October 7th 2023: Debunking Israel’s racist propaganda and its Western media collaborators
As Israel extends its war against Palestine to attacks on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, we are seeing a repeat of the same Israeli lies and propaganda which was centred in our mainstream media from October 7th last year.
October 7th
At 6.30am on October 7th 2023, Palestinian resistance groups launched a widespread, co-ordinated and devastating attack on Israeli military positions outside the Gaza fence. After 76 years of Israeli brutality and 17 years living under an Israeli imposed air, sea and land blockade, Palestinians in Gaza made a “prison break” involving around 1200 Palestinian resistance fighters.
By 8:30 am, the resistance fighters had stormed six Israeli military bases: Erez at the northern end of the Gaza Strip, Nahal Oz opposite Gaza City, two others near the Beeri kibbutz, one in Reim near central Gaza and two in the south close to the Egyptian border.
Dozens of Israeli soldiers were killed and many more taken back to Gaza as prisoners of war. It was an astonishing feat of military ingenuity, daring and courage in the face of Israel’s newly elected far right government with its top priority to expand illegal Israeli settlements on Occupied Palestinian land, encouragement of settler violence against Palestinians and provocative Israeli ministerial incursions into Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa compound.
From a guerilla war point of view, in a David Vs Goliath context, the attack was a stunning success. Armed only with light weapons the resistance fighters dealt a savage military blow to an enemy armed to the teeth with the latest US-supplied high-tech weapons, planes and armaments.
After some reasonable initial reporting, which included interviews with Hamas leaders, within 24 hours a massive wave of Israeli propaganda overwhelmed the western world’s mainstream media. This propaganda was not aimed to downplay the striking success of the Palestinian resistance, which was undeniable, but to deploy a surge of misinformation and disinformation to turn Israelis into the victims and Palestinian resistance fighters into bloodthirsty inhuman monsters whose only aim was to slaughter Israeli civilians, behead Israeli babies, rape Israeli women and children, pillage and destroy Israeli homes and communities.
If the Palestinian resistance attacks on Israel were a decisive military success, the wave of Israeli propaganda in the western media was also an overwhelming success. Conditioned for decades to promote Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications, the Western media became a one-way pipeline for the most vile, racist, dehumanising propaganda against Palestinians ever to be poured into our mainstream television, newspapers and radio outlets.
International law
Israel claims the “right to defend itself” against attacks from the Palestinian resistance and a chorus of Western leaders, including New Zealand, dutifully support the apartheid state when it says this. The “right to defend” means the right to wage war. However United Nations Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinians territories, Francesca Albanese, says this does not apply to Israel because it is attacking a people it occupies.
Palestinians on the other hand have the right to armed struggle under international law.
War crimes
War crimes were committed on October 7th. The killing of civilians and taking civilians hostages are war crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention and must always be condemned.
All war crimes should be investigated and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court but, unlike the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ICC has been slow to hold Israel to account for its genocidal words and actions against Palestinians that followed October 7th. In Israel’s case, so far the ICC’s chief prosecutor has only sought arrest warrants for trial on war crimes against the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant.
Canadian journalist and activist Naomi Klein summed it up well shortly after October 7th when she said “Side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child.”
The heart of the fighting
No-one wants to see innocent civilians losing their lives or having their safety and freedom of movement ripped away – Israeli or Palestinian – but the fault lies at the root cause: the oppressor-oppressed paradigm laid down by Israel’s ethnic cleaning of vast swathes of Palestine in 1947 – 1949. 1.9m of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are registered with UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) as refugees from 1948. Gaza was their brief sanctuary but not their home. For example Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s family were driven from Ashkelon in what is now Israel in 1948. He can see that town from Gaza but was never allowed to go there.
The Great March of Return in 2018-19 was an attempt to show to the world that Palestinians in Gaza have a right to return to their homes (which they do under international law) and a protest against the US moving its embassy to Jerusalem. Israeli snipers responded by shooting dead 183 unarmed Palestinians on the Gaza side of the border fence.
