Week’9.11.23. - "Mass Hannibal" — We killed Israelis on 7 October, says Israeli air force colonel Nof Erez
Zionism,
when it arose was seen by most Jews as a form of Jewish
anti-Semitism. Zionist ideologues like Arthur Ruppin accepted the worst
stereotypes of the Nazis and
anti-Semites, such as Jews being sexual predators, adopting them as its own.
One
medieval myth about Jews was that they poisoned the wells of non-Jews.
Thousands of Jews died in the German Empire between 1348 and 1350 and across
Europe as a result.
Yet
it is an incontrovertible fact that Israeli settlers poison the water of the
Palestinians. David Hearst wrote
how
the settler
attacks come generally at night and where they cannot destroy water cisterns
they poison them by putting chicken carcasses in them.
In
1948 Zionist militias infected the waters of Acre and Gaza with dysentery
bacteria. According to Ofer Aderet this biological warfare was far
more widespread than first known.
Allegations
that Jews were disloyal to the countries they lived in and owed their
allegiance to a cabal of international Jewish ‘Elders’ was part and part of
anti-Semitic discourse.
Zionism
does its best to live up to this myth by actively encouraging dual
loyalty.One of their favourite accusations
against Jewish anti-Zionists is that they are ‘traitors’ – in other words they
have no loyalty to Israel as a ‘Jewish’ state.
When
Ilhan Omar accused US Zionists of allegiance to a foreign country, Israel, it
was as if the heavens had fallen in. Jonathan Chait wrote
that
Accusing
Jews of “allegiance to a foreign country” is a historically classic way of
delegitimizing their participation in the political system.
Even
though it was true it was a case of pure anti-Semitism! Michelle Goldberg in
the New York Times accused Omar of waging a series of
"microaggressions". As I wrote
at the time:
It is inherent
to Zionism that the first loyalty of any Jew is to Israel because their stay in
the diaspora is temporary. "The negation of the diaspora" is fundamental to
Zionist ideology. The accursed Galut (diaspora) needs to be wound up,
In 2013 Israel’s
Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Absorption sent a survey asking
American Jews "where their
allegiance would lie in the case of a crisis between the two countries."
Netanyahu realising the implications had the survey stopped in its tracks but
it would have been interesting to see the results.
Jonah Cohen writing in ‘The Lust
Libel’ argued
that
Antisemites have long depicted the Jews as a
perverse, predatory, and pornographic people; horny vampires of the
Orient. That ghoulish portrait — which, for short, can be called the ‘lust
libel’ — is one of the more enduring of the classical antisemitic stereotypes.
It is no
surprise that Zionist hasbara should adopt this anti-Semitic narrative and
project it onto the Palestinians. Rape has become the principal ingredient of
Zionist propaganda. October 7, instead of being a resistance operation, was organised
rape.
Israeli
women and many Western Feminists, such as those at Brighton Women’s Centre, are happy to go
along with this myth even though its sole purpose is to justify a genocide that
has killed over 14,000 children and over10,000 women in Gaza. White western
feminists are literally helping to kill Palestinian women and girls at the behest
of Jewish Supremacists, women included.
There are
good precedents for this in the history of colonialism. The ‘BlackPeril’
was the fear of White South African men that Black men had designs on ‘their’
women. In the Deep South the fear of Black sexual predators fuelled lynching. White
women went along with this, as is the case today with western feminists.
Foremost
on the minds of Southern Whites was a fear of inter- racial sex, miscegenation.
Whites espoused
the idea that black men were sexual predators and wanted integration in order
to be with white women. And Black women were secretly sluts.
— Reem Alsalem UNSR Violence Against Women and Girls (@UNSRVAW) March 24, 2024
This
helps explain Israeli soldiers fascination
with the underwear of the Palestinian women they have killed and often raped
(Israeli rape of Palestinians never seems to figure in the discourse of Israeli
women or Western feminism).
Only
today I received a report from a Palestinian woman of rapes near Al Shifa
hospital, which Israel has again invaded.
Zionism’s Rape Fraud and October
7
October
7 was a great shock to the Zionists. They repeated ad-nauseum that October 7 ‘was the worst atrocity committed against the
Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust.’ Biden was happy
to repeat
this.
