This line from Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer" keeps popping up in my head:
"Still a man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest"
The coverage by the media and statements by world leaders and pundits to the Gaza war is a Rorschach test. Most of them assume Israel's guilt, and trust Hamas' lies, ab initio - giving more weight to a terror group whose founding document instructs them to literally engage in genocide over the words of a mature democracy with multiple layers of checks and balances and a vigorous internal opposition that is free to object.
Yesterday's hospital incident was literally made up by Hamas. The hospital itself wasn't hit, they knew it was one of their own side's rockets immediately, and within minutes they made up the accusation against Israel and pulled out the "500 deaths" statistic out of thin air without pointing to a single shred of evidence. Scenes of horrors on the ground were all they needed, and they relied on the world's nascent antisemitism to fill in the rest of the picture, and reflexively blame Israel.
Now, Israel is partially at fault. It has not emphasized enough to the media the huge number of people - lawyers, senior military leaders, people who decide on the size of the munitions, the latitude given to pilots to abort a mission if they see unexpected civilians, and more - involved in every real airstrike.
But the information is out there, and the media shows little interest in mentioning it. At best, they play a game of "he says, she says" and give equal weight between the stories of the people who plan to massacre civilians and the ones who do everything humanly possible to avoid hurting them.
That is not objectivity. That is laziness and subconscious antisemitism.
Check out the New York Times current headline (after hours of only headlining Hamas claims) on the rocket incident:
This was written after the smoke has cleared. Israel provided large amounts of evidence as to what happened. Hamas has not provided a crumb, and in fact has proven it lies by claiming the hospital itself was struck when it wasn't and 500 casualties which it plucked out of thin air.
But the New York Times gives them exactly equal weight.
Being even-handed is not journalism. In this case, it is saying that Jews are just as reliable as proud rapists and mass murderers.
Even worse, MSNBC afternoon show host Ayman Mohyeldin tweeted uncritically the original claim by Hamas, and then cautioned his followers not to believe the IDF version of the story:
The IDF track record of telling the truth and of transparency is orders of magnitude better than that of the "Gaza Health Ministry" controlled by a group that eagerly films and brags about its atrocities. Pretending that the two sides are equally credible is not journalism - it is stupidity. Pretending that the Hamas side is credible and the Israeli side is suspect is nothing less than antisemitism.
Yet that stupidity and bigotry is the raw material cited as "proof" that is then spread by modern slander artists - politicians, NGOs, social media influencers - who have even less regard for the facts than the journalists.
That reflects their own bias. And that bias - the eagerness to blame Israel - is certainly based on Jew-hatred, which is obvious when you see them using words like "genocide" against the people were the first victims for whom the term was invented.
When finally confronted with incontrovertible facts, these same antisemites then zoom out and say "well, we need to look at the bigger picture" and find a way to blame Israel no matter what it, or what the real genocidal murderers, do or say.
The Al Ahli Hospital incident tells us a lot about how little the terrorists and their corrupt government care about the people of Gaza and about the truth. It is just one of many lies that the Hamas Health Ministry issue every day.
But the incident tells us far more about everyone who jumped on the bandwagon, enthusiastically using it to spread lies - and to ultimately incite hate against Jews. Lies like "Israel attacked the Al Ahli hospital" directly leads to antisemitic attacks worldwide.
And the media automatically assuming Israel's guilt based on statements from proven liars makes them complicit.
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