Stop telling us porkies – Appeal to media to stop reporting debunked Israeli war propaganda as though it was true
As the 12-month anniversary of the October 7th attack on Israel approaches, PSNA is appealing to New Zealand mainstream media to stop reporting Israeli war propaganda when it has already been comprehensively debunked.
For example, on TVNZ News tonight, 4 October, the presenter told us that in the October 7th attack “Hamas gunmen killed around 1200 people – mostly civilians”. This is repeating Israeli war propaganda. Even ABC News in Australia has reported on this debunked lie but a full year on TVNZ is happy to keep telling us porkies.
Israeli news reporters and independent journalists have investigated and found:
- 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
This is not to deny war crimes were committed on October 4th. Taking Hostages and killing civilians are war crimes which should be investigated and prosecuted by the International Criminal Court as the court has done in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the myriad war crimes of genocide and apartheid by Israeli leaders must also be investigated and prosecuted.
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.”
So what are the debunked Israeli propaganda lies we are appealing to the media to stop reporting as though they were factual?
- 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 an 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.
- 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.
New Zealand’s mainstream news reporting is unashamedly racist and biased in its reporting of the Middle East. It is no different to the awful reporting from other western media. For example:
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.
There is no alternative for the news media than to report the truth. Israeli propaganda lies are not the truth and must not be reported when they have been thoroughly debunked.
Nā,
John Minto
National Chair
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa
Thank you John a very enlightening read.
About that media bias and “Hasbara propaganda” John. Where are the headline stories about the successful IDF misson to rescue and return to her family, the young Yazidi woman Fawzia Amin Sido who, at 11 yrs of age, was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists and trafficked to a Hamas terrorist affiliated with ISIS in the Gaza Strip where she was held in captivity for 10 years.
And here’s a question not raised by the media, the virtue signalling protestors, the Islamic population of the world who have been bleating for over a year about genocide in Gaza or western feminists. This poor child was kidnapped as a sex slave aged 11, brought to Gaza as a sex slave, and in such a small and tight community, nobody felt the need to say “hey this is wrong”? Oh and there goes your myth about no association between ISIS and Hamas.
“successful IDF misson” as reported by the IDF.