10/01 Links Pt2: IDF: 170 Hamas, PIJ terrorists killed in Gaza were misrepresented as 'innocent journalists'; IDF rejects ‘NAZA’ claims of deliberate targeting of Gaza civilians

From Ian:

Andrew Fox: Why does the BBC refer to dead terrorists as ‘journalists’?

By its dodgy reporting, the BBC implicitly bolsters one of the most pernicious myths about Israel: that it deliberately kills journalists to silence their reporting. But the fact that a fighter has a camera does not erase his military role, and nor does a journalist’s death alongside a military target establish that his journalism made him a target. By presenting men engaged in war as independent witnesses, the BBC has helped turn their deaths into evidence for an accusation that those deaths cannot, by themselves, sustain. Hamas could hardly ask for a more useful service than what the BBC provides for it.

The overlap extends beyond proven combat roles. A December 2025 study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre identified terrorist affiliations in 157 of 266 reported journalist and media-worker deaths, roughly 59 per cent. Its definition included employment by factional media, so not all 157 were fighters, but this should have given editors ample reason to investigate whose version of the Gaza war they were publishing.

Hamas has a vested interest in demonising the Jewish State, yet the BBC consistently treats the word of this proscribed terrorist organisation as the truth. The BBC owes viewers an explanation of how it checked its contributors and what relevant affiliations it failed to disclose. Any competent editor should examine their source’s independence, particularly in a conflict as polarising as this one. Instead, the BBC has allowed Hamas propaganda to be smuggled into Western homes with the stamp of a trusted broadcaster.

Since 7 October 2023, the BBC has happily shown footage of a devastated Gaza Strip – but there has been comparatively less interest in explaining the broader security threat that Hamas poses to Israel, or any of the measures taken by the Jewish State to minimise civilian casualties.

The BBC’s record on the Gaza war makes a mockery of its claims to accuracy and impartiality. The BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, used a child narrator whose father was a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run administration. Ofcom found that omitting this fact materially misled audiences. The BBC later claimed that it wasn’t aware of the connection. But, as with the dead ‘journalists’, this isn’t good enough. The BBC broadcast an emotive and highly biased piece of propaganda without knowing the full picture.

Earlier failures were just as grotesque. After the October 2023 Al-Ahli hospital explosion, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, claimed an Israeli airstrike was responsible. In fact, it was a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The following month, the BBC was forced to apologise for falsely claiming that Israeli troops were ‘targeting’ medical teams at Al-Shifa Hospital.

The BBC’s repeated professions of editorial rigour are contemptible when set against that record. A broadcaster that lectures the public about misinformation has repeatedly failed the elementary checks its own authority depends on.

Senior editors must now account publicly for the sources they trusted and the reports that need correcting, across BBC Arabic and English-language output. Failures this serious should cost careers. Licence-fee payers deserve a broadcaster that is capable of questioning Hamas’s propaganda. The public should not have to investigate the BBC itself to discover what it left out.

More Than Half the Names on Committee to Protect Journalists List of Slain Gaza Journalists Are Still Linked to Terror Outfits Despite Group’s Self-Policing ‘Audit’

More than half the names on the embattled Committee to Protect Journalists' revised list of "journalists" slain in Gaza "have connections to terrorist groups," even after the New York-based advocacy organization conducted a months-long review meant to identify and remove confirmed combatants from its widely cited database, according to a leading media watchdog.

CPJ first announced in June that it was undertaking a wholesale review of its list of "Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza War" following a series of Washington Free Beacon reports questioning the integrity of its influential list and revealing that numerous confirmed terrorists were included in the death toll. CPJ has been in turmoil for months—driven by infighting and the public defenestration of a pharmaceutical heiress—over allegations of myopic anti-Israel bias that's clouded its historic mission of protecting journalists worldwide.

While CPJ initially said its internal review would be completed in July, the organization did not publicly disclose its findings until late last week. CPJ ultimately removed 19 terrorists and 3 other fake journalists from the list, but reinstated 4 others who had previously been nixed for engaging in terrorism against Israel. That leaves a total of 191 supposed Gazan journalists on the CPJ's rejiggered database—102 of whom still have demonstrable "connections to terrorist groups," according to an independent review of the CPJ audit performed by the Israeli media watchdog group HonestReporting.

"Although the CPJ review removed almost two dozen individuals who participated in combat during the war that began on October 7, 2023, 53 percent of those still listed have terrorist ties, with CPJ failing to remove identified terrorists and even reinstating some to the database," HonestReporting concluded in a comprehensive 138-page review. "CPJ continues to include members of the non-military wings of terrorist groups on its list, and has failed to issue an apology for spreading disinformation."

