OPINION
When American soldiers liberated Dachau and other concentration camps and discovered the full depth of Nazi barbarity, General Dwight D. Eisenhower made a point of touring the camps, with not only Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley, but a film crew in tow. Because, he said, he knew that some would try to deny the hideous truth.
“The things I saw beggar description,” said Eisenhower. “I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”
Israeli first responders tasked with the harrowing job of cleaning up the bloody horror inflicted by the barbaric Hamas are doing the same.
Possibly in violation of protocol, they’re disseminating grisly footage of their discoveries – and they have their reasons.
Acting anonymously, this disparate coalition of frontline officers, organised around a Telegram channel, South First Responders, is uploading pictures from dashcams, CCTV observation posts and mobile phones, and urging that these images be amplified.
Confronting as the images are, administrators are adamant their purpose is noble. A message posted to some 25,000 subscribers said doing so was necessary to reveal “the true horrors that took place here”. Material from survivors of the attacks are also being uploaded to the Telegram channel, whose base grows daily.
If there is a second purpose, the release of these crowd-sourced glimpses of carnage are being used to contradict claims by Hamas officials, who insist their entity does not seek to harm anyone out of uniform, and that outlets claiming that is so are victims of “Israeli propaganda”. At this point, it’s a claim well past the point of absurdity.
Not so absurd that the likes of Australia’s taxpayer-funded leftist propaganda wing national broadcaster aren’t all-too-willing to believe it. When doubt briefly circled, yesterday, that Hamas had beheaded up to 40 babies at a kibbutz, the ABC’s Middle East correspondent immediately, almost gleefully, bellowed that it was “bullshit”. The ABC’s bias was so obvious and dreadful that even other journalists asked him, “Care to retract this now?”
Not all the images are able to be immediately verified, including photographs of an ISIS flag seized from a dead Hamas gunman near a military post at Kibbutz Sufa.
A caption accompanying the photograph said the terrorists “planned to raise the flag at the military post in the event that they succeeded to capture it”.
Most of the content attests to barbaric levels of violence and suffering meted out against women, children and the elderly over the weekend, much of it too graphic to reproduce.
Routinely provided are images of strewn bodies, razed buildings, butchered animals, children burned alive in their homes, or the dead being robbed.
The Australian
Even those dedicated souls who’ve spent decades cleaning up the aftermath of atrocities committed in the name of the “Palestinian” cause NZ’s Greens so stoutly champion, are devastated by the barbarity they’ve witnessed. Just as months of the horrors of war could not prepare battle-hardened American soldiers for the full depth of Nazi depravity, nothing body collectors like Yossi Landau has seen before prepared him for the full depth of Palestinian bestiality.
From his home in Ashdod, a coastal city north of Gaza, he recalled seeing “the horror” as he rushed to the scene.
“I saw cars turned over, I saw people on the street dead,” Mr Landau said in Sderot, a town near the border where multiple residents were killed.
He has 33 years of experience volunteering for Zaka, an organisation which recovers the bodies of people who suffered unnatural deaths.
But as gunfights raged between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces, Landau said he witnessed violence he had never seen before.
“A piece of road that should’ve taken 15 minutes, it took us 11 hours because we went and picked up everyone, put them in a bag,” the 55-year-old said.
But that was nothing compared to what awaited them at Beeri kibbutz.
“I felt that I’m falling apart, not only me, my whole crew,” he recalled, after entering the first home and finding a dead woman.
“Her stomach was ripped open, a baby was there, still connected with the cord, and stabbed,” Mr Landau said.
The Zaka volunteer said he saw multiple civilians, including around 20 children, who had their hands tied behind their backs before being shot and torched.
The Australian
Do you finally understand what your witless prattling of “from the river to the sea” really means, now, Ricardo Menendez?
