I’ve seen some mad media corrections in my time, but the one from the BBC this week was on an entirely new level. It wasn’t a correction as such, it was an ‘update’. ‘This post replaces an earlier story which has been updated’, said a tweet from BBC News. It concerned the story of Yocheved Lifschitz, the 85-year-old Israeli woman who was seized by Hamas during its genocidal pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October. Mrs Lifschitz was released on Monday evening. ‘Released Israeli hostage shakes her captor’s hand’, gushed the BBC, encouraging us to think this elderly lady must have got on pretty well with her Hamas keepers. Then came the new post, the updated one, the correction, the truth. ‘I went through hell, says 85-year-old hostage released by Hamas’, it said.
That is some turnaround. From a handshake to ‘hell’, in two tweets. From fawning over a kidnap victim and her kidnapper briefly shaking hands to admitting that the kidnap victim actually had a horrific time. It seems the BBC, belatedly, caught up on some of the things Mrs Lifschitz said after she was released. It was ‘hell’, she said from her wheelchair in a hospital in Tel Aviv. ‘They stormed into our homes. They beat people’, she said, seeming ‘overwhelmed’. She herself was thrown on to a motorbike by the terrorists: ‘My head was on one side and the rest of my body was on the other side.’ Her watch and jewellery were stolen. And she was battered with sticks. With Herculean grace she said: ‘They didn’t break my ribs but it was painful and I had difficulty breathing.’
Why would any journalist worth his or her salt focus on a touching of hands rather than the near breaking of ribs? On the briefly humane ending of a racist and unjust false imprisonment rather than on the inhumanity of the imprisonment itself? You could say ‘Shame on the BBC’ virtually every week. (This week, for example, it was revealed that the Beeb’s channel for kids, CBBC, asked an academic who’s just published a book on the ‘psychosis of whiteness’ to explain ‘white privilege’ to its young viewers.) But the BBC’s switch on the Lifschitz story is an entirely different order of shame. Here we have an elderly Jew who was violently kidnapped by an anti-Semitic movement, and what does our public broadcaster initially say? That there was a nice moment between her and her tormentors. It focussed not on the vile humiliation of Mrs Lifschitz, but on the fleeting instant in which she reached out to one of the anti-Semitic monsters who conspired in her violation and persecution.
This is a journalistic failure of extraordinary proportions. Actually, it’s more than a failure in journalism – it’s a failure of morals, reason, decency. Yes, it is proper that the BBC eventually corrected the record and reported that, beyond the handshake, beyond Mrs Lifschitz’s appreciation that her captors let her wash her hair and gave her food to eat, fundamentally this was an intolerable act of violation against a pensioner’s liberty and dignity. But why the happy-clappy crap before the truth? Imagine if a black woman was kidnapped by the KKK and was beaten and kept in a tunnel for two weeks – do you think the Beeb would have said, ‘Ah, bless, she shook her captor’s hand when she was released’? Would they hell. Jews, though? Hamas? That’s different, it seems.
Nurit Yitzhak, who is 79, was released alongside Mrs Lifschitz. The sight of these two elderly ladies walking into the arms of the Red Cross has led to some seriously skewed journalism. ‘Maybe Hamas isn’t all bad?’ has been the tone on social media. Why else would an old lady shake the hands of one of their operatives? Well, maybe Mrs Lifschitz is that way inclined – decent to a fault. More to the point, her husband, the 83-year-old peace activist Oded, remains in captivity. My wild guess is that she showed kindness to the scum who put her through ‘hell’ because she wants her husband to be safe. Did this possibility not cross the minds of the BBC before it led with the handshake rather than the harm? The ‘humanity’ rather than the horror?