Except
that it wasn’t the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust. That was
the murder
of at least 3,000 Jews, 12% of the total victims, by Israel’s friends, the
neo-Nazi Argentine Junta between 1976 and 1983.
When
Hamas and the militants broke out on October 7 they did not kill Israelis
because they were Jews but because they were occupiers. The Nazis and the
Argentine Junta killed Jews because they were Jews. That simple distinction
eludes Zionists.
Yasmin Porat Survivor Speaks:
Israeli forces shot their own civilians
October
7 was the nightmare that every settler colonial regime fears, that the natives
will rise up and take their revenge on their persecutors. It was the fear of
white slavers in the Caribbean, the Apartheid masters in South Africa and the
Zionists in Palestine.
Israel
used October 7 in order to construct a myth of a second holocaust. According to France
24 695 Israeli civilians, including 36 children, as well as 373 security
forces and 71 foreign workers died. A total of 1,139.
There
were undoubtedly atrocities committed, such as civilians or concert goers shot
at close range but that was not sufficient for the Zionists.At first their propaganda was crude but that
didn’t stop the western media from adopting it wholesale.
‘40 Beheaded babies’, ‘baked babies’ and even babies hung on
clothes lines were invented. The serious
press such as The Telegraph and Timesreported
these claims as fact.
Fact
Check on the Beheaded Babies
Today, I spoke again with Prime Minister Netanyahu regarding the latest developments in Israel and Gaza.
I continued to affirm that Israel has a right to go after Hamas, a group of terrorists responsible for the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
A
fact check on Al
Jazeera showed how the claims were false. This included Genocide Joe’s claim that
he had seen them with his own eyes. All this nonsense had to be walked
back as Israel admitted it had no proof of these allegations.
As
Israeli state propaganda and its advocates got their act together, the claims
of atrocities settled on the allegation of mass rape. The attractions of such
claims are many.
Unlike
the beheaded babies, allegations of rape are difficult to disprove and easy to
make. The irony is that senior officers, including the Military Chief Rabbi,
Eyal Karim, actually justified
raping Palestinian women.
According
to Karim ‘wounded terrorists should
be killed, gay people are sick and women are sentimental.’He elaborated
that at a time of war it was permitted to satisfy
the evil
inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will, out of
consideration for the difficulties faces by the soldiers and for overall
success could be considered as excusable in order to maintain morale among
soldiers and the army during fighting.”
Former
Col. Mordechai Kedar, who served in military intelligence for 25 years and a
lecturer at Bar Ilan University, declared
that.
'The only
thing that deters a suicide bomber is the knowledge that if he pulls the
trigger or blows himself up, his sister will be raped,'
Israel
has not alleged that some rapes were committed but that rape was a deliberate
strategy of Hamas on October 7, that it was organised and systematic. When a group of Zionist women picketed in
Brighton they chanted
‘resistance is not rape’ – which is
of course true but no one is suggesting otherwise.
It
is clear that the main aim of Hamas on October 7 was the capture of hostages in
order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners. Something which was entirely
justifiable.
No
one is suggesting that no one was raped on October 7. Rape and war go together
but what is clear is that if rape happened it was perpetrated by the those who
came in Hamas’s wake.
"Today he is a baby, tomorrow he is a fighter." - Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, head of the settlers' yeshiva school in occupied Jaffa, incited his students serving in the Israeli occupation forces to kill everyone in Gaza, including babies.
Of
the 1,139 Israelis including foreign workers who died
on October 7 approximately one-third were soldiers or police and up to half the
remainder were killed by Israel itself. Israel was determined that no hostages
would be taken who would then have to be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners. If
necessary they would kill them themselves. See Israel
killed Israelis, confirms new 7 October documentary
As
Al Jazeera’s investigation (below) revealed, many of the deaths of Israelis on
October 7 occurred because Israel had implemented from 12 pm that day the Hannibal
Directive that British papers, including the Guardian have been loathe to mention, despite the fact that it is
an accepted fact in Israel.
A
further investigation by Al Jazeera gives a time line of events on October 7
and provides further proof that many civilian casualties were caused by the
decision of Israel’s military that anything that moved between Gaza and Israel
that day was to be targeted, irrespective of whether their own hostages would
die.