Thursday afternoon, the CPJ doubled down, making the claim on X that "Israel has been targeting and killing journalists in connection with their reporting for decades, and this deadly pattern must end," something the Israelis strongly dispute, presenting, case by case, documentary proof such as "martyr posters," photos, and Hamas payroll and membership records.

The CPJ was first thrust into the spotlight in May, when it served as a critical source for an outlandish column by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof alleging that Israeli soldiers raped two Palestinian "journalists" with a carrot and a dog.

Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups operating in Gaza have a well-documented practice of installing their operatives as journalists—often as cameramen in TV crews—so they can take advantage of longstanding conventions to avoid killing journalists during war. When Israel identifies and targets these militants, it faces international opprobrium, especially if CPJ claims there were indeed journalists.

HonestReporting further determined that CPJ's updated list fails to meet the organization's own "criteria for inclusion as a journalist, while broader methodological issues remain." CPJ's board voted 17-1 in July to affirm that "organizations affiliated with militant groups" meet the criteria of a legitimate journalistic outlet "provided they are not engaging in combat or inciting violence in a manner likely to have imminent effect." That contentious definition, opposed only by the Fox News board representative, essentially allowed CPJ to continue considering known terrorists for inclusion on its list.

10/01 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Those amazing and heroic Israelis; How Fiction Will Remember October 7 - with Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff; Does U.N. stand for "unknown"?

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Those amazing and heroic Israelis

The British government is blind to the risks posed by the Palestinian Arabs because, to the morally bankrupt left, the Palestinian cause is synonymous with morality.

The spittle-flecked fanaticism of Miliband’s speech to this week’s Labour Party conference took many people aback.

Having paid lip service to standing against antisemitism and for Israel’s right to defend itself, this scion of a Jewish family decimated by the Holocaust denounced Netanyahu’s responsibility for Palestinian “suffering” in Gaza and the West Bank as a “stain on the conscience of the world.”

Having falsely accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” by the “settler terrorists of the West Bank,” “war crimes in Gaza” and the “illegal occupation of Palestine,” Miliband declared: “To the millions in Britain and elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right.”

Precisely what does Miliband think those people were “right” about? Their claim that Israel is committing “genocide”? That Palestine must be Arab “from the river to the sea”? Their demand to “globalize the intifada”?

Miliband, who came across as an unhinged demagogue, is a stain on the memory of his slaughtered family.

The suicidal imbecility of Britain’s hostility to Israel was demonstrated by the incident at RAF Fairford, the base in southwest England from where U.S. bombers have taken off for Iran.

Last Sunday, five men were arrested on suspicion of being about to attack the base. Although much about this incident remains murky, Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham has now said there are “strong indications” that Iran was involved.

But as Netanyahu has revealed, it was Israel that gave the Brits the intelligence warning of such an Iranian attack—and pretty much the next day, he said, the United Kingdom announced sanctions against the Israeli “settlements.”

Where Britain leads, the rest of the West follows. There is acute concern that these sanctions are intended to broaden out into a global financial strangulation of Israel, especially if the Democrats win the post-Trump presidency.

There’s anxiety that American support for Israel is crumbling. Some reports suggest that, apart from CENTCOM, even the U.S. defense establishment has become hostile to the Jewish state.

This is fundamentally because the West is undergoing a rapidly progressive erosion of its core values, including the destruction of morality, truth and reason itself.

Even today, diminished as it is, the United Kingdom sets the Western cultural pace. That’s why the British government’s defamation and delegitimization of Israel are so important.

Britain is leading the West into the heart of darkness—the abandonment of civilization for the embrace of barbarism. And the people upon whose backs Miliband et al have accordingly stuck a bullseye are the Jews.

But another narrative is emerging to counter this obscenity. Flydubai is a United Arab Emirates airline. The terrorist co-pilot was Omani. Oman is an ally of Iran. The UAE has become a close ally of Israel fighting Iran. The Emirati crew helped Israelis on the plane to avert catastrophe. And the plane was allowed to land in Saudi Arabia.

A new order is being born in which Arabs and Jews are fighting together against the forces of barbarism in the Islamic world.

On their way home to Israel, survivors of the hijacking sang the words written by the 18th- century Chassidic rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all.”

Britain and much of Europe—and even America if it allows the Democratic Party to gain power—are now hurtling downward towards a catastrophic crash. But Israel will live because it has seized the cockpit controls.

JPost Editorial: The flydubai passengers have returned home safely, and that is all that matters for now

Serious questions will have to be answered about how the terrorist came to be piloting an Israel-bound aircraft and whether every security requirement governing flights to Israel was properly followed. Those questions are legitimate, and they should be investigated thoroughly.

