Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: media lies

Showing posts with label media lies. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Hospital head is a Hamas lieutenant colonel. His lies were widely quoted by the media for months.

Times of Israel reports:

The director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabaliya has revealed in a Shin Bet interrogation that his northern Gaza hospital was turned into a military facility under Hamas’s control and that at one point, it had housed a kidnapped soldier.

In footage published on Tuesday by the Shin Bet and Israel Defense Forces, hospital director Ahmed Kahlot could be seen telling an Israeli interrogator that Hamas had offices inside the hospital and used it as a base for operational activity.

According to Kahlot, who said he has been a lieutenant colonel in Hamas since 2010, some 16 members of the hospital’s staff — including doctors, nurses and paramedics — were Hamas operatives serving in the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the terror organization.

He added that several members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades were also employed in the hospital.

Here is his statement:

Kahlout was widely quoted by the media for two months. Now that we know he is Hamas, we can assume that a large percentage of his statements that helped shape world opinion were propaganda.

So what has the media quoted a Hamas official as if he was a dedicated medical professional?

AP quoted him November 7 defending how casualty numbers from Hamas' health ministry are trustworthy.

“Hamas is one of the factions. Some of us are aligned with Fatah, some are independent,” said Ahmed al-Kahlot, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. “More than anything, we are medical professionals.”

The Guardian, November 12:

The head of northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital has told Al Jazeera that the hospital has run out of fuel.
“Ahmed al-Kahlout, the head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the facility’s main generator has run out of fuel, forcing the hospital to shut its operation,” the news organisation reports.
More than 5,000 people are sheltering at the hospital in addition to patients, al-Kahlout said.

The Guardian, November 22, quoted him again:

The hospital had received more than 60 bodies with over 200 injured since last night, he added. “The medical teams are very tired. We don’t have a single drop of fuel. We work in the dark using handheld searchlights,” he said
In another message distributed by the health ministry, Kahlout said the hospital was using cooking oil rather than diesel to run the hospital’s generators, and an ambulance targeting the wounded had been struck near the hospital grounds.

CNN, December 11, quoted him as saying that the maternity ward was hit by tank shelling, killing two women and leaving two more so badly wounded their legs required amputation.

Pravda, December 12:

"Israeli drones target anyone entering or leaving the hospital. ...The IOF targeted the hospital's water system, and we had to rely on groundwater. No electricity, water, or food in the hospital. The IOF shelled the maternity ward. Three children in the hospital lost their lives in the last three days due to a shortage of oxygen. "

Every quote from every medical professional in Gaza since October 7 is as suspect as Al-Kahlout's. But there was no skepticism about his accusations - until now.

Now that he is telling everyone that Hamas controls the hospitals and ambulances, the Times of London has lots of reservations about his statements:

Israel has sought to justify arresting scores of medical staff in Gaza by posting a video that purports to show a hospital manager confessing to working for Hamas.
Ahmed Kahlot, head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, was detained last week along with 70 other medical staff.
The release of the video was condemned by pro-Palestinian groups, who said there was no justification for publishing interrogation evidence obtained under unclear conditions without the presence of a lawyer.
Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon who spent weeks earlier in the conflict working in both al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals, said the Israelis were taking these actions because their attempts to show al-Shifa had been used as a command centre had failed.
“The Israelis plan to have show trials to justify the attacks on hospitals, because the whole narrative on al-Shifa was so ludicrous,” he said.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Pure antisemitism in @BBCArabic: "Observant Jews consider spitting on Christians a holiday ritual"

Earlier this week, some religious Jews were captured on video spitting in front of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem.

A thoroughly stupid extremist named Elisha Yered posted on X that the custom of spitting next to a church or near priests is an “ancient and long-standing custom.”

His statements and the spitting incidents themselves were roundly condemned by Israeli officials and prominent rabbis.

Rabbi Shlomo Aviner wrote Tuesday: “There is no Jewish law that you have to spit at idol worship. There is no such rule in the Gemara, nor in Maimonides, nor in the Shulchan Aruch. ... It simply causes disputes and quarrels and we lose from it. We have to educate the children to behave respectfully.”

Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel David Lau said, "These immoral phenomena have certainly nothing to do with Jewish law."