It wasn’t just the Beeb. Sky News gave a staggeringly one-sided account of Mrs Lifschitz’s experience in its initial social-media posts. It quoted her as saying, ‘Each person had a guard watching him or her. They took care of all the needs. They talked about all kinds of things, they were very friendly.’ This, editorialised Sky, is what it was like ‘being held hostage by Hamas’. You didn’t have room to mention that she was beaten? Robbed? Violently degraded on account of her race? The idea that you can have a ‘nice’ captor is a deceit of Orwellian proportions. Sky’s ‘very friendly’ Hamas tweet has been shared and liked tens of thousands of times. It has ignited a firestorm of Hamas apologism online. ‘They’re good people’, cry anti-Semites across social media.
Serious outlets, initially, opted to tell only part of Mrs Lifschitz’s story. The larger story, the hellishness of her abduction, was downplayed. It fell to a newspaper like the Sun, snootily looked down upon as ‘racist’ by the right-thinking elites, to tell the truth of Mrs Lifschitz’s persecution. ‘My hell in spider’s web of Hamas tunnels’, its frontpage headline said, next to an image of Lifschitz looking withered from her experience, not the image of her shaking hands with the terrorist. There is infinitely more truth in the Sun’s coverage than there was in the BBC’s and Sky’s and the Twitterati’s suicidally ‘Kumbaya’ response to the release of an elderly Jew from the violent clutches of a poisonously anti-Jewish movement.
The twisted, partial coverage of this week’s release of elderly hostages — was it journalistic oversight, or something worse? It certainly seems that some newsrooms in the West were looking at this story in completely the wrong way. They are still under the delusion that Hamas is a normal organisation, with ‘nice’ members, when in truth it is a genocidally violent group that was founded for the express purpose of murdering Jews. Yes, some journalists focussed on the handshake to emphasise Mrs Lifschitz’s humanity, and that’s fine. But others focussed on it to suggest Hamas is not what Israel says it is. They jettisoned objectivity — in this case the objective facts of Mrs Lifschitz’s horrific mistreatment, and the objective fact of Hamas’s nature.
There have been numerous incidents of ‘journalistic oversight’ in the past two weeks. Consider the bombing of al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Media outlets, including the BBC, instantly pinned the blame on Israel. But a more complicated picture has since emerged: there is evidence this calamity was in fact a consequence of a misfired missile by Islamic Jihad from inside Gaza. As NPR in the US says, the list of news organisations that fell short in their coverage of the hospital bombing is ‘long and illustrious’ – ‘the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and more’. All rushed to blame the IDF, when ‘concrete facts’ were ‘scant’, in NPR’s words.
The New York Times has publicly reckoned with its failures over the hospital bombing. We ‘relied too heavily on claims by Hamas’, it said in a special editorial statement. We left readers with the ‘incorrect impression’ that Israel was unquestionably to blame, and we should have taken more ‘care with [this] initial presentation’. The BBC also admits that its initial strong speculation that Israel bombed the hospital was premature, ‘and we apologise for this’. It is possible this is all too little, too late. The impact of the liberal media’s frenzy of Israel-blaming for the hospital bombing has been huge. Diplomatic efforts for peace have stalled. Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe have risen. ‘Words have consequences’, the chattering classes love to say. That is actually true when we’re talking about global institutions like the BBC and the New York Times instantly bashing Israel for something it likely did not do.
Are these mistakes? Or reflections of something more worrying? To my mind, the bad journalism we’ve seen over the past fortnight speaks to the corruption of the media by the ideology of identitarianism. ‘The media will never forgive Israel for not bombing that hospital’, said the National Review. The liberal media ‘wanted the hospital to be destroyed’ by Israel, because this would have helped to boost their ideological conviction that ‘Israel is a violent, aggressive, oppressor nation’, said NR. This is right. The larger problem we face today is the colonisation of the media by a new generation that has been inculcated with such identitarian orthodoxies as ‘Israel Evil’, ‘Gender Fluid’, ‘White Bad’, etc etc. The media no longer tell us the truth but the ideology.