But this incident is not an indictment of the UAE.

One terrorist does not represent a country. The UAE has maintained its relationship with Israel through years of regional upheaval, including war, and Wednesday’s attack should not be allowed to undermine a relationship that has become an important part of the region since the Abraham Accords.

Another country also deserves Israel’s gratitude: Saudi Arabia.

Israel and Saudi Arabia still do not have formal diplomatic relations. Yet when an aircraft carrying 166 Israelis needed somewhere to land after a terror attack in the cockpit, Saudi Arabia opened its doors.

The Saudis did more than provide a runway.

Passengers received food and medical care after landing in Tabuk; the wounded were treated, and frightened children and families were looked after. One Israeli passenger described the Saudi treatment as “very nice” and “very understanding.”

At a moment of extraordinary fear, Saudi authorities responded with humanity and professionalism. Israelis should recognize that and say thank you.

There will, of course, be time for questions, and there should be.

The investigation must determine exactly how this attack was possible, whether security procedures failed, whether warning signs were missed, and what changes are needed to ensure nothing like it happens again.

A political argument is already developing around the attack.

Netanyahu warned on Tuesday that Israel’s enemies could try to attack ahead of the election. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, who received a security briefing from Netanyahu that evening, said afterward that nothing resembling the flydubai incident had been presented to him and accused government figures of trying to use the attack for political purposes.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) responded that Netanyahu had been briefed about a significant increase in terrorist activity around the world.

Those competing accounts will need to be examined. Israelis deserve to know what intelligence existed, what the government knew, and whether the statements now being made accurately reflect the information available beforehand.

But that reckoning does not have to overshadow what happened on Wednesday.

For now, think of the passengers who ran toward danger. Think of the pilots who regained control of a plunging aircraft. Think of the dentist who treated a wounded pilot in midair. Think of the Saudis who received Israelis in Tabuk and cared for them.

And think of 174 families who could so easily have received a very different call.

A terrorist tried to hijack an aircraft carrying 166 Israelis.

He failed.

They are alive and safe.

For now, that is more than enough.

Khaled Abu Toameh: 'October 7 Will Return': Hamas, Like Iran, Will Not Voluntarily Give Up the Fight

The chants matter because they reveal what speeches about peace and reconstruction conceal.

These slogans raise a fundamental question for anyone discussing the future of the Gaza Strip: What exactly has changed?

The answer is particularly important because the international framework for the Gaza Strip explicitly calls for something very different.

US President Donald J. Trump's 20-point peace plan states that Gaza is to become a "deradicalized terror-free zone" that poses no threat to its neighbors. The plan calls for the decommissioning of weapons, demilitarization and the establishment of an International Stabilization Force. It also envisages a process intended to change Gazan mindsets and narratives by emphasizing tolerance and peaceful coexistence.

On paper, the objective is peaceful coexistence. Public gatherings are proclaiming that Gaza belongs to Hamas and rejecting international forces.

This is the main problem facing any attempt to transform the Gaza Strip.

Reconstruction can rebuild buildings. It cannot dismantle an ideology.

The answer will determine whether Gaza's reconstruction becomes part of a genuine transition toward stability, or whether reconstruction takes place alongside the reorganization of the same forces that brought the Hamas terrorists to power in the Gaza Strip and the region into war.

Has the ideological and military foundation for another October 7 massacre actually been removed?

On the eve of the October 7 anniversary, the world should pay close attention when people in the Gaza Strip say they want the October 7 massacre to happen again.

It is crucial to remember what senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said shortly after the October 7 massacre: "The Al-Aqsa Flood [what Hamas calls the October 7 massacre] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight."

TIL That Taking Unprecedented Measures To Protect Noncombatants Is The Same As Genocide (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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TIL That Taking Unprecedented Measures To Protect Noncombatants Is The Same As Genocide

By Jessica Montross, Student, International Law

New York, October 1 - Are you telling me... are you telling me that everything I'd always thought I'd known about the Laws of Armed Conflict, International Humanitarian Law, all of that, is incorrect, and that moving civilians out of harm's way, as required by those laws, in fact violates those laws in the most egregious possible way?

Well, you live and learn, I guess.

Okay, it is not quite that simple: for most militaries, in most armed conflict situations, my original understanding holds. Where it differs: when Israel is involved. Then, according to experts in International Law, we must invoke whatever principle makes Israel look the worst.