After an earlier such incident in the summer, many prominent rabbis condemned the practice, including Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Amar issued a strong statement condemning the practice and said that those who spit at non-Jews are a chilul Hashem, desecrators of God's name, one of the most serious prohibitions in Jewish law:

But according to BBC Arabic, there are no rabbis who condemn spitting at or near Christians. On the contrary - religious Jews all agree that spitting on Christians is exactly how Jews are expected to celebrate Sukkot!

BBC Arabic released a video on their website and on X that both describes the spitting incidents and how Jews celebrate the Sukkot holiday, as if the two topics are related. Here's the headline translated into English:

One of the sections of the video says this (Arabic screenshot above; this is the screenshot translated into English:)

"Observant Jews consider spitting on Christians a holiday ritual."

Then they showed Yered's tweet.

Even the most disgusting apologists for the spitting don't say it is associated with celebrating Jewish holidays, let alone all religious Jews.

This is stright-up antisemitism and anti-Jewish incitement published by the BBC Arabic. And it isn't the first time....this week.

The BBC should not only remove the videos. They should not only publicly apologize - in English and Arabic - for posting these lies.

The BBC must immediately fire whomever wrote that hateful lie. That person has no journalistic integrity; on the contrary, the video producer is simply a hatemonger. If the BBC allows that person to remain in their job, any claims of impartiality that the BBC pretends to maintain are shown to be simple lies.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

A Palestinian kid killed in a traffic accident with another Arab driver? Nathan Thrall blames Israel!

Israeli medics at the scene of a fatal Palestinian car crash in 2017

From The New York Review of Books:

Heading Toward a Second Nakba
David Shulman
Nathan Thrall argues that the accident in which Abed Salama’s son died was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the Israeli occupation in its quotidian forms.

On a stormy winter day in February 2012, a Palestinian bus carrying schoolchildren on an outing collided with an Israeli trailer truck on the notoriously dangerous Jaba‘ Road near the West Bank village of A-Ram, not far from Ramallah. The bus burst into flames; six young children and one teacher were killed and others were seriously injured. Among the dead was Milad, the five-year-old son of Abed Salama, from the town of Anata. Nathan Thrall has made the story of that accident and that family the thread that binds together A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, a penetrating, wide-ranging, heart-wrenching exploration of life in Palestine under Israeli occupation. I know of no other writing on Israel and Palestine that reaches this depth of perception and understanding.

There is indeed something emblematic about the accident. The Jaba‘ Road is entirely within Area C, the 62 percent of the occupied West Bank that is under full Israeli control, where today there are close to two hundred settlements and settler outposts. Because of the nightmarish maze of roads in the Ramallah area—some of them closed altogether to Palestinians, others blocked by army checkpoints to keep Palestinians without special permits from entering Israel—rescuers were slow in reaching the site of the accident. They were also slow in evacuating the injured, many of them badly burned, to hospitals in Ramallah or inside Israel. Fire trucks, army medics, and ambulances were only a mile or two away in nearby Jewish settlements but failed to arrive quickly. Israeli ambulances coming from Jerusalem were held up for critical minutes at the checkpoints. Moreover, Palestinian neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Separation Barrier had (and some still have) almost no emergency or police services. As one of the Palestinian rescuers at the site of the accident later formulated what had happened: “If it had been two Palestinian children throwing stones on the road, the army would have been there in no time. When Jews are in danger, Israel sends helicopters. But a burning bus full of Palestinian children….”

...No one wanted to kill those children along with one of their teachers. Israeli rescuers and soldiers who finally reached the accident site did their best to save the injured. But the central point of Thrall’s narrative is that this disaster, like today’s ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories in general, was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the occupation system in its quotidian forms. It is a regime of state terror whose raison d’être is the theft of Palestinian land and, whenever possible, the expulsion of its Palestinian owners. I have seen this system in operation over the course of the past twenty-odd years.

I did not read the book, and probably won't. But this review already shows the incredible bias and the desire by Thrall to bend any evidence towards his foregone conclusion.

First of all, the driver of the Israeli truck was an Arab.

An average of two to three Palestinian Arabs are killed every week in road accidents. In 2022, there were 144 fatalities in over 16,000 accidents.

Palestinians acknowledge the epidemic of car accidents, and when they are not speaking to Westerners they blame themselves, not Israel, for these deaths. Ten reasons for Palestinian car crashes are listed in this article:

1- Narrow roads

2- Drivers who ignore traffic laws and basic safety, tailgating, passing vehicles on the opposite side of the road.

3- Not maintaining their cars.

4- Using a mobile phone while driving .