Rape
has long been a favourite obsession of the far-right.From Nazi Germany to South Africa it has been
deployed against the indigenous population. In patriarchal societies rape is a
serious offence against a man’s property and if it is a Black man then it’s
race defilement too. False allegations of rape were made against Julian Assange
because the state knew that such allegations would deter otherwise progressive
people from supporting him. People like my own MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
Let
us see how the Israeli narrative of rape has been debunked.
Scandal grows around fraudulent
New York Times "mass rapes" investigation, with Ali Abunimah
The NYT’s Screams
without words
On
28 December 2023, 82 days after October 7, ‘Screams
without words’ appeared in the New York Times. It was the result of an
investigation carried out by Pulitzer prize winner, Jeffrey Gettleman, as well
as two freelance staff Adam Sella and Anat Schwart. Schwartzhad no previous journalistic experience and had
been an Intelligence officer for the Israeli army. She demonstrated where her
sympathies lay when she ‘liked’
a tweet calling for Gaza to be turned into a slaughter house.
Schwartz
also liked
posts about the long since discredited ’40 beheaded babies’ story and a post
calling for Hamas to be labelled as equal to ISIS. Esha Krishnaswarmy revealed that
Adam Sella was Schwartz’s nephew! The stench of nepotism and corruption was
overwhelming. Sella too is not a journalist.
On
December 4 Gettleman, Schwartz and Sella, had written another
article for the NYT What We Know
About Sexual Violence During the Oct. 7 Attacks in Israel which did not
name a single victim. On December 8 the NYT published a correction saying that
the Israeli police were relying on witness testimony not autopsies or forensic evidence.
This
is the problem with Israel’s rape propaganda. There is no forensic evidence of
rape because all those killed were quickly buried. The alleged crime scenes
were not quarantined either.
For a week I embedded myself with Jewish Israeli nationalists who believe it’s a worthy cause and religious duty to block desperately needed humanitarian aid at the Gaza border. They enjoyed pastries with the military while confessing to war crimes and cheering for genocide.… pic.twitter.com/YVaXYdVqgt
There
isn’t one single victim who has come forward. All we have is ‘witnesses’ from
Zaka who are proven
liars and the Israeli military whose lies set off the 40 beheaded babies
story.
Zaka
is an ultra orthodox organisation which was founded by a multiple
rapist, Meshi Zahav. He committed suicide in June 2022 but not before his
colleagues in Zaka had tried to cover them up. Yet despite being discredited in
Israel, the NYT and US media continues to quote them as an impartial
organisation.
The
NYT ran a puff
piece about Zaka on 15 January ‘They
Thought They Knew Death, but That Didn’t Prepare Them for Oct. 7’. As the
Intercept noted in an article
of 27 February
The Times
report on Zaka reads like a glowing portrait of selfless volunteers on a “holy
mission” to honor the dead and give families closure in accordance with Jewish
law. The article could also be read as a whitewash of an organization mired in
sexual abuse and financial scandals for decades. The Times never notes that
Landau appears to be a serial fabulist, and other Zaka volunteers tell stories
that stretch credulity.
‘fail(ed) to
scrutinize Zaka stories. Many volunteers describe extreme crimes that would
leave extensive evidence yet aren’t corroborated by reporting.’
Although the
NYT has refused to comment on the criticisms of its article the Interceptreported
that they had
pulled a
high-profile episode of its podcast “The Daily” about sexual violence
perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 amid a furious internal debate about the
strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject, Times newsroom
sources told The Intercept. The episode had been scheduled for January 9
Interesting interview with 10/7 survivor Raz Cohen, who gave the NYT the quote “screams without words,” for its headline: “‘Screams Without Words:’ How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence On Oct. 7.”
He just told Tapper the men he saw were not actually from Hamas, but rather Gazan… https://t.co/XTmn2X5mOp
The NYT is
also reported to have cut links with Schwartz. Even worse for the NYT a key
witness Raz Cohen contradicted
a claim in the article that Hamas had committed the rapes.
There
were stories such as naked women tied to trees at the Supernova Festival.