Thus, in the example we mentioned at the outset, whereas evacuation of noncombatants from a combat zone forms an unremarkable step we expect any military to take before initiating hostilities in that area, once we discover that the party conducting or encouraging those evacuations is the IDF, that evacuation, even its merest attempt, constitutes genocidal ethnic cleansing.

I have been taking notes. The notes are embarrassing, because they look like the syllabus.

Warning before an attack: normally a precaution. Article 57. Feasible advance warning. I highlighted it in green. Green meant “this is how you stay inside the law.” When the warning is an Israeli phone call, a leaflet, a roof-knock, the highlight changes color. The warning becomes proof that the civilian population was identified as a population and then operated upon. Identification, which I had understood as the beginning of distinction, is refiled as the beginning of intent, a key element of determining that genocide has occurred.

"Distinction" itself changes. Elsewhere, a combatant embedded in a school is a problem the defender created and the attacker must still try to solve. The involvement if Jews somehow converts every nearby civilian into evidence against the attacker. The attacker’s effort to separate them is not credited as separation. It is credited as "sorting."

But again, only if we're talking about Israel.

Proportionality works the same way. I was taught to weigh concrete and direct military advantage against expected incidental harm. Tedious work. Lawyers pretend it is math so they can sleep. When the actor is not Israel, a bad ratio is a tragedy, a scandal, maybe, in rare cases, a war crime. When the actor is Israel, the ratio is not weighed. The existence of the civilian is the whole case. The military object is treated as a story the perpetrator tells in order to stand near the civilian.

I used to think “as such” in the Genocide Convention did some work. National, ethnical, racial or religious group as such. The phrase was there to stop people from renaming every ugly war. I wrote a whole outline on specific intent. I can still recite it. Recitation is now a form of denial. Intent, in the special file, is inferred from the fact that Israel knew there were Palestinians in Gaza and fought a war there anyway. Knowledge of geography becomes mens rea. And Israel has maps! Maps are inculpatory.

Aid is also reversible. A state that facilitates food, medicine, vaccination, and fuel is, in ordinary doctrine, not inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction. When it comes to Israel, facilitation is calibration: you keep enough people alive to prove you had them in your power. Restriction is the same crime at a different setting. There is no compliant setting.

I asked a professor whether the rule was simply lex specialis Israel. She said of course not, and then walked me through a chain of inferences that only fires when the defendant is the Jewish state. Siege law for everyone else. Collective punishment if the name on the brief is Israel. Human shields as a legal problem if the defender is a state we recognize as a state; human shields as a moral reproach to the attacker if the defender is Hamas.

I wrote “see also: whatever principle” in the margin. It is not a term of art yet. It will be.

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09/30 Links Pt2: 85 years later: Babyn Yar and the fight against deliberate erasure; Jeremy Boreing: They're Trying To Eradicate the Jews; Melanie Phillips on how Britain sides with Islamist evil

From Ian:

85 years later: Babyn Yar and the fight against deliberate erasure

In 1961, Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote about the absence of a monument at Babyn Yar. His poem became a protest against the silencing of memory and against antisemitism.

In 1991, a menorah-shaped memorial to the Jewish victims was erected at the site, but the road to establishing a comprehensive memorial center was long. Memorials now stand there, yet the war has halted the momentum of construction and development.

Research continues, even under fire.

In September 2025, the center reported that 1,031 previously unidentified victims’ names had been added to its database since the outbreak of the war. Birth certificates, adoption applications, and court testimony are restoring identities once thought lost.

In the face of erasure, each name restores a person to memory.

A line connects Soviet erasure to Russian propaganda today. Once again, history is subordinated to the needs of the state.

The Kremlin justifies its invasion of Ukraine with the false claim that the country must be “denazified,” exploiting the memory of the victory over Nazism.

A study by Ruslan Kavatsiuk, Oleksiy Makukhin, and Violetta Seleznova, published this month in Eastern European Holocaust Studies, analyzes 4,263 Russian television broadcasts from 2012 to 2024.

The researchers show how “Nazism” became a label used to delegitimize Ukraine and justify military action against it. This, too, is a form of erasure: blurring the historical meaning of Nazism, pushing its victims to the margins, and replacing their story with a narrative that serves the state.

Then, the victims’ Jewish identity was suppressed; today, the memory of their murderers is exploited to justify aggression.

Through my work in Holocaust education and remembrance with March of the Living, I have learned the power of encountering the places themselves. Visiting a town, a synagogue, or a killing site connects historical knowledge to human lives.

To understand what was lost, we must know what existed: families, culture, spiritual life, and daily routines. This is how we counter erasure beyond commemorative ceremonies: by learning about communities, reading testimonies, and remembering names.