5- Low traffic awareness .

6- Young people and teenagers driving vehicles .

7- Drivers showing off.

8- Buildings being built right up to the roads.

9- Drug users who park their cars on the roads away from home.

10- Vehicles from Israel, often that would not pass Israeli inspections, being sold or stolen and used.

Even in Israel, the majority of car accidents involve young Arab drivers.

But what about the supposed delay of help for Milad and the other children? Wasn't that Israel's fault?

It doesn't seem to be true. News reports from the time say:

Following the accident, Palestinian health minister Fathi Abu Mughli accused Israeli rescue services of failing to provide timely assistance, resulting in more casualties. Ma’ariv reported that eyewitness report contradict Abu Mughli’s claim.

Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams transferred at least 30 casualties to hospitals in Ramallah, Petah Tikva and Jerusalem, Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. Israel Radio reported that it took rescue forces seven minutes to reach the scene of the accident.

Thrall believed the Palestinian health ministry, which has a track record of lying, over the Israeli authorities. Which tells you all you need to know about his interest in the facts.

In other accidents involving Arabs in Area C, Israeli and "settler" ambulances rush to the scene to help, indicating who is telling the truth..

Earlier this year a 12-year old Palestinian Arab boy in the West Bank was internally decapitated when he was hit by an Arab car, and doctors in Israel performed an extremely rare and delicate surgery to save his life.

A similar horrific accident as Milad's from 2017 where there was a 3-way collision between an armored Israeli bus, a Palestinian minibus and a Palestinian car saw a swarm of Magen David Adom ambulances and an IDF doctor on the scene within minutes trying to save lives.

In 2017, in another fatal West Bank car accident, a nine month old Arab baby survived while his father was killed and his mother unconscious. The baby refused to drink from a bottle so the Israeli Jewish nurse volunteered to breastfeed him. She put out a call on Facebook asking for other volunteers and Jewish women from as far away as Haifa wanted to help.

The "Jewish supremacy" and "racism" that Thrall takes as a given is an anti-Israel paranoid fantasy. Jews, even "settlers," help Palestinian Arabs in trouble, all the time.

In other words, the very basis of Nathan Thrall's book is built on lies. And that is how anti-Israel writers like Thrall and the reviewer work: not only will they only look at selected evidence that supports their thesis - they will twist counter-evidence to pretend it is evidence.

This supposed microcosm of Israeli evil is anything but. The only malicious actors in this little drama are Nathan Thrall and David Shulman.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Blood libel of the day: "Israel blocking dialysis supplies to Gaza"

From Xinhua:

At least 1,100 Palestinian kidney patients are facing an interruption of life-saving treatment due to a lack of medicines and medical equipment in the coastal enclave, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

They include 38 children who are in danger of being denied access to dialysis sessions, Ashraf Abu Mahdi, director of the pharmacy department in the Health Ministry, said in a press conference held in Gaza.

"Patients with kidney failure are forced to live in difficult health conditions as medical supplies will be used up soon," Abu Mahdi added.

Abu Mahdi indicated that stores run by the ministry in Gaza are short of related medical supplies, and the hospitals in Gaza provide 13,000 dialysis sessions for patients per month.

He accused Israel of "banning the transport and shipment of medical supplies to the hospitals of the coastal enclave, putting the lives of thousands of kidney patients at risk."

Israel has never blocked the supplies of medicines or consumable medical supplies to Gaza. Any previous shortages were blamed on the Palestinian Authority, not Israel.

And interestingly, when Gaza health authorities first raised this alarm on Saturday, they didn't blame Israel either:

The Director of the Hospital Pharmacy Department at the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, Alaa Helles, appealed to all concerned authorities “to assume their responsibilities to save the lives of kidney failure patients due to the acute shortage of the necessary medical supplies needed for dialysis sessions, which poses a threat to the lives of 1,100 kidney failure patients, including 38 children.”

Helles called on the relevant authorities to “take urgent action to provide medical consumables for the needs of kidney failure patients, which means continuing service to them and preserving their lives.”

Not a word about Israel, just "authorities." Which is not a word used to refer to Israel.

This is not adding up.

Perhaps a hint to what is really going on can be seen in this June article at ReliefWeb:

In response to the difficult health situation and a looming dialysis services halt in Gaza, Qatar Red Crescent Society (QRCS) has provided the hospitals of Palestine’s Ministry of Health (MOH) in Gaza with a total of 12 dialysis machines and accessories, as well as life-saving medicines and medical consumables for the patients with kidney failure.

