NYPost Editorial: There is no Gaza famine, so why is the pro-Hamas media silent about this great news?
Of course, President Biden (and his minions) also echoed the lie as he sought to show he “cares” in order to appease the “When Jews defend themselves it’s genocide” crowd.Melanie Phillips: The ‘Gaza famine’ myth
Which raises the question of why the USAID-backed network cooked the books to suggest famine was coming.
And of why so many “news” organizations swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
It’s rank media bias: An “honest mistake” by reporters and editors eager to paint the Jewish state as monstrous, to buy propaganda slamming Israel’s allegedly cruel restriction of food-aid entry into Gaza.
Again, any such blockage of food aid was thanks to theft by Hamas.
The Biden team’s unseriosness and incompetence here is summed up by the emergency pier the prez demanded in his State of the Union speech, which took months to construct, almost instantly began to fall apart and is about to be decommissioned after managing to unload only a bare pittance of aid — all of it apparently seized by the terrorists.
So when the media’s terror-lovers next begin to scream about some supposed Israeli atrocity — don’t worry, it won’t be long — remember their utter silence about this tremendous piece of good news.
And understand that the shouters don’t love Palestinians, they simply hate Jews.
It’s worth remembering that USAID, the parent body of FEWS NET, is run by Samantha Power, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administration.Jonathan Tobin: The Gaza famine that wasn’t is being used against Israel
In 2002, Power suggested in a “thought experiment” that America might have to invade Israel to prevent an Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. She also suggested that the only people who might be alienated by this would be American Jews, who she said exercised tremendous political and financial power over America.
Other research has also exploded the “Gaza famine” claims. At Columbia University, two professors have said the evidence shows that sufficient amounts of food are being supplied to Gaza.
They told The Jerusalem Post that it was “a myth that Israel is responsible for famine in Gaza” and suggested that the International Criminal Court and U.N. had joined Hamas in blaming Israel for a “famine that never was, hoping to stop the war.”
Yet there are no signs that these rebuttals of the “Gaza famine” claim are having any effect on the Israel-bashing crowd. A few days ago, The New York Times was still referring to “starving civilians” and blaming deaths from malnutrition on “restrictions on aid and commercial goods entering Gaza.”
BBC News reported this week that “warnings of famine are looming once again in northern Gaza,” broadcasting distressing footage of infants said to be suffering from dehydration and malnutrition caused by restrictions on aid at the Rafah and Kerem Shalom border crossings.
Other than Fox News, it seems that no mainstream media outlet has reported the Famine Review Committee’s findings that the claim of famine in Gaza cannot be justified. Nor have the anti-Israel humanitarian organizations, although the World Health Organization’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has now subtly adjusted his rhetoric by talking about “famine-like conditions.”
Famine is not the only anti-Israel falsehood whose debunking has been ignored. The mainstream media and humanitarian crowd are still using the Hamas figure of 37,000-plus civilians killed in Gaza, despite the fact that the U.N. itself revised its own casualty totals sharply downwards after it emerged that some of the claimed deaths had been drawn from media sources and were fabricated.
Yet the egregious nature of the Oct. 7 assault and atrocities, as well as the clear justification for Israel’s counter-offensive to eliminate the genocidal terrorist movement that carried out those crimes, seems to have impelled those who hate Israel and Jews to new depths of mendacious reporting. The intersectional left-wingers who are convinced that Israel is a nation of “white” villains victimizing Palestinian “people of color” who are inaccurately analogized to American victims of racial discrimination have no compunction about spreading these smears. The worse the actual behavior of the Palestinians, who are bent on the destruction of Israel and its people, the more it becomes imperative to flip the narrative and accuse Israel of genocide.
Every death and all of the privations suffered by Palestinian Arabs since Oct. 7 is the responsibility of the Hamas terrorists who started this war and who take every opportunity to maximize the suffering of their own people to besmirch Israel’s image. That is not only the case for Gazans hurt or killed during the fighting but true for anyone prevented from receiving aid shipped into the Strip with Israel’s permission.
The mythical Gaza famine is just the latest instance of how the Palestinians are gaslighting the world as they deliberately spiral further into an abyss of unending conflict in which they themselves are the primary victims. Sober-minded Americans who by now ought to have learned better than to trust the corporate media on this and many other issues should not be influenced by this propaganda campaign, rooted in the age-old tropes of antisemitism in which the Jews are always accused of conspiring to harm others. Stripped of the emotionalism and partisan activism that colors so much of contemporary journalism, and especially the coverage of the Middle East, the claim that Israel is starving the Palestinians should be seen for what it is: a 21st-century blood libel.