Babyn Yar should be a gateway to understanding Eastern European Jewry and its world, while also bearing witness to its destruction.

Ukraine’s efforts to confront this chapter of its past deserve recognition, as does its perseverance in the work of remembrance after more than four years of a devastating war.

On the 85th anniversary of the massacre, our responsibility is to protect memory against erasure, distortion, and manipulation.

That means returning to the facts, supporting research, opening archives, and making their findings accessible; teaching the Holocaust by bullets and learning about the communities that lived before they were murdered.

Behind the name Babyn Yar are tens of thousands of human beings, and beyond it are millions whose stories were buried in the soil of Eastern Europe.

Our duty is to remember their names, their lives, and their Jewish identity, and to ensure that no regime succeeds in bending their story to its own purposes.

The Palestinian Inquisition

Hasan Piker interviews politicians and other public figures and helps establish which answers are acceptable. Having likened liberal Zionists to 'liberal Nazis', he plays at being the grand inquisitor, the arbiter of correct beliefs. If any attachment to Israel puts you in the heretical category, what room is left for disagreement?

You don’t even have to be Jewish to find yourself before this tribunal. Ask Ed Sheeran. His crisis began when Macklemore was removed from Sheeran’s tour following pressure from venue owners over the rapper’s anti-Israel statements and history of anti-Semitic imagery.

Soon Sheeran’s own beliefs were on trial. A picture of him meeting a former Israeli hostage was enough to ‘prove’ he was irredeemable. And when he condemned the October 7 terrorist attacks while also calling the situation in Gaza catastrophic, this too was evidence against him. For some critics, acknowledging suffering on both sides was offensive. British MP Zarah Sultana accused him of ‘both-sidesing genocide’. Apparently, the problem with his compassion was extending it to all humans.

Saturday Night Live UK then turned his reluctance to take sides into a recurring joke. In one sketch, a fictional Sheeran remained unwilling to choose even during a conflict between humans and robots. The joke depended on the audience accepting that his neutrality was cowardice. When comedy writers can’t conceive of there legitimately being two sides to a two-sided conflict, that’s troublesome.

Sometimes you don’t even have to give any answer to become a victim of the inquisition. You just have to sit next to someone who gave the ‘wrong’ one. Pop singer Pink faced an immense backlash after criticising Macklemore’s concert remarks. Then Elizabeth Banks and Amy Adams were photographed sitting with her at the US Open. People began questioning them, too. In a Reddit discussion of the photographs, commenters condemned their friendliness toward Pink and flooded their Instagram accounts with hateful comments. Watching tennis with someone deemed ‘impure’ was enough to start the examination. The warning extends beyond what you’re allowed to say to who you’re allowed to be seen with.

You don’t even have to help anyone to pass the test. A person can donate to Palestinians privately and still fail if they don’t use the required language. Another person can make the proper declaration and be celebrated without being asked to do anything more. The words become the whole point.

The celebrity inquisition doesn’t need everyone to believe what they say. It only needs everyone to know what happens if they don’t say the right words.

‘Put me down for not getting burnt at the stake.’

Adam Brody blasted as ‘ignorant Jew’ over Palestine stance by former ‘Nobody Wants This’ Rabbi consultant

Adam Brody has been lambasted by former “Nobody Wants This” technical consultant, Rabbi Steve Leder, who called the actor an “ignorant Jew” over his comments on Palestine.

“Hi Adam, you might not remember me. My name is Rabbi Steve Leder, and I was the technical advisor for Season 1 of ‘Nobody Wants This,’” he began in a social media video, responding to Brody’s recently published comments to GQ — in which he referred to Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide.

“My job was to make sure that your character was authentic and that everything in Season 1 about Judaism was authentic,” he went on.

“Your pronouncement the other day about a genocide in Gaza was truly shocking, not only because of your misuse and mischaracterization of the word ‘genocide.’ There is no genocide in Gaza. There are genocides in other countries happening, but you failed to mention any of them.”

“You, by your own admission, are a relatively ignorant Jew, and your ignorance really showed the other day,” Leder said.

“If you’re gonna use a word like ‘genocide,’ you oughta know what it means, he continued, calling the way Brody referred to the term as “so flippant” and “disgusting,” while likening it to “asking for a table for two at Craig’s.”

“Here’s some more technical advice: If you know nothing about something, you should say nothing about it.”

Brody previously told GQ when asked about his stance on the Isreal-Gaza conflict, “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine.”

He added that he’s “hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”

In Netflix’s hit series, Brody plays Rabbi Noah Roklov, who begins an unlikely romance with a non-Jewish podcaster Joanne Williams, who is played by Kristen Bell.