Zaka’s deputy commander, Greiniman, claimed foreign fighters had taken part in
the attack. Another Zaka spokesperson said he saw dozens of dead babies, and children
bound together and burned. Yet another volunteer claimed
they found a sexually mutilated woman’s corpse under rubble with her organs
removed.
Yet only
two babies died on October 7. Nor were any children found bound together or
burned.
Aaron
Mate revealed how former US diplomat, Stuart Seldowitz was on Zaka’s New York Advisory
Board.Seldowitz recently accepted
a plea deal for having racially abused a food vendor in New York with his
anti-Palestinian rants. His rants included saying that killing 4,000
Palestinian kids wasn’t enough.
But
whilst the western media are doing their best to support the fake allegations
of rape against Hamas they are ignoring what according to the UN is very
credible reports of rape, sexual abuse and torture against Israel in Gaza.
The
NYT article was important because it is considered a paper of record. It was
used by Zionists to ‘prove’ that October 7 had been a mass rape attack.
When
Professor Justin Stebbing of
Imperial College, London sent me an email on 21 January saying “thank you
for making me hate all jews, i agree with you they should all be gassed” he
followed it up with a caption of the NYT article.
On January 4, seven
days after the NYT article, Ha’aretz posted
an appeal by the police for victims or witnesses to contact them:
Israel's police investigators are having difficulties
finding living victims of or witnesses to sexual assault committed by Hamas on
October 7
Why would the Police
do this if the evidence is so overwhelming?
The Black Dress
BREAKING: GAL ABDUAH’S SISTER DENIES RAPE CLAIMS IN NYT ARTICLE AND SAYS NYT MANIPULATED THE FAMILY
They had no knowledge the article was going to be about rape and were under the impression it was going to be about Gal ABDUAH’S memory. pic.twitter.com/g6EGS7VXyt
The
main claims in NYT’s article revolve around Gail Abdush, the woman in the Black
Dress, who was allegedly raped at the music festival. Yet almost immediately
after the NYT article the Abdush family denied that she had been
raped and said they had been interviewed under false pretences.
Ynet asks the photographer of "the woman in the black dress" how @nytimes reached her. She explains the rationale of the Israeli journalists Adam Sella & Anat Schwartz:
The
person who took the video of Abdush’s body, Edan Wesley described how Sella and
Schwartz called her repeatedly and said how important the video was to Israeli
hasbara (propaganda).As Ali Abunimah pointedout, Schwartz and Sella
were telling so-called witnesses that their testimony was essential for the
purposes of Israeli State Propaganda. It is clear that Schwart and Sella’s mind
had long been made up.
The
NYT allegations over the woman in the black dress centred on a video by Eden
Wessely.Shiran Maluka, a friend of
Miral Alter, Gail Abdush’s sister, wrote:
Based on what
does Eden Wessely conclude that she was raped? Based on the video she took,
there is no evidence, it’s not true that half of her body was burned, only her
face, and there is nothing but a dress pulled up.
Wesley
herself is a dubious character of the Israeli far-right. In the early days of
the war, Wessely posted
fake news, debunked by the
Israeli media, about “Israeli
traitors who supported Hamas fighters during the attack on October 7th.”
Wessely also shared many posts by the fascist Im
Tirtzu, and posts by rapper, Hatzel,
a symbol of Israeli fascism. In another post, Wessely shared
a picture of Israeli human rights lawyer Lea Tsemel, calling her “the devil incarnate.”
In the end, it
appears that the New York Times manipulated a working-class Mizrahi
family in the service of Israeli hasbara in order to score a
journalistic achievement, which in reality is nothing more than a repetition of
fake news and government propaganda.
The
Intercept reported
that as well as the NYT, the
Washington Post, and Los
Angeles Times’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias
against Palestinians...
Major U.S.
newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used
emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; ...
Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias,
with the New York Times seeing protests at its headquarters in Manhattan for its
coverage of Gaza –– an accusation supported by our analysis.
The Intercept alleged that
The (Israeli)
Channel 12 podcast interview with Schwartz, which The Intercept translated from
Hebrew, opens a window into the reporting process on the controversial story
and suggests that The New York Times’s mission was to bolster a predetermined
narrative...
