Thursday, August 11, 2022
From Ian:
Honest Reporting: The ‘Fix’ Is In: How Hitler-Praising Palestinians Are Warping Gaza Conflict Coverage
Honest Reporting: The ‘Fix’ Is In: How Hitler-Praising Palestinians Are Warping Gaza Conflict Coverage
New York Times’ Fady Hanona Urges Missile Attacks on IsraelBrendan O'Neill: Progressives for jihad
Out of the eight articles produced by The New York Times during the three-day PIJ-initiated conflict, six credit Fady Hanona as having contributed from Gaza City (see here, here, here, here, here, and here).
Hanona, a freelance producer and fixer who has also been hired by the BBC, The Guardian, and VICE News, appears to be working to further the anti-Israel narrative promoted by Palestinian terror organizations that seek the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
For one, he supports arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti, having backed him repeatedly on Facebook (here, here, and here). Prior to his incarceration, Barghouti co-founded and headed the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, an organization that murdered dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and shooting attacks during the Second Intifada (2000-2005).
Hanona moreover made light of the escape from prison of members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in September of last year (see here and here). Most of the escapees were serving life sentences for their roles in attacks on Israeli citizens. Ayham Kamamji, for example, was convicted of kidnapping and murdering teenager Eliyahu Asheri.
Indeed, Hanona makes no attempt to hide his desire that Israel be removed from the map, referring to the country’s sovereign territory as the “[19]48 lands,” while putting “Israel” in scare quotes.
During 2014’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza, the New York Times freelancer took to social media to threaten the murder of Ghassan Alian, an Israeli Druze who commanded the IDF’s Golani Brigade at the time.
Then, on August 18, 2014 — days before a ceasefire took effect between Israel and Hamas — Hanona urged the Palestinian “resistance” to reject a truce and continue its missile attacks on Tel Aviv, which had at that point already cost the lives of five civilians.
In another online post from the same month, he went as far as invoking Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to support his point about the strength of Gazan fighters. “As Hitler said, give me a Palestinian soldier and a German weapon, and I will make Europe crawl on its fingertips,” Hanona’s post read, citing an unconfirmed quote attributed to the man responsible for the murder of six million Jews.
Furthermore, the NYT fixer shared a now-deleted propaganda video of terrorist groups in Jenin on Facebook, telling his followers that Palestinians should return to “the culture of fighting and killing Israelis.”
“I don’t accept a Jew, Israeli or Zionist, or anyone else who speaks Hebrew. I’m with killing them wherever they are: children, elderly people, and soldiers,” Hanona asserted, adding: “The Jews are sons of the dogs… I am in favor of killing them and burning them like Hitler did. I will be so happy.” According to his Twitter feed, Israel’s security services subsequently flagged his name when he applied for a permit to travel to Jerusalem.
Remember when progressives were opposed to hardline religious movements that use violence to try to destroy democratic states? Islamic Jihad is a thoroughly regressive movement that says it will settle for nothing less than the obliteration of Israel. It wants to create an Islamic State of Palestine in which Sharia would rule and all who fall foul of it - uppity women, homosexuals, atheists - would suffer.A look back at the first disastrous ‘Two-State Solution
Islamic Jihad is not a national liberation movement. It is a violent and extremist religious organization generously funded by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. It rejects the political process and has executed numerous acts of indiscriminate slaughter in Israel in recent years, massacring hundreds of Israeli citizens in restaurants, at supermarkets, on buses.
Name me one nation on Earth that would turn a blind eye to such existential threats? If there was a well-armed group of religious fundamentalists a few miles from Britain that had sent suicide bombers to slaughter British men, women and children, we would act, no? And yet Israel is always condemned for acting.
Islamic Jihad is not good for the Palestinian people. Its activities in recent years have in part been designed to weaken the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Mahmoud Abbas-led government of the West Bank. It wants to dislodge the PA. That will help the Palestinian people, will it?
To fully understand its origins, we must go back to the early years of the 20th century.
In 1920, Great Britain was given the responsibility by the League of Nations to oversee the Palestine Mandate after the ending of the 400-year-old Ottoman Turkish Empire’s occupation of much of the Middle East. Britain was to uphold the League’s express intention of reconstituting within the Mandatory territory a reborn Jewish national home.
The League of Nations created several articles in line with the original intent of the Balfour Declaration of November 29, 1917. At the last minute, however, a new article was introduced by the British Colonial Office: Article 25.
It became apparent that its inclusion directly enabled Great Britain in 1921-22 to tear away all the vast Mandatory territory east of the river Jordan and give it away to the Arab Hashemite tribe: The territory to become Trans-Jordan, led by the emir Abdullah.
British officials claimed that the gift of Mandatory Palestine east of the Jordan River was in gratitude to the Hashemites for their contribution in helping defeat the Turks. However, T.S. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) described in derisory terms the Hashemite role as “a side show of a side show.”
Ironically, Britain was aided far more by the Nili underground movement in defeating the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had ruled geographical Palestine for 400 years.
This was the first partition of the non-state geographical territory known as Palestine and the first two-state solution. It created a new Arab entity some 100 years ago called Trans-Jordan, covering some 35,000 square miles, or nearly four fifths of the erstwhile Palestine Mandate. Immediately,
Jewish residence in this new Arab territory was forbidden in an act of Islamic apartheid (which no one protested on US college campuses...), and it is thus historically correct to state that Jordan is Palestine. Note too that Jordan’s population is comprised of well over 75% Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
In 1923, the British and French colonial powers also divided up the northern part of the Palestine Mandate. Britain stripped away the Golan Heights (with its ancient Biblical Jewish roots) and gave it to French-occupied Syria.
The Balfour Declaration issued by Lord Balfour, British foreign secretary, never envisaged that the Jordan River would be the eastern boundary of the reconstituted Jewish homeland.
As early as September 19, 1919, the London Times newspaper had thundered in an editorial: “The Jordan will not do as the eastern frontier of Palestine … Palestine must have a good military frontier east of the river Jordan … Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling state but one that is capable of vigorous and independent life.”
During its administration of the remaining Palestine Mandate’s tiny territory, between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, (a mere forty miles in width) Britain severely restricted Jewish immigration and purchases of land while turning a blind eye to massive illegal Arab immigration into the territory from neighboring stagnant Arab territories. This had been Britain’s policy since it was given the Mandate from 1921/22 up until 1947 and Israel’s subsequent independence in 1948.
Britain’s sorry record of appeasement of the Arabs, at the expense of Jewish destiny in the remaining tiny territory, culminated in the infamous 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration to a total of just 75,000 souls over the next five years. This draconian policy, coming as it did on the eve of the outbreak of World War 2 and the Holocaust, was a deathblow to millions of Jews attempting to flee extermination by Nazi Germany.
