Opinion
At a wine’n’cheese beano this weekend, I got talking to a person of the young persuasion. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned that she had friends who had no idea who Hitler was. “I said to her, ‘you know, Adolf Hitler?’”. “I have no idea who that is,” was the response.
I forgot to ask if her friend was a journalist or a lawyer. Although I’d be willing to bet good money he or she is “pro Palestine”.
A truly mind-boggling level of ignorance, whether real or feigned, is the hallmark of the “pro Palestine” types. Especially journalists and lawyers. These are people who should know better, yet choose to repeat the most lunatic falsehoods as unalloyed fact. There’s some “dangerous misinformation” for you.
Consider, for instance, the “open letter” signed by nearly 1,000 Australian lawyers. When (briefly) acknowledging Hamas’ October 7 massacre, it dismissively states, “there are reports of mutilation”. As if Hamas didn’t proudly livestream themselves in the very act of dismembering and mutilating hundreds of Israelis.
The letter also never mentions, even once, the indisputable evidence that Hamas uses hospitals and schools as military installations.
This past week, the world finally saw what Israel had flagged, cold hard evidence that al-Shifa hospital had been operating as a de facto terror base. The hospital hid munitions stores, concealed tunnels and war rooms. The world now has seen images of bloodied hostages being bundled into lifts on October 7. Security vision shows men standing guard, carrying assault rifles and what looks like a large machete or knife.
Yet the World Health Organisation, which repeatedly has described al-Shifa as a “death zone” in its numerous calls for a ceasefire, offered its best Sgt Schultz impersonation when pressed about why it didn’t notice anything unusual during many visits to al-Shifa since the massacre. We saw nothing, we knew nothing. We focused on the patients, was its explanation.
So focused, the presence of heavily armed men wandering corridors didn’t raise any red flags. We’re expected to swallow this nonsense.
The Australian
But it’s not just the activist legal and medical classes who’ve been completely subsumed by Jew-derangement syndrome. The media, impossible as it may seem, cover themselves in worse ignominy by the day. The very people for whom words are supposed to be tools of the trade, fling words around with no regard for their meaning, like infinite monkeys throwing excrement. The more they scream and bluster about “war crimes” and “genocide”, the clearer it is that they have absolutely no idea or regard for what those words mean. When words can mean anything, they mean nothing.
In the words of Geoffrey Corn, at the Centre for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law: “When every attack is a war crime, when every measure taken to weaken Hamas is a war crime, when nothing Israel does is considered consistent with its rights and obligations under international law, the very notion of war crime loses meaning.”
The mainstream media are the people who call everyone they don’t like a “Nazi”, yet have no idea who Hitler was. They are unable to bring themselves to call Hamas’ deliberate attacks on civilians involving extensive torture, mutilation and sexual violence as the war crimes that they are, yet they screech and gibber that accusation repeatedly at Israel, in defiance of all fact.
Most notably the plain fact that Hamas deliberately and repeatedly uses its own people as human shields.
Under the laws of war, use of civilians by Hamas or captured enemy personnel – and in this case civilian hostages of many nationalities – to shield a military objective from attack is forbidden. The prohibition is codified in Article 51(7) of the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions to which the “state of Palestine” is a signatory.
As emeritus Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote back in 2009: “When a murderer takes a hostage and fires from behind his human shield, and a policeman, in an effort to stop the shooting, accidentally kills the hostage, the law of every country holds the hostage-taker guilty of murder – even though the policeman fired the fatal shot. The same is true of the law of war.”
Another buzzword the media deploy without even the most rudimentary understanding is “proportionate”. As far as the media seem to be concerned, “proportionate” means something like “an even scoreboard”. As if Israel killing even a single more Palestinian than vice-versa is somehow “disproportionate”. Which ignores, of course, the sheer enormity of Hamas’ atrocities: what is, after all, the “proportionate” response to monsters who gut mothers and mutilate their unborn children, put babies in ovens, and pack-rape girls until their pelvises are crushed? A good talking to? In fact, “proportionate” means, “appropriate to the military objective”.
Israel has exercised its right to defend itself to ensure Hamas does not repeat the atrocities it has promised to recommit. Israel has been explicit in adhering to the laws of armed conflict, requiring her to distinguish military targets from civilian objects, to implement precautions and to ensure that damage caused is not excessive or disproportional to the military necessity.
For Israel’s actions to be proportional, they must include the prior assessment of collateral damage and the prior implementation of measures to minimise such damage. Israel has been doing just that. For example, on November 9, the IDF released a video of its officers aborting an airstrike on a terrorist target after spotting Palestinian children playing nearby. Israel routinely gives warnings to civilians of an impending strike to allow them to evacuate, despite the obvious benefit this gives Israel’s adversaries.
The Australian
In the words of British officer, Colonel Richard Kemp, MBE, CBE, “the Israel Defense Force, the IDF, does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare”.
It’s typical of our “post-truth” media, of course, that they would have us believe that the opposite is true.
In the morally-upended world of the mainstream media, the most brutal terrorists since ISIS, the most bloodthirsty anti-Semites since the Nazis, are their unimpeachable heroes.
Which says all we need to know, really.