Despite a year passing since the October 7th attack we don’t know all the details but through Israeli media reporting and independent journalism it has become increasingly clear that:
- Most of the victims were either Israeli soldiers and police or army reservists. One analysis concluded “A total of 1,269 individuals were affected, predominantly military males aged 18-25”
- Many Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli military commanders adopting the “Hannibal directive” whereby it is better to kill or risk killing Israeli war captives than having them taken hostage or prisoner. Orders to attack any vehicle heading to Gaza meant hundreds of cars were attacked, killing hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis alike
- After the resistance fighters broke out from Gaza there was a “second wave” of people who came through the fence and it appears this group were responsible for most of the war crimes committed on that day rather than fighters from the highly-disciplined resistance groups
- There was no widespread sexual assault committed by the Palestinian resistance fighters against Israeli women and children as claimed by Israel
- There were no beheaded Israeli babies, no foetuses ripped from slaughtered mothers, no children raped – all claims made by the Israeli propaganda machine
- Israel has taken more than 9,000 counter hostages (held without charge or trial) from Gaza and the Occupied West Bank since October 7th
- 6,400 Palestinians in Gaza are missing since October 7th
Basic statistics to 17 September 2024
Demonising Hamas
The wave of Israeli propaganda has focused on demonising Hamas – so much so that New Zealand political leaders rushed to declare the Hamas political wing a terrorist organisation. It’s important for Israel to demonise Hamas because it helps them justify their wholesale slaughter of Palestinians and destruction of schools, hospitals and the entire civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
What has the propaganda said?
- Hamas hates Jews and wants to kill every Jew in the world
- Hamas beheaded babies, burned babies alive in ovens etc
- Hamas used systematic widespread rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women and children.
- Hamas uses civilians as human shields
- Hamas educates Palestinian children to hate Israelis
- Hamas has hijacked humanitarian supplies which is the main reason Palestinians in Gaza are starving
Looking at these one by one.
Hamas hates Jews and wants to kill every Jew in the world
In the latest Hamas charter from 2017, the organisation says
“Hamas reiterates that its conflict is with the Zionist project and not with the Jews based on their religion.”
“Hamas is not fighting against the Jews because they are Jews, but against the Zionists who are occupying Palestine.”
“Hamas rejects the persecution of people or the undermining of their rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian ground.”
In fact, their new charter goes further and Hamas accepts the state of Israel based on 1967 borders – precisely the same policy as the New Zealand government along with the US, the UK and most of the world!
Hamas beheaded babies, burned babies alive in ovens etc
None of this has a shred of truth despite these anti-Palestinian lies gaining huge traction with even the US President Joe Biden claiming to have seen photos to prove these lies.
See the links here, here, here and here
Hamas used systematic widespread rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women and children.
Israeli claims of systemic sexual violence perpetrated by Palestinian resistance groups on October 7th is part of its propaganda narrative to justify the horrendous violence they have unleashed against Palestinians in Gaza – the majority of those killed being women and children.
Ran Yakkoby, Israeli Ambassador to New Zealand, pushes this racist lie saying on a recent TV interview ‘Are we supposed to enter homes and gang rape the same number of women…and children who were raped?’ and ‘Did children in Israel vote to be raped by Hamas?’
These claims of systematic sexual abuse by the Palestinian resistance were picked up readily and amplified by western media but have since been thoroughly discredited.
The highest profile media report was an extensive investigation reported in the New York Times on December 28, 2023 titled “’Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The investigation delved into the alleged rape and sexual violence by members of the Palestinian resistance against women during the October 7 attack. That piece has now been widely discredited. The New York Times itself has backtracked on some of the allegations and now says “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” Further investigation has found allegations of systemic sexual assault by the Palestinian resistance to be untrue and award-winning journalist Jonathan Cook gives a detailed analysis here debunking the allegations.