We need to wake up to the fact that the New York Times – which was very recently rocked by a generational struggle for control – and the BBC are increasingly the property of a rising class of youthful ideological influencers. This is why we have a situation where the Beeb will happily refer to a rapist with a cock as ‘a woman’ but not to radical Islamists who massacre entire families as ‘terrorists’. Why it frowns upon the evils of ‘whiteness’ but erms and ahhs on whether Hamas’s mass murder of Jews really is terrorism. The liberal media have fallen. We are living through the nadir of journalism. The lives and the rights of Jews like Mrs Lifschitz are being sacrificed to the morally infantile storytelling of a woke establishment that has truly lost its bearings.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
Why would any journalist worth his or her salt focus on a touching of hands rather than the near breaking of ribs? On the briefly humane ending of a racist and unjust false imprisonment rather than on the inhumanity of the imprisonment itself? You could say ‘Shame on the BBC’ virtually every week. (This week, for example, it was revealed that the Beeb’s channel for kids, CBBC, asked an academic who’s just published a book on the ‘psychosis of whiteness’ to explain ‘white privilege’ to its young viewers.) But the BBC’s switch on the Lifschitz story is an entirely different order of shame. Here we have an elderly Jew who was violently kidnapped by an anti-Semitic movement, and what does our public broadcaster initially say? That there was a nice moment between her and her tormentors. It focussed not on the vile humiliation of Mrs Lifschitz, but on the fleeting instant in which she reached out to one of the anti-Semitic monsters who conspired in her violation and persecution.
This is a journalistic failure of extraordinary proportions. Actually, it’s more than a failure in journalism – it’s a failure of morals, reason, decency. Yes, it is proper that the BBC eventually corrected the record and reported that, beyond the handshake, beyond Mrs Lifschitz’s appreciation that her captors let her wash her hair and gave her food to eat, fundamentally this was an intolerable act of violation against a pensioner’s liberty and dignity. But why the happy-clappy crap before the truth? Imagine if a black woman was kidnapped by the KKK and was beaten and kept in a tunnel for two weeks – do you think the Beeb would have said, ‘Ah, bless, she shook her captor’s hand when she was released’? Would they hell. Jews, though? Hamas? That’s different, it seems.
Nurit Yitzhak, who is 79, was released alongside Mrs Lifschitz. The sight of these two elderly ladies walking into the arms of the Red Cross has led to some seriously skewed journalism. ‘Maybe Hamas isn’t all bad?’ has been the tone on social media. Why else would an old lady shake the hands of one of their operatives? Well, maybe Mrs Lifschitz is that way inclined – decent to a fault. More to the point, her husband, the 83-year-old peace activist Oded, remains in captivity. My wild guess is that she showed kindness to the scum who put her through ‘hell’ because she wants her husband to be safe. Did this possibility not cross the minds of the BBC before it led with the handshake rather than the harm? The ‘humanity’ rather than the horror?
It wasn’t just the Beeb. Sky News gave a staggeringly one-sided account of Mrs Lifschitz’s experience in its initial social-media posts. It quoted her as saying, ‘Each person had a guard watching him or her. They took care of all the needs. They talked about all kinds of things, they were very friendly.’ This, editorialised Sky, is what it was like ‘being held hostage by Hamas’. You didn’t have room to mention that she was beaten? Robbed? Violently degraded on account of her race? The idea that you can have a ‘nice’ captor is a deceit of Orwellian proportions. Sky’s ‘very friendly’ Hamas tweet has been shared and liked tens of thousands of times. It has ignited a firestorm of Hamas apologism online. ‘They’re good people’, cry anti-Semites across social media.