In the
podcast interview, Schwartz described
her efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers
etc. In fact she was unable to get a single confirmation.
“She was told there had been no
complaints made of sexual assaults,” the Times
spokesperson acknowledged. Yet the NYTheadline
was‘‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas
Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”
The first
eye witness evidence came from an Israeli Air Force paramedic who claimed that
two teenage girls at Kibbutz Nahal Oz had been raped and murdered in their
bedroom. Problem was that no girls at the Kibbutz fitted the description. He
later changed the site of the attacks to Kibbutz Be’eri, but there too no one
matched the description of the victims.
Schwartz then
contacted Kibbutz Be’eri but that drew a blank so she then contacted Zaka and Yossi Landau told her that
When we go
into a house, we use our imagination. The bodies were telling us what happened,
that’s what happened.
Landau
features in the Times report, though
no mention is made of his well-documented
track record of disseminating sensational stories of atrocities that were later
proven false.
After
Zaka, Schwartz’s next port of call was Shari Mendes, who serves in a rabbinical
unit of the Israel Defense Forces. The Intercept reported that Mendes
had also
spoken about other violence on October 7, telling the Daily Mail in October, “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the
mother was beheaded.” No pregnant woman died that day, according to the official Israeli list of those killed in the attacks, and
the independent research collective October 7 Fact Check said Mendes’s story was false.
Shari
Mendes was a serial liar yet to Schwartz she was a credible witness.
Schwartz quoted
on 14 November in her first story for the NYT, Israel’s police chief, Kobi
Shabtai that ‘This is the most extensive
investigation the State of Israel has ever known,” Yet when “Screams Without Words” appeared forensic
evidence of sexual violence was non-existent.
On the
Channel 12 podcast Schwartz said her next step was to go to a new holistic
therapy facility established to address the trauma of October 7 victims. It was
called Merhav Marpe, or Healing Space.
In
multiple visits to Merhav Marpe, Schwartz again said that she was told there
was no direct evidence of rapes or sexual violence. She expressed frustration
with the therapists and counsellors at the facility, saying they engaged in “a conspiracy of silence.” And so it went
on. The elusive evidence was simply not there so Schwartz began speculating
that it was because Israel was a conservativesociety or that survivor guilt played a part. At no time did she
question her own basic assumptions.
She
interviewed Raz Cohen, who claimed he had seen multiple rapes whilst denying
that the perpetrators at the Nova Festival were from Hamas.
The
independent site October
7 Fact Check, Mondoweiss, Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone have flagged numerous
inconsistencies and contradictions in Cohen’s account. He had initially said
“he chose not to look, but he could hear
them laughing constantly.”
Coupled
with Schwartz’s ‘investigation’ Israel was mounting an intensive public
campaign, accusing the international community and feminists of ignoring the
widespread, systemic sexual violence of Hamas’s October 7 attack.
The NYT Goes Into Witchhunt
Mode as Criticism Mounts
The NYT
management which has exposed many state secrets itself, notably the Pentagon Papers and
more recently the Wikileaks
revelations of Julian Assange didn’t take kindly to being the subject of
exposes, notably by The Intercept
which gave a blow-by-blow account of dissent within the NYT.
The NYT
took a leaf out of Richard Nixon’s
book and began a leak inquiry, more commonly known as a witch-hunt. Vanity
Fair revealed
how ‘at least two dozen staffers,
including Daily producers’ had been called into
meetings in an attempt to find out how internal details about the podcast’s
editorial process got out. The investigation was by Charlotte Behrendt,
the paper’s director of policy and internal investigations.
The article quoted
staffers as saying that this was the ‘first
such internal probe they can recall taking place.’ NYT’s management had
been rocked by revelations about the shelving of The Daily podcast. The Nation noted
sarcastically that
somewhere in
the fiery caverns of Hell, Richard Nixon is enjoying a brief respite from his
eternal torment as he learns how The New York Times is mimicking him
Where
once the NYT could be relied on to subject US Administrations to scrutiny,
today they act as little more than court stenographers to Biden and Israel’s
far-right government. Woodward
and Bernstein have been replaced by Blumenthall, Mate and Abunimah. Today
the mainstream press, led by the NYT, acts as a kind of fools’ chorus to the
senile Biden and Kissinger
protégé Blinken.
