Belal Aldabbour is a Palestinian physician who lives in Gaza. He tweets from there as @Belalmd12. He’s an indispensable eyewitness to Israel’s latest attack on the besieged territory. But even more, he — and others on the internet — are demolishing the latest biased and dishonest reports in the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets.
Yesterday he tweeted, “Israel is generously (and provokingly) sharing graphic videos of the latest strikes in #Gaza, showing the very last seconds in the lives of the victims. One was lying down. Another was having a phone call.” And he then added, “Israel is going the extra mile to provoke factions in #Gaza. Something reeks here.”
That “something” is the widespread view that Prime Minister Yair Lapid is instigating the conflict to improve his chances in the upcoming November Israeli elections. Another experienced observer, the writer Ben Ehrenreich, tweeted, “Imprisoning two million people and then bombing them every time you have an election coming up is a profoundly sick political ritual.” The connection between an Israeli election and increased violence against Palestinians is nothing new. This site explained it back in November 2019.
But the report in today’s New York Times made no mention of the election angle. Neither did the Washington Post. (So far, there’s no on-air report on National Public Radio.)
In fairness, you would have to administer truth serum to Lapid and other Israeli politicians to be absolutely certain about what motivates their brutal provocative attack. But it is certainly news that large numbers of people, including Israeli Jews, believe that the assault is a pre-election maneuver. A recent poll shows Benjamin Netanyahu edging ahead of Lapid, and there’s no doubt Netanyahu will say during the campaign that he would have attacked the Palestinians even more viciously.
Instead of offering this essential context, the New York Times had to once again blame the Palestinians. This time, the challenge was even greater than usual. The paper couldn’t justify Israel’s air attack on Gaza by saying the Palestinians had first fired rockets at Israel from there — because they hadn’t. The Associated Press reporter in Gaza, Fares Akram, made this point clearly: “There was no fire from Gaza before & during the 1st two hours into the Israeli operation.”
So the Times had to create a distorted timeline of events, designed to blame the Palestinians. The paper’s dishonest tale couldn’t start in Gaza, so it moved to the West Bank to scrounge up the original provocation: “Since March, Palestinian attackers have killed at least 19 Israelis and foreigners in the West Bank and Israel. . . In response, Israel. . .”
Extraordinary. If you want to find original cause, this version would be far more accurate:
Israel has militarily occupied the Palestinian West Bank since 1967, and continues to violate international law by moving hundreds of thousands of Jewish-only settler/colonists into the territory. In response, Palestinians have. . .
The Times bias was even more stark in the actual newspaper. The single photo showed “Palestinian rockets heading toward Israel,” but there was no room for photos of the destruction in Gaza City. The Times has a correspondent in Gaza, Fady Hanona, but they didn’t let him quote any Palestinians, such as family members of Alaa Qadoom, the 5-year-old girl who was among the estimated 15 people killed so far by Israeli warplanes. Instead, the only Palestinian who was allowed to speak was a Hamas leader, who gave the aggressive statement the Times needed for its twisted narrative.
In fairness, the Washington Post report was no better, although it at least hinted at the Israeli political angle by saying that Prime Minister Lapid “faces a new election in November and has been under pressure to take a strong hand with militants in Gaza.”
Back to the Times article. Here is arguably its single most dishonest paragraph:
Several civilians were caught in that West Bank violence, including Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American broadcaster shot dead while covering an Israeli raid in May.
This is astonishing, implying that the “shot” came out of nowhere and accidentally “caught” the respected journalist. In fact, a number of investigations prove that Israeli soldiers killed her, and the only questions are: Did they deliberately murder her? Who ordered it? Who is involved in the coverup?
Lapid is just another war criminal in a long line of Israeli Criminal leaders who have engaged in wholesale slaughter in an effort to demonstrate their “courage” to illegal squatters like Jon S.
Here are just a few of these despicable cowards. Ehud Barak/Ariel Sharon/Tipsy Livni /Ehud Olmert.
Hopefully there is a special place in hell for Jon S,s monsters.
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Israel bombs Civilian Apt. Bldg. in Gaza City, Killing 10, Wounding 55; When Russia does it, it is a War Crime (juancole.com)
“Israel bombs Civilian Apt. Bldg. in Gaza City, Killing 10, Wounding 55. When Russia does it, it is a War Crime” Informed Comment, August 6/22, by Juan Cole
EXCERPT:
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – “Maram Humaid at Al Jazeera English reports that Israeli fighter jets bombed the civilian Palestine Towers apartment building in downtown Gaza City on Friday, killing 10, including a five-year-old girl, a Quds Brigades commander & wounding 55 other persons.
“The little girl, Alaa Qadooum, & her father were on a motorcycle passing the Palestine Towers building, on their way to buy some groceries. He was also killed, leaving his wife Rasha & three other children without a breadwinner.
“Israel has imposed an economic & military siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, limiting the densely populated region’s imports & interfering with the building & repair of infrastructure. Under international law, Israel is the Occupying power in Gaza, which it seized by force in 1967, and may not treat Gaza’s inhabitants in a brutalizing way, according to the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 & the Rome Statute of 2002 that underpins the International Criminal Court.
“The strike on a civilian apartment building in a densely packed city was not reported on any of the US cable news channels I checked in on today. But were a retaliatory strike by some Gaza-based Palestinian group to manage to hit something in Israel, now that would be a news segment. It is one of the propaganda effects of US television news that correspondents very seldom are allowed to report on Israeli aggressive actions, so the reaction of Palestinians always comes out of the blue and looks like unprovoked barbarism.
“Contrast the American reaction (yawn) to this Israeli bombing of the Palestine Towers apartment building, where civilians lived, with the outrage in this country when Russia behaves similarly in Ukraine. (cont’d)
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“[Russian] Attacks have struck people in bread lines and on playgrounds, as well as apartment blocks, theaters and hospitals. After each one, Russia has denied or deflected responsibility, often accusing Ukraine of attacking its own people to sway domestic and global opinion against Moscow. Russia has claimed that it aims only at targets of military value — even though some were hundreds of miles from the front lines — and that whenever a civilian facility did get hit, it was one that the Ukrainian military had co-opted for use as a command post, a shelter for foreign fighters or storage for weapons.”
“So Russia sounds exactly like Israel. They had to hit the apartment building because terrorists were hiding out in it, even (gasp) members of the feared 800-strong Azov Brigade.
“The authors refuse to let Russia off the hook, going through one by one and examining the bombing of apartment buildings, and questioning the Russian rationale.
“No paper of record in the US treats the Israelis the way the NYT treated Russia in this article, even when Israeli leaders order army snipers to shoot Palestinian civilians in Gaza for demonstrating, unarmed, near an Israeli security fence. They killed 266 protesters or medics and journalists over two years of weekly demonstrations, and wounded an unimaginable 30,000, many of them doomed to lose a leg.”
For the record:
Former Senator James Abourezk has revealed that many members of congress privately resent the control that Israel has over them. He wrote, ‘I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear—fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress—at least when I served there—have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I’ve heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they’re pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby’s animosity by making their feelings public.’
http://ifamericaknew.org/us_ints/pg-abourezk.html
What’s unique about the present round -so far- is that Hamas is not involved. Israel is attacking Islamic Jihad targets and IJ is firing at our civilian population. However , today I fear a serious escalation due to the provocations by Jewish extremists on the Temple Mount. Hope I’m wrong.