A UN report suggested similarly that there may have been widespread sexual assaults although even this report raises serious misgivings. The leader of the investigation was Pramila Patten who confirmed in the report and the press conference releasing the report that:
- They did not meet or interview a single victim of sexual assault from October 7th.
- At least two of the allegations of sexual violence previously reported were determined by
the mission team to be unfounded
- No tangible indications of rape could be identified anywhere
- She had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence
- No digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence was found in open sources or anywhere! (The open sources included 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras on October 7th. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence)
- She had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.
- She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she accepted it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on October 7th was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.
- Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.
- She noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”
AP News has given coverage to at least two accounts of claims that were inaccurate about Hamas’s actions on October 7th: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-sexual-violence-zaka-ca7905bf9520b1e646f86d72cdf03244
The New Yorker published a extensive piece clarifying that claims of rape on October 7 were not a tool of warfare used by Hamas but were at the centre of Israeli propaganda: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/what-we-know-about-the-weaponization-of-sexual-violence-on-october-7th
This is not to say individual sexual assaults, which are common in war, did not occur but that allegations of widespread, systematic sexual assault were false.
The rape of Palestinians
Unlike the misinformation and disinformation from Israeli sources, there is a wide body of evidence showing clear patterns of sexual assaults on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers and only a sliver of this material reaches western eyes and ears via mainstream media.
In part because Israel has not been held to account by Western media such as TVNZ, we have reached a point where Israeli officials and the general public of Israel defend the rape and torture Israeli soldiers conduct https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/
Israeli state-sanctioned rape of Palestinian women
However, unlike the lack of evidence that Hamas ordered rape as a weapon of war, we do have evidence, from the Israeli media, of state-sanctioned rape of Palestinian women from Israel’s Chief military rabbi, Eyal Krim, who supports Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women to “boost morale”.
“The rabbi gave a more shocking answer on the same site when asked if soldiers were permitted to rape women during war. Karim replied that, as part of maintaining fitness for the army and the soldiers’ morale during fighting, it is permitted to “breach” the walls of modesty and “satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will, out of consideration for the difficulties faced by the soldiers and for overall success.”
Needless to say this has never seen the light of day in mainstream media here.
Human Shields
While the Israeli army has always stated that human shields are “a key pillar of Hamas’s terror operations”, it has not provided credible proof for its allegations which are denied by Hamas.
Israel repeatedly pushes this lie as a way of justifying the horrific civilian death toll from its indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas such as schools, hospitals etc
The United Nations Secretary General mentioned human shields in the war on Gaza. To put this into context, the statement by the UN Secretary General said the following:
- All parties respecting all their obligations under international humanitarian law. Now.
- This means the unconditional release of the hostages in Gaza. Now.
- The protection of civilians, hospitals, UN facilities, shelters and schools. Now.
- More food, more water, more medicine and of course fuel – entering Gaza safely, swiftly and at the scale needed. Now.
- Unfettered access to deliver supplies to all people in need in Gaza. Now.
- And the end of the use of civilians as human shields. Now.
- None of these appeals should be conditional on the others.
- And for all of this, we need more funding – now.
The UN Secretary General didn’t identify which groups were allegedly using human shields but a 2005 Israeli Supreme Court ruled Israel must stop using Palestinians as human shields.
Meanwhile Israel has regularly used children as human shields in its genocide on Gaza.
Educating children to hate Israelis
Israel has always made this claim because it wants to undermine the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) which provides humanitarian aid, health and education services for Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank etc
It’s important to firstly look at the context. We are speaking about a group of people who have been occupied and displaced for over 76 years. These people have experienced daily racism through a State that now has had multiple UN reports calling them out on their occupation, colonialism, apartheid, white supremacy, violence, and failure to adhere to international law. Israel as a racist apartheid state has been called out by Al Haq, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and every credible human rights group internationally.
These children, who can’t even access education anymore, don’t need to be taught hatred by anyone other than through the actions of the State of Israel.
What about how Israeli children are taught?
“Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians. But, she says, they are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism. They are called Arabs. “The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop,” she says. “The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/07/israeli-school-racism-claim and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbooks_in_Israel
Or check out the language used by Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Other Israeli political, military and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as “a cancer”, “vermin”, and called for them to be “annihilated”.
Attacks on Aid convoys
Here is a UN envoy report on the lack of evidence Israel has provided to back up its claims:
What we are seeing in fact is mounting evidence in the form of footage from on the ground of Israelis attacking aid convoys:
Media bias
A last word on our mainstream media bias. In terms of international news agencies, New Zealand media relies almost exclusively on Western news sources such as the BBC, AP and Reuters none of which has journalists on site in Gaza unlike Al Jazeera and the various Palestinians news services which operate there despite 116 Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza since October 7th according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel has closed the East Jerusalem Office and the Occupied West Bank offices of Al Jazeera and banned foreign journalist from entering Gaza. In the print media our newspapers take stories almost exclusively from The Times, Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, the Washingtion Post and the New York Times.
Using Western, Eurocentric news sources means we get Israeli perspectives, explanations, justifications and reasoning at the centre of news reporting with Palestinian voices, when they are ever included, as passively reported victims.
Our news media is unashamedly racist and biased in its reporting of the Middle East.
A recent computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting for example revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives despite the mass slaughter of Palestinians.
The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.
In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.
A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.
New Zealand government
Throughout the entire year since October 7th 2023 the New Zealand government has not uttered a single word of condemnation of Israel. The best it has done, and we welcomed this, was to vote for the UN General Assembly September motion reinforcing the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is illegal.
Instead of condemning the colonial aggressor the New Zealand government has condemned every act of Palestinian resistance. They have inverted reality – standing with the racist apartheid state and condemning the victims.
PSNA has written to the government giving a list of steps that should take to uphold their obligations under the Genocide Convention and international law to begin to hold Israel to account. At this point the government is happy to do absolutely nothing.
A luta continua.
Nā,
John Minto
National Chair
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa
Big effort this – well done.
Even the ‘israelis’ admit their ‘nation’ is the international refuge for pedophiles. It’s time to solve the pedo problem.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/israel-safe-haven-paedophiles-jerusalem-sex-abuse-jewish-community-watch-a7445246.html
Could you start with the Pakistani international refuge for pedophiles in northern England?
Then there’s that little tradition of child brides which suddenly seems to have sprung up all over western Europe since their DEI leaders decided multiculturalism rocks. Very strange. Where would you say it comes from?
The judischen are definitely beyond the Pale.
Thank you for the truth you write John
Malcom X.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed,
and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
This is so the history of the Jewish INVASION of Palestine.
The invaders always claim the “right” to defend themselves against the people being invaded.
Power allows pure racist bullshit history to be justified in the minds of the invaders.
In war the winners write the history.
The real truth is that the Jews are illegal invaders and occupiers of land stolen by Britain in 1919.
Remember Britain/France/Spain had been invading 90% of the world since 1450-1920 and always claimed the “right “to “defend” themselves against the people being invaded.
Absolute racist White European Christian imperialist bullshit.
But when you have the power you can “justify the unjustifiable”
Jews saying they have the right to “defend” themselves against the Palestinian
people they invaded and subjugated since 1948 is pure racist propaganda.
Its like saying Nazi invaders had the right to defend themselves from the Russian terrorists.
Or the Russians today saying they have the right to defend themselves from the Ukrainian terrorists
Same with the racist fascist David Seymour saying the British invaders had the right to murder and destroy my Maori ancestors who tried to stop the illegal British invasion, mass murder and theft.
All over this country there are monuments to the the British “invaders “who “defended “thenselves against the my Maori freedom fighters.
Yet no monuments to Maori men and women who gave their lives defending our homelands
against the White invasion
The thing is the White Western Christian European world still believe this shit and have the military, economic and media power power to maintain the lies.
Appealing to White prejudice, ignorance and power won election 2023.
Justifying the Jewish invasion theft and subjugation of the Palestinians to NZ white folks is so easy.
