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If it seems like most of the legacy media have spent the last two years parroting Hamas, it’s because they have been. First it was the BBC, caught out using the son of a senior Hamas commander as the mouthpiece for an anti-Israel hit-piece. Now, Australia’s own taxpayer-funded left-wing megaphone has been caught out providing a publicly funded megaphone for anti-Semitic Islamic extremists.
(Okay, that’s a tautology, but anyway…)
Over two years, the ABC published eight comment pieces by one Uthman Badar. Badar is the spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group banned by many countries, including multiple Islamic countries. The group are due to be banned as a proscribed terror group in Australia.
Yet, as The Nightly’s Stephen Johnson points out, “The ABC gave a platform to the leader of now-banned Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, despite knowing his extremist views”.
‘Knowing them’? The ABC was literally promoting them.
[Johnson] pointed out that in March 2012, Badar was even “given space to defend Muslim law giving sons double the inheritance of daughters and attack News Corp for covering a case in the ACT Supreme Court”. Fancy that.
We have to wonder just how much the ABC were aware of Badar’s and the Hizbies’ other well-known opinions when they gave him a nationwide foghorn. These include that Jews “are the most evil creatures”, Muslim children should not sing the national anthem and justifying the death penalty for anyone who leaves the Islamic religion.
The ABC declined to comment. Within days of The Nightly’s piece, though, Badar’s comment pieces had vanished from the ABC’s website.
No note, no explanation, no nothing: they’re just no longer there.
Now, we’re sure the ABC wouldn’t just de-platform someone like Badar ... not at the same time their own star reporters were making a big song and dance about boycotting Adelaide Writers Week this month after pro-Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah was punted from the program over historic comments she had made about terrorist outfit Hamas and Zionists.
The ABC and the BBC aren’t the only legacy media getting caught out acting as mouthpieces for anti-Semitic terrorists. It should surprise no one that the newspaper that still refuses to hand back its Pulitzer Prize for publishing Walter Duranty’s blatant lies is also exposed as a Hamas mouthpiece.
A fresh credibility fight is erupting around Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital, after the New York Post reported that the Israel Defense Forces and NGO Monitor identify him as a Hamas colonel, citing images of him in a military-style uniform at a 2016 ceremony tied to the hospital.
That would be just par for the course in ‘Palestine’, except that the NYT twice published anti-Israel propaganda pieces by Abu Safiya, while describing him as merely a “pediatrician and hospital director”. Not a high-ranking Hamas officer, which is kind of a biggie, you would think.
If the claim holds, it’s not a minor biographical footnote; it’s a case study in how a global platform can be used to launder messaging from a group that embeds itself inside civilian systems […]
Israeli officials have repeatedly said Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad exploit medical sites as cover – and specifically, the IDF has described Kamal Adwan as a recurring terror stronghold in the north.
In one flashpoint, IDF spokesman Lt Col Nadav Shoshani pushed back on Hamas claims about a hospital fire and warned that “running with unsubstantiated reports” reflects “questionable journalistic integrity.”
New York Times and “journalistic integrity” only belong in the same sentence when it’s a punchline.
And that goes for the entire legacy media.