Dr. Akram Nassar, head of QRCS’s office in Gaza, said the project of “providing dialysis departments with equipment and medicines in Gaza” was part of QRCS’s unwavering support to the health sector of Gaza. Its aim is to ensure continuing dialysis services, as well as mitigate the impact of depleted medical equipment and supplies for 1,022 patients with kidney failure.

Since 2018, QRCS has been working extensively on dialysis services in Gaza, with three projects to procure 33 dialysis machines, medications, and consumables to MOH hospitals, totaling approximately QR 4.2 million in value.

We learned this week that Qatar was reducing its aid to Gaza. Could it be that they also stopped paying for these dialysis supplies and Gaza has no one else to pay for them?

Given that it appears that Hamas is trying to pressure Israel to pressure Qatar in turn to resume payments, this sounds like it is another means by Hamas - which runs the Gaza health ministry - to make Israel look like the reason for the shortages - and, as we see, the world media won't fact-check any accusations against Israel.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Recent EoZ memes, posters, cartoons....

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

An analysis of a Palestinian lie

August 21 was the anniversary of the fire that gutted al Aqsa Mosque in 1969. It was set by a mentally ill Australian Christian.

Here is how an Arab publication wrote about the event yesterday:

On the morning of August 21, 1969, a huge fire broke out in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the fire quickly spread to the southern portico, the mihrab of Salah al-Din, and the dome pillars in the blessed mosque, in a Jewish attempt to turn the sacred Islamic heritage, even the most sacred, and rare in human civilization, into a pile of ashes. To build the alleged temple on its ruins.
Jerusalemites, Muslims and Christians, rushed to extinguish the fire, just as Palestinians from villages and cities in the West Bank rushed to participate in extinguishing it and saving Al-Aqsa Mosque from the imminent Jewish threat to destroy it.
The Israeli occupation army closed the gates of the Haram and Al-Aqsa Mosque, to prevent the Palestinians from entering to extinguish the fire, so that the Zionist flames, which hate to Arabism, Islam and all humanity, would devour it.
The Palestinians forced the Israeli army to open the doors after a violent clash that lasted 45 minutes, thinking that "Israel" would turn the Al-Aqsa Mosque into ashes during that period.
When the Palestinians started trying to pump water from the wells of the mosque, they found the water pumps unfit for work, so they took the water with small containers and climbed the roof of the mosque to extinguish the fire.
And when the fire trucks arrived from the municipalities of Ramallah, Al-Bireh, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, Bethlehem and Hebron to participate in extinguishing the fire, the occupation army and the Israeli police prevented them from entering the mosque yard under the pretext that the extinguishing operation is within the jurisdiction of the Zionist occupied Jerusalem municipality. The Palestinians succeeded in putting out the fire after the important part of the mosque was burned, including the mihrab of Salah al-Din, which he took from the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo to Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem.
And the Israeli government officially announced, as usual in lying and deceit, that the fire was due to a defect in the electrical wires inside Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Arab Jerusalem Electricity Company, at the request of the Islamic Commission, sent a committee of experts and engineers to investigate the causes of the fire, and they confirmed that it was not the result of an electrical fault, as officially announced by “Israel”, but rather an intentional fire.
They proved that the fire was meticulously planned, which embarrassed the Israeli government and prompted it to announce the arrest of the person who confessed to having set the arson attack, the Jew Michael Mohan, and brought him to trial and sentenced him to five years in prison, and later issued a decision to release him and deport him to Australia.

Here is how Time magazine described the events at the time:

SOON after early-morning prayers at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque one day last week, flames burst from the ceiling beneath its famed silver dome. For three hours, the fire raged, destroying part of the roof and an 800-year-old pulpit of exquisitely carved cedarwood and inlaid ivory, a gift from the Islamic hero Saladin (1137-1193). Before Israeli and Arab firemen could extinguish the flames or anyone could investigate the fire, the entire Middle East was echoing with outraged Moslem demands for jihad—holy war.

Automatic Assumption. In their fury, many Moslems automatically assumed that the Al Aqsa blaze had been started deliberately—and by an Israeli. Hundreds of Arabs rushed to the still-burning mosque, threatening firemen who were trying to control the blaze and shouting "Nasser! Nass-er!" When Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan arrived on the scene, he was jeered. An Arab mob coursed down the Via Dolorosa—the path Jesus took to the Crucifixion—shouting "Death to Israel!" Police blocked them at the fifth Station of the Cross.

