As we all know, simply reporting the news is way down on the list of the mainstream media’s priorities, these days. Their first priorities are speaking lies for power, and, above all else, maintaining narratives.
But, every so often, something slips through.
Sometimes, it’s a standard “gotcha” interview that goes pear-shaped when the subject runs rings around the inquisitor. Consider Jordan Peterson’s famous demolition of the BBC’s Cathy Newman, for example.
Or it might be when a subject goes rogue, live-to-air. We’ve seen a few of these already, as the media tries desperately to maintain its anti-Semitic, Israel-is-the-bad-guy, narrative. There was, for instance, the Palestinian woman who made clear that the death of her child was on Hamas’ heads. In that case, onlookers quickly covered her mouth, most likely to stop her before she got shot by Hamas.
In a more recent example, the media, in this case Al Jazeera (which should surprise no-one), metaphorically clapped their hands over the mouth of a disruptive Palestinian civilian.
A local resident creates shock in Gaza’s Al Aqsa Hospital suggesting on the live Al Jazeera broadcast that Qassam fighters are hiding among them, then issues curses saying:
“Regarding the Resistance – why are they hiding between the people here? They should go and hide in hell.”
Gaza Report/X
The Al Jazeera reporter couldn’t cut away and start talking over him fast enough.
Then there are the wire stories that just slip through the mainstream media’s narrative filters. Such as this one, from Washington Post reporters. WaPo were one of the outlets invited to Israel’s screenings of the horrific unedited footage from October 7, which seems to have sharpened their moral clarity somewhat.
Surprisingly, Stuff reprinted it — and accidentally busted the “pro-Palestine” narrative.
Because the story uncovers in deep detail, not just how deliberately Hamas targeted Israeli civilians for the most horrific terror imaginable, and why, but the complicity of so many “innocent Palestinian civilians”.
The first clues came from the bodies of slain militants: maps, drawings, notes, and the weapons and gear they carried.
In Beeri, a kibbutz town overrun by Hamas on October 7, one dead fighter had a notebook with hand-scrawled Quranic verses and orders that read, simply, “Kill as many people and take as many hostages as possible.” Others were equipped with gas canisters, handcuffs and thermobaric grenades designed to instantly turn houses into infernos […]
Five weeks later, the reassembled fragments are beginning to reveal the contours of Hamas’s broader plan, one that analysts say was intended not just to kill and capture Israelis, but to spark a conflagration that would sweep the region and lead to a wider conflict.
The evidence, described by more than a dozen current and former intelligence and security officials from four Western and Middle Eastern countries, reveals an intention by Hamas planners to strike a blow of historic proportions, in the expectation that the group’s actions would compel an overwhelming Israeli response.
The captured material also shows, unbelievable as it may seem, that the horrors of October 7 could have been much, much worse.
New evidence suggests that they were prepared to go even further. Some militants carried enough food, ammunition and equipment to last several days, officials said, and bore instructions to continue deeper into Israel if the first wave of attacks succeeded, potentially striking larger Israeli cities.
The assault teams managed to penetrate as far as Ofakim, an Israeli town about 25km from the Gaza Strip and about half the distance between the enclave and the West Bank. One unit carried reconnaissance information and maps suggesting an intention to continue the assault up to the border of the West Bank.
What’s also become plain is just how deeply complicit “Palestinian civilians” were in the terror.
The planning for the historic assault against Israel was underway for well more than a year before the events of October 7, intelligence officials say […]
The group elicited additional information, intelligence officials said, from Gazan day labourers who were permitted to enter Israel for work, often in the same farming communities that were in Hamas’s crosshairs.
Information such as where families lived, how many people were in individual houses, and so on.
In other words, “Palestinian civilians” willingly participated in planning to massacre as many innocent Israelis as possible.
Hamas also used the sort of deception that has become commonplace in jihad around the world for decades. For instance, in the prelude to the Algerian civil war, Islamic clerics went to great lengths to assure French colonial authorities that their activities were strictly peacefully religious. In fact, they were planning for jihad all along.
As the plotting progressed in secret, others in the Hamas leadership were busy planting seeds for an extraordinarily sophisticated deception.
The plan’s top architect, Israel believes, was Yehiya Sinwar, Hamas’s military leader […] he and other Hamas leaders began issuing subtle signals in recent years hinting of a new pragmatism.
It was a message that Israelis wanted to hear – that “Hamas wants no more wars,” said Michael Milshtein, the former chief of Palestinian affairs in Aman, Israel’s military intelligence directorate. Milshtein, who briefly met Sinwar years ago, said that October 7 bore an essential hallmark of Sinwar’s previous operations: a “knowledge of the basic consciousness of the Israeli public.”
To buttress that perception of moderation, clashes between Hamas and Israel ceased after 2021. The group notably refrained from jumping in on several occasions when its Gaza ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, fired rockets or engaged militarily with Israel.
To many in Israel, it was further evidence that Hamas had changed and no longer sought a bloody conflict.
It was all taqiyya on a grand, deadly scale.
The distractions and ruses worked. In Gaza, less than 80km from the West Bank, the arming and training of Hamas assault teams was largely ignored or dismissed.
Surveillance footage and other data continued to flow to Israeli listening posts. But the most important communication was occurring on channels that Israelis either could not access or failed to comprehend, current and former officials said.
“They were conning Israel on a strategic level, using handheld radios, land-wire networks in the tunnels and other comms that we couldn’t listen to, while using codes on the so-called open networks, which they knew we were listening to,” said Eran Etzion, former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council. “They were creating an alternative reality.”
Above all, what is clear from the captured material is that Hamas wanted a war, and they wanted their own people to be killed. Because they knew exactly the response it would elicit from “pro-Palestine” useful idiots and anti-Semites in the West.
Hamas meticulously planned and prepared for a massacre of Israeli civilians on a scale that was highly likely to provoke Israel’s government into sending troops into Gaza, analysts said. Indeed, Hamas leaders have publicly expressed a willingness to accept heavy losses – potentially including the deaths of many Gazan civilians living under Hamas rule.
“Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it,” Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas politburo, told Beirut’s LCBI television in an interview aired on October 24. “We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.”
Hamas was willing to accept such sacrifices as the price for kick-starting a new wave of violent Palestinian resistance in the region and scuttling efforts at normalising relations between Israel and Arab states, according to current and former intelligence officials and counterterrorism experts.
“They were very clear-eyed as to what would happen to Gaza on the day after,” said a senior Israeli military official with access to sensitive intelligence, including interrogations with Hamas fighters and intercepted communications. “They wanted to buy their place in history – a place in the history of jihad – at the expense of the lives of many people in Gaza.”
Stuff
But sure, leftists, tell us again how Israel is the villain in all this.
Even Stuff can’t help but let the truth slip through, sometimes.
