Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win
In normal times, it would be obvious that a group that beheads babies may also be liable to lie. But these are not normal times, and Israel has never been treated as a normal country.
It is true that Hamas was elected by the Palestinians to succeed Yasser Arafat in 2006. It is also true that – after ousting the Palestinian Authority from Gaza in a brutal coup – its officials now control all the mechanisms of state in the enclave, from the judiciary and education sector to the Health Ministry.
The widely reported claim that an Israeli missile was to blame for the destruction of the al-Ahli hospital last week, killing 500 people, came from Hamas. The consensus today is that it was wrong to blame the Israelis; the blast most likely being caused by a misfiring rocket from within Gaza, which hit the hospital carpark, not the building itself.
In the days after the disaster, Hamas officials revised their estimate down to 471, but the United States has since placed the figure “at the low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum”. European and Israeli intelligence services, meanwhile, have suggested that the true total may be even lower.
We must recognize that believing Hamas’s untruths created havoc in the real world, at a time when the real world could benefit from a little less havoc. Synagogues were firebombed in Berlin and Tunisia; President Biden’s diplomatic efforts were undermined, as Arab envoys cancelled meetings, frustrating efforts to control the crisis.
Luke Baker, the former Reuters bureau chief for Israel and Palestine, said this week that Hamas had “squeezed the life out of honesty and probity” in Gaza, and its death toll figures should not be trusted. But his is a lone voice in a bleak landscape.
George Orwell wrote: “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.” Those words should be ringing through many parliaments and newsrooms today.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gullible-west-falling-hamass-fictitious-141409726.html
It is true that Hamas was elected by the Palestinians to succeed Yasser Arafat in 2006. It is also true that – after ousting the Palestinian Authority from Gaza in a brutal coup – its officials now control all the mechanisms of state in the enclave, from the judiciary and education sector to the Health Ministry.
The widely reported claim that an Israeli missile was to blame for the destruction of the al-Ahli hospital last week, killing 500 people, came from Hamas. The consensus today is that it was wrong to blame the Israelis; the blast most likely being caused by a misfiring rocket from within Gaza, which hit the hospital carpark, not the building itself.
In the days after the disaster, Hamas officials revised their estimate down to 471, but the United States has since placed the figure “at the low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum”. European and Israeli intelligence services, meanwhile, have suggested that the true total may be even lower.
We must recognize that believing Hamas’s untruths created havoc in the real world, at a time when the real world could benefit from a little less havoc. Synagogues were firebombed in Berlin and Tunisia; President Biden’s diplomatic efforts were undermined, as Arab envoys cancelled meetings, frustrating efforts to control the crisis.
Luke Baker, the former Reuters bureau chief for Israel and Palestine, said this week that Hamas had “squeezed the life out of honesty and probity” in Gaza, and its death toll figures should not be trusted. But his is a lone voice in a bleak landscape.
George Orwell wrote: “One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.” Those words should be ringing through many parliaments and newsrooms today.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gullible-west-falling-hamass-fictitious-141409726.html