It’s faulty reasoning and misinformation to conflate imperialism and conquest only with western influence koina. You can have legitimate grievances with western imperialism but you can’t just whitewash all other imperialist entities. Which includes the Arab and Ottoman conquest and rule in the Levant and southern Syria, Mediterranean, East and North Africa, Balkans and India before western European nation states were even thought of. Dear me, I suppose you’re a bit ignorant on the Arab slave trade, which barbarity far outranked the Atlantic slave trade, as well. Oh and incidentally you really, really need to read up on how Ottomans treated their Arab subjects including “Palestinians”. But I guess if it doesn’t involve Jews or the British you’re not interested. Do correct me if I’m wrong.
Remind me again which racist, imperialist, Christian invaders put an end to slavery, including that which they encountered in New Zealand. FYI Saudi Arabia didn’t outlaw slavery until 1962.
Whilst true the Arabs went into the African interior to procure the slaves. It was to supply European demand…we also want to remind Israel it was the Iranians (Persians) who freed the Jews from bondage in Babylon…In fact they banned Slavery and allowed freedom of religion thousands of years before Europe.
Not quite true that Arabs procured slaves only for Europeans. The Arab Islamic slave trade of Africans started in the seventh century, didn’t officially cease until the twentieth and involved castration of the boys and men with primitive instruments which caused millions of deaths, both from the surgery and from infection. Watch the You Tube video entitled “The Hidden Slave Trade the Arab World Wants to Cover Up.” Ever wondered why there is no Black culture in the Middle East? As hideous as the Atlantic slave trade which lasted for three centuries was, it pales in comparison to the Arab Muslim slave trade of Blacks for sexual and economic use in their own empires.
In addition Arabs carried out slave raids in western Europe and up into Scandinavia (those blue-eyed blondes are pretty highly prized by all cultures) while the Ottomans harvested the women and young boys from the Balkans over four centuries for their harems and military service.
The dhimmi status, with its constraints for the People of the Book meant of course that freedom of religion could never be as comprehensive as it came to be in the west.
How about South Africa taking Israel to court over Crimes against Humanity and Apartheid hahaha…oh the irony
“At 6.30am on October 7th 2023, Palestinian resistance groups launched a widespread, co-ordinated and devastating attack on Israeli military positions outside the Gaza fence”
So that music festival where they raped and butchered women was a ‘military position’?
Who knew!
Who the fuck puts on a Music festival next to an open Prison/ Concentration camp. Like having a picnic next to Aushwitz in 1942. They simply paid for their arrogance…
Just a break in the reports of Israeli madness. It mounts to their high places and is swamping them and we over the world. Wreaking havoc on the world repeats past excesses against them.
How Great Thou Art – Christian hymn sung by Chris Rice with uplifting verses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc0QVWzCv9k
It doesn’t include in its praise of greatness for Israel to become Greater Israel by murder, rapine, viciousness and destroying people’s settlements and homes and everything. A replay in reverse of WW2 – what are Jews thinking of?
This tangled history – some thoughts about how Jews have sometimes been considered in a thoughtful and responsive way.
To represent Jewish and Israeli feelings and quest? – The Slaves Chorus from opera Nabucco? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VejTwFjwVI
About Verdi and Nabucco – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Va,_pensiero
…Verdi composed Nabucco at a difficult moment in his life. His wife and children had all just died of various illnesses. Despite a purported vow to abstain from opera-writing, he had contracted with La Scala to write another opera and the director, Bartolomeo Merelli, forced the libretto into his hands. Returning home, Verdi happened to open the libretto at “Va, pensiero” and seeing the phrase, he heard the words singing. At first rehearsal “the stagehands shouted their approval, then beat on the floor and the sets with their tools to create an even noisier demonstration”…
Well what do you know, a Nigel go figure.
Nigel:
A close relative of the Karen well versed in screaming to try to make their deranged point. Know for a comprehensive lack of facts and logic and has a great fear of the truth and Google.