Serious outlets, initially, opted to tell only part of Mrs Lifschitz’s story. The larger story, the hellishness of her abduction, was downplayed. It fell to a newspaper like the Sun, snootily looked down upon as ‘racist’ by the right-thinking elites, to tell the truth of Mrs Lifschitz’s persecution. ‘My hell in spider’s web of Hamas tunnels’, its frontpage headline said, next to an image of Lifschitz looking withered from her experience, not the image of her shaking hands with the terrorist. There is infinitely more truth in the Sun’s coverage than there was in the BBC’s and Sky’s and the Twitterati’s suicidally ‘Kumbaya’ response to the release of an elderly Jew from the violent clutches of a poisonously anti-Jewish movement.
The twisted, partial coverage of this week’s release of elderly hostages — was it journalistic oversight, or something worse? It certainly seems that some newsrooms in the West were looking at this story in completely the wrong way. They are still under the delusion that Hamas is a normal organisation, with ‘nice’ members, when in truth it is a genocidally violent group that was founded for the express purpose of murdering Jews. Yes, some journalists focussed on the handshake to emphasise Mrs Lifschitz’s humanity, and that’s fine. But others focussed on it to suggest Hamas is not what Israel says it is. They jettisoned objectivity — in this case the objective facts of Mrs Lifschitz’s horrific mistreatment, and the objective fact of Hamas’s nature.
There have been numerous incidents of ‘journalistic oversight’ in the past two weeks. Consider the bombing of al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Media outlets, including the BBC, instantly pinned the blame on Israel. But a more complicated picture has since emerged: there is evidence this calamity was in fact a consequence of a misfired missile by Islamic Jihad from inside Gaza. As NPR in the US says, the list of news organisations that fell short in their coverage of the hospital bombing is ‘long and illustrious’ – ‘the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and more’. All rushed to blame the IDF, when ‘concrete facts’ were ‘scant’, in NPR’s words.
The New York Times has publicly reckoned with its failures over the hospital bombing. We ‘relied too heavily on claims by Hamas’, it said in a special editorial statement. We left readers with the ‘incorrect impression’ that Israel was unquestionably to blame, and we should have taken more ‘care with [this] initial presentation’. The BBC also admits that its initial strong speculation that Israel bombed the hospital was premature, ‘and we apologise for this’. It is possible this is all too little, too late. The impact of the liberal media’s frenzy of Israel-blaming for the hospital bombing has been huge. Diplomatic efforts for peace have stalled. Anti-Semitic attacks in Europe have risen. ‘Words have consequences’, the chattering classes love to say. That is actually true when we’re talking about global institutions like the BBC and the New York Times instantly bashing Israel for something it likely did not do.
Are these mistakes? Or reflections of something more worrying? To my mind, the bad journalism we’ve seen over the past fortnight speaks to the corruption of the media by the ideology of identitarianism. ‘The media will never forgive Israel for not bombing that hospital’, said the National Review. The liberal media ‘wanted the hospital to be destroyed’ by Israel, because this would have helped to boost their ideological conviction that ‘Israel is a violent, aggressive, oppressor nation’, said NR. This is right. The larger problem we face today is the colonisation of the media by a new generation that has been inculcated with such identitarian orthodoxies as ‘Israel Evil’, ‘Gender Fluid’, ‘White Bad’, etc etc. The media no longer tell us the truth but the ideology.
We need to wake up to the fact that the New York Times – which was very recently rocked by a generational struggle for control – and the BBC are increasingly the property of a rising class of youthful ideological influencers. This is why we have a situation where the Beeb will happily refer to a rapist with a cock as ‘a woman’ but not to radical Islamists who massacre entire families as ‘terrorists’. Why it frowns upon the evils of ‘whiteness’ but erms and ahhs on whether Hamas’s mass murder of Jews really is terrorism. The liberal media have fallen. We are living through the nadir of journalism. The lives and the rights of Jews like Mrs Lifschitz are being sacrificed to the morally infantile storytelling of a woke establishment that has truly lost its bearings.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
12 comments:
Would it be "safe to assume"? that the International Media, The MSM of any Nation, who will "pick up on a story" from either International Print media and/or TV and to some extent Social Media - to to create "column inches and/or 30 second breathless segments for TV News" - have someone sitting at a computer create "that story" that either [1] - a Print Media Editor/ Subby approves with out question, it being the story of the moment - [2] - the TV News Ed then approves for the "News Flash"(intervention to a running program) and because that "story" will now become a repeat item (ad-nauseum - with refinements) - there will be segments of the Public "who will be converted/believe" and any following verbal conversation "will not be differed from what they have read and/or seen"- even when the truth is later revealed.