If the Times
wanted to serve its readers and the world, it would launch a transparent
investigation into this botched article, the biggest failure of journalism at
the newspaper since Judith Miller’s infamous and
discredited articles on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2002 and
2003. Just as Miller regurgitated war propaganda on behalf of the George W.
Bush administration, the Times is now serving as a mouthpiece for
Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
Heer
suggests that the main instigator of “Screams
Without Words” was the NYT’s Executive Editor Joe Kahn, a Zionist whose
father, Leo Kahn, was a longtime member of the board of CAMERA, a pro-Israel
media watchdog. But could Kahn have acted without the approval and perhaps
direction of the Sulzberger family, which owns the newspaper?
Heer
notes that Watergate proved that a scandal could topple a President and asks ‘what scandal is large enough to bring down
the executive editor—or perhaps even the owners—of The New York Times?’
Israel has Struggled to Control the Narrative in
Order to Justify Genocide in Gaza
At the
beginning of December I wrote
a blog on the Israeli hostages who had been released and how their testimonies
had conflicted with the Zionist demonisation of Hamas. Yocheved Lifshitz 85 spoke
of how well she had been treated.
Lifshitz
said the captives were treated well and received medical care, including
medication. The guards kept conditions clean, and hostages were given one meal
a day of cheese, cucumber and pita, she said, adding that her captors ate the
same.
A family
member of Ruth Munder, an elderly woman who was released, told the Jerusalem
Post that Munder did not experience any harm during her captivity. In
a section ‘How did Hamas Treat the Hostages’ the Jerusalem
Post reported that
Initially, there weren't
many people with them, but at some point, more individuals were added. They had
access to a radio and television, where they heard news from Israel. Ruth heard
on the radio that her son [Roi Munder] had been killed… The conditions were far
from ideal; 80-year-old men and women lied down on plastic benches similar to
those in a hospital, without mattresses.
"Fortunately, they did not endure any unpleasant
experiences during their captivity; they were treated in a humane manner," continued the family member.
"Contrary to our
fears, they did not encounter the horrifying stories we had imagined. They
described the initial moments of their kidnapping when the terrorists were
agitated and threatened to harm them, but once they were on motorcycles, they
did not harm them."
Lifshitz
told the press how she received daily visits from a doctor during her captivity.
Lifshitz’s daughter also said that her mother was cared for by a paramedic
during her captivity.
On
October 24, Lifshitz told the press that she was treated well
while in Hamas captivity after she was driven into the Gaza Strip. Her
statements caused an uproar in Israel, with some government and diplomatic
figures accusing the conference organizers of damaging the country's advocacy
efforts by portraying a positive image of Hamas.
Israeli authorities
were outraged at the fact that Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv had facilitated
Yocheved Lifshitz’s interview. Hospital employee Avi Shoshan was suspended and subsequently dismissed. Why
should Israel object to the hostages speaking freely unless they had something
to fabricate?
The organisers of the press conference had
allowed doubt to be cast upon government lies about Hamas and that was
unforgiveable. Ha’aretz reported how Lifshitz started the press conference
by recounting the details of the October 7 kidnapping: "Masses
mobbed our homes. They beat people, took some hostage." She
described it as "very painful.”
It was the statements that followed, however, that drew
controversy in Israel. She said that the kidnappers brought a doctor
that gave them medical treatment, that the hostages were treated well and the
kidnappers were friendly. "We lay on mattresses, they made sure
everything was sanitary," she said. "They made sure we
wouldn't get sick, and we had a doctor with us every two or three days.”
Ha’aretz reported the story as ‘The problem
is you, not Hamas' : Hostages' families lash out at Israeli government.’
"They were very friendly to us," Lifshitz said, "they treated us gently and
looked after us." Clearly this dedemonising of Hamas and the
portray of its members as human beings could not be allowed again.
Israel’s
Channel 12 reported
that Israel’s released hostages ‘are expected to receive close supervision,
and they will be instructed on what to tell the media and what not."
Blumenthall
on what hostages can say
The Israeli govt has imposed strict rules on freed Israelis, closely monitoring or muzzling them entirely
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