The Israelis, who have ruled Arab Jerusalem since 1967, protested their innocence, but in vain. Premier Golda Meir convoked an emergency Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem to offer help in repairing the mosque (the offer was spurned) and to appoint an investigating commission that included two Arab dignitaries (local Moslems named their own board of inquiry). Sheik Hilmi Al-Muh-tasib, chairman of Jerusalem's Moslem Council, quickly summoned newsmen to pointedly announce that "a blond, freckled man dressed in khaki, who did not appear to be a Palestinian," had been seen fleeing from the mosque just before the fire. That was all the information that Arab propagandists needed. Cairo Radio called the fire a "premeditated crime." Al-Fatah, the Palestinian Arab commando organization, demanded shrilly in its broadcasts: "Moslems, what are you waiting for? The Zionists are burning down your sacred shrines. How can you face the Prophet Mohammed?" Jordan's King Hussein, whose grandfather King Abdullah was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab gunman in front of the Aqsa mosque in 1951, called for an Arab summit meeting.

At first the Israelis maintained that the fire was accidental. A welding torch was found beneath the roof, where work men had been repairing old timbers treated with inflammable linseed oil.

At week's end, however, Israeli police arrested and charged with arson neither a Moslem nor a Jew but a member of the third faith that holds Jerusalem holy: Michael Dennis William Rohan, 28, an Australian ranch hand who has been touring Israel for several months and who, according to the police, belongs to the Church of God, a Protestant evangelical sect. Some reports said that Rohan spoke of a dream in which God commanded him to clear a site in the compound on which to build a Jewish temple. Anxious to damp down the incendiary emotions aroused by the fire, the Israelis held a press conference on the Jewish sabbath—an unprecedented peacetime action—to announce the arrest. Police emphasized that Jerusalem Arabs provided the most important clues by giving them a description of the man and a vest that had been torn from him as he fled from the scene. Said an Israeli police official: "We have enough evidence for any court in this country to convict him."

The Time article is more accurate 54 years ago than the Arab media today. But there were plenty of other lies in current Arab accounts of the fire.

One can see Israeli rescue equipment at the scene. You can look at video of the firefighters and it seems clear that Israeli and Arab firefighters worked together to fight the flames.

Rohan was indeed mentally ill. His trial was covered extensively in Australian papers, where he said things like that he was going to become the king of Jerusalem and that God had "promised him maidens:"

But to spread the lie that Israel was responsible for the fire was not enough. The Muslim world pushed through a resolution blaming Israel for the fire, although not explicitly saying that Israel set it.

The US abstained. It was the first time the US didn't support a resolution against Israel on Jerusalem.

What we see in this episode, as in so many others, is that the Arab lies came first, and the desire to keep the lies going is far greater than any desire to tell the truth. If something terrible happens, the Jews must be behind it. Fatah and Arab leaders didn't waste a minute in blaming Jews for the fire, and they rushed to get the UN to back their lies.

While much has changed in parts of the Arab world since then, the Palestinians have kept the exact same playbook that they had then.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

75 years ago: Just like today: False accusations of Israeli massacres along with real Arab terrorism

From the Palestine Post, August 12, 1948:

There was a different version of the story reported by wire services:

Jews have burned 28 Arab villagers alive at Eltera, near Haifa, according to a telegram which is reported to have been sent to the UN Security Councll by the Secretary-General of the Arab League (Azzan Pasha).
The telegram declared that during the present cease-fire an eyewitness saw Jews saturate villagers' clothing with petrol and set them alight. The names of 14 of the victims are known.

And the lurid, lying accusations sometimes became headlines with no caveats (Caneberra [AU] Times)

Needless to say, this never happened and it is not even clear that the complaint was really sent to the UN Security Council. The accusation was enough to make it into the newspapers and make people think that Jews are monsters, which was the intent.

Just like today, baldfaced lies are an effective propaganda technique, because people simply do not want to believe that someone has the gall to make up such extravagant lies.

Meanwhile, there was real terrorism done by the Arab side, meant to cut off any supply of water to Jews in Jerusalem (August 13):

Arab accusations of Jewish terror were, then as now, projections of their own terror attempts and desires.

Interestingly, the Jews in Jerusalem had planned for such an event, and had built their own small but important emergency alternative water pipeline to Jerusalem