Sadly we now add Social media - that fast paced transmission of data, that is sent into cyber space for reading consumption, most of the data being unverified and at a later date has to Be "deleted" as it was wrong in the first place. Sadly by then- it is to late.
Come to "aotearoa" wherever that is, the land where we're told daily that water isn't wet
Although the Israeli media has blacked out all such news as thoroughly as in (say) Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and China), the toll of “vaccination” there, in that small country, has been so obvious that many people get it, though most have kept that awareness to themselves. Thus they’ve been far more outspoken in protesting Netanyahu’s dictatorial “judicial overhaul,” which was reported audibly by the Israeli media, as well as “our free press” throughout the West.
So Netanyahu had good reason to allow that hideous attack—to get Israelis to forget about the toll of “vaccination” and their anger over his attempt to seize control of Israel’s courts. Of course, such “wag the dog” manipulation has been used forever to get people to forget news inconvenient to the government—as (say) Ronald Reagan scored his smashing military triumph in Grenada, to “save the medical students” there (though they were in no danger), and thereby change the subject from the 241 Marines killed in Lebanon (where they’d been sent for no good reason); and as Bill Clinton bombed civilian neighborhoods in Belgrade, to halt what “our free press” portrayed as Serbian “genocide,” and thereby change the subject from the scandal over his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.
The americans are even worse. No wonder they accepted ardern at harvard. Her type is right up their alley. Woke and marxist. It is so bizarre. Critical race theory is a joke on both sides.
Stockholm syndrome is real.
This poor elderly woman had not only that to contend with but also the fact that she had devoted her life to actively fighting for the rights of Gazans. What mental gymnastics must she have been performing to square her own horrific experience of antisemitism with her prior beliefs that love and care and reason would win out?
We all know how hard it is to leave behind our cherished beliefs even when the evidence of their falsity is overwhelming.
And above all else, as Brendan has so rightly pointed out, this elderly woman’s husband- her life’s partner in peace activism - remained ensnared deep in the bowels of Hamas’s web, no crucial medication, no reprieve for him, despite the fact that he speaks fluent arabic- almost certainly learned as a part of his desire to bond with the people he so wanted to show solidarity with.
Just imagine her position with regard to her husband still in captivity if, instead of shaking her captor’s hand, she’d spat in his face.
I noticed also in recent days, the media joy at seeing footage of the young woman from the peace party, having her reset broken arm lovingly bandaged by her captors on international TV. Unlike many, it appeared, that young woman reminded me very closely of a young woman i saw in some awful footage released early on in the pogrom. She was on the ground with a terrorist standing over her lifting her torso up by her agonisingly twisted right arm. I could almost hear her right humerus breaking as he did so.
I suspect this is that same woman, and she was targeted for this pro hamas propaganda because they knew the footage of them deliberately breaking her arm in the first place, was already out there.
The original footage of the atrocities may be horrific but it is the only way we can truly grasp that what is happening to us all is manipulative and to the Israelis is truly depraved.
Thanks for this sensible article. Mainstream media were very biased towards the Palestinian 'underdog' but in recent days have made token efforts to mention the 7 October barbarism. However, at present they are still failing to mention things such as that most hostages are still being held if not already murdered, that Hamas continues to fire numerous missiles at Israel, and that generous two-state solutions have been offered to the Palestinians in the past but they rejected each one because it would allow Israel to keep existing.
It's beyond horrific to see Palestinian civilians and children in their hellish suffering. The Israelis subjected to the 7 October attacks also went through hell, some lucky enough to die quickly although their loved ones suffer. As Douglas Murray noted, the idea of requiring Israel's response to be 'proportionate' is unrealistic because how can one define proportionality in response to raping women, specifically and deliberately murdering unarmed music festival attendees as they tried to run away, beheading children in front of their parents and the converse, and so on?
Once the Rothschild (KM) gained their own private homeland in Israel in 1947 through their covert political manipulations, they began to secretly view all of Palestine as their New Khazaria, and began plotting how to genocide all the Palestinians and steal all of Palestine for themselves. Their plans include their fantasy of constructing a “greater Israel” by taking over the whole Middle East and manipulating dumb American Goyim to fight and die on their behalf, taking all the Arab lands for Israel and the Khazarian Mafia (KM), so they can asset strip their wealth and natural resources, especially their crude oil.
Recent peer-reviewed Johns Hopkins genetic research by a respected Judaic MD shows that 97.5% of Judaics living in Israel have absolutely no ancient Hebrew DNA, are therefore not Semites, and have no ancient blood ties to the land of Palestine at all. By contrast, 80% of Palestinians carry ancient Hebrew DNA and thus are real Semites, and have ancient blood ties to Palestinian Land. This means that the real anti-Semites are the Israelis who are stealing Palestinian lands in order to build Israeli settlements, and it is the Israelis who are the ones tyrannizing and mass-murdering innocent Palestinians.
I was interested in reading your different interpretation of Jewish history. They may be considered by some to have a special role in God's plan but that doesn't mean they have always been squeaky clean in their actions. Far from it when they were sent to Babylon as captives.
It is the bible that dictates the Jews are to have the land but if you don't believe this then to you they don't have any right to it. Muslims also believe Allah gave them the land. Your belief system will dictate who you think should have it.
The diaspora caused the Jews to spread across the planet acquiring no doubt all sorts of genetic material There have, however always been a proportion of Jews who have lived in the area for 3,000 years.
Margaret, you say that "Your belief system will dictate who you think should have [Palestine]." We can do much better than appeal to tribal warlords in the sky. There is this thing called international law which is administered by various bodies including the International Court of Justice. Unfortunately these bodies have no teeth and the big global players flaunt their findings with impunity. But there is no way international law can be used to justify the Israeli annexation of lands beyond the 1948 borders. Their mates, particularly the US, need to withdraw their support for those illegal settlements and all Israeli expansion beyond those borders. It would not solve the Palestinian problem in one go but it would be an essential first step towards resolving this land dispute which in some form or other has been going for almost four millennia.
Barend , reading information about the International Court of Justice , does not lead me to believe the boundaries are clear at all since 'The armistice agreement of 1949 expressly preserved the territorial claims of all parties and did not purport to establish definitive boundaries'( Prof. Judge Schwebel , former President of the International Court of Justice' Further , the 1949 armistice borders were not recognized by Arab States, which continued to refuse to recognize Israel. It is contradictory for Arab States to later claim these are legal boundaries. As stated by by the International Court of Justice, the 1949 Armistice green line was not intended to be Israel's legal border.
Under international law neither Jordan , nor the Palestinian Arab people of the West Bank or Gaza Strip have a substantial claim to the occupied territories. The West Bank should be considered 'unoccupied territory'(Prof.Eugene Rostow , Prof. Emeritus Yale Law School) There is a widespread misunderstanding of the true legal situation.
You're right, Margaret. But at a pragmatic level, most Arab states today are prepared to recognise the 1948 borders as a fait accompli whether strictly speaking legit or not, on the understanding that anything beyond those is unlawful.
I see in an article last week in Aljazeera of Hezbolla, Hamas and jihad chiefs meeting and discussing the route to' victory ' on Israel.
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam abolishes it ....there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad ( Hamas Charter 1988)
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