Reposted fromThe Australian.
Hamas lies were easily swallowed by the woke West. Hamas strategically exploited Western media, governments and institutions after October 7 to “convert Jewish deaths into Israeli guilt".
That's why, in Hamas’s thinking, October 7 was an outstanding success. The deaths of up to 70,000 Palestinian Arabs bought the terror group exactly the anti-Israel publicity it sought.
The Harvard declaration by a coalition of student groups the day after Hamas's brutal murder of 1200 innocents, taking of 250 hostages and rape of young women at a music festival for peace declared Israel was to blame for all the violence.
In Australia, a range of Muslim preachers echoed the same message and on October 9 people chanted “F..k the Jews" at the Sydney Opera House.
Hamas got from the “decolonisation left" exactly what it wanted. The UN, various NGOs and our own journalists’ union played into what was always a festival of antisemitism.
Journalists who should have known better openly demanded reporters not quote a democratically elected government and rely instead on sources linked to a terror organisation that is a clone of Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
This column asked on July 26 why so few of the many media organisations that had reported Israel was deliberately murdering journalists had revealed that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had now admitted many so-called reporters killed, including from Qatar-owned Al Jazeera, were in fact Hamas fighters.
These organisations - the ABC, Nine newspapers, Guardian Australia, SBS - have since then largely failed to reveal the latest admissions by the UN, aid and medical charities and Amnesty International about of alleged (and untrue) 'starvation in Gaza, Hamas looting of UN and Israeli aid, the use of rape on October 7 and the presence of Hamas militants among staff of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Within 10 months of the war’s end it is clear most claims made by Israel during the war and rejected by Western journalists, academics and governments, were true. Even today the media accuses Israel of violating the ceasefire when Hamas has refused to hand over its weapons, as required by the October 2025 peace deal.
Never slow with reports criticising Israel, Amnesty International waited more than two years to release its findings about October 7. The report, released in December last year, verified evidence of rape against women and girls as well as crimes against humanity.
“The overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians and most of the locations targeted were residential communities," Amnesty found. How surprising.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has been a staunch defender of UNRWA and reinstated $6m a year in aid to the organisation in March 2024 after the UN gave itself a clean bill of health apart from 12 employees sacked for participating in the October 7 murders.
Readers may not know that on June 11 this year UNRWA sacked another 70 workers. On June 13 The Times of Israel reported Christian Saunders, UNRWA’s acting chief at the time, saying the sackings “were taken further to an assessment of the safety and security of UNRWA operations in Gaza".
UNRWA refused to acknowledge the sackings were linked to Hamas membership even though UN Watch and the Israeli government have supplied information to UNRWA suggesting 400 staff are Hamas members.
In Australia, the ABC reported online on July 13 that the UN said that Hamas militants had stormed a food depot and disrupted aid deliveries in Gaza. Ramiz Alakbarov, speaking for the UN food program, said armed personnel had assaulted truck drivers and stolen aid. “These incidents are not isolated. They … reflect an increasingly dangerous pattern of intimidation, violence and obstruction … targeting … humanitarian operations," Alakbarov said.
But for most of the war the Australian media swallowed Hamas lines that the Israel Defence Forces were shooting civilians at aid depots. As if Israel would pay for aid to go to Gaza and then deliberately kill people trying to collect it.
UNRWA has always denied it allowed Hamas to penetrate Gaza’s hospitals and, like most medical and nursing NGOs, has claimed innocent medical staff were being targeted by the IDF.
Yet an investigation by The Times of Israel published on July 27 named several senior medicos who, like journalists who were also Hamas fighters, were mentioned for their military roles in lists of the dead published by Hamas and PIJ.
The Geneva-based International Council of Nurses claimed in September last year that Mohammed Akram al-Kafarna - “one of the leaders of the Palestinian nursing profession in Gaza" - was one of hundreds of healthcare workers killed by the IDF.
But Hamas last month published a photo of al-Kafarna in full military gear with a gun, identifying him as a member of its Nidal Nasser Battalion. The Times of Israel named and identified 18 senior nurses and healthcare workers who were all male combatants. Some had been mourned as medical heroes by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).
Worse, a joint Israel-UNICEF study has found not only are Gazan infants not starving but the incidence of low-weight infants is lower in Gaza than in much of the Middle East. Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon told The Jerusalem Post on August 7 that the UNICEF-led study was proof claims of famine in Gaza were a “false narrative against Israel".
“Israel is not starving children. Israel is fighting Hamas terrorism, while Hamas uses civilians in Gaza as human shields," he said.
Using World Health Organisation methodology, the survey found acute infant malnutrition rates across Gaza “ranged between 0.2 per cent and 0.8 per cent’’. The Post said: “These levels are comparable to or below those recorded in Gaza prior to the Israel-Hamas war, and are significantly lower than those recorded in neighbouring countries, including Egypt, Jordan and Syria."
UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese gave the game away. At a UN press conference last September, Albanese said the death toll in Gaza was 680,000 (it’s 70,000 including terrorists), including 380,000 infants under five. When told there were only 341,790 children under five in Gaza to begin with, Albanese said she used the higher figure deliberately because “it had the effect I wanted".
As Matt Field wrote in That Jew on Substack on August 9, in a piece on antisemitism and postcolonialism since October 7: “Hamas planned the attack. The institutions planned the response. Only one of them knew what the other would do."
Hamas “had studied Western progressive institutions, their ideological architecture, their frameworks, their reflexes - and they concluded that those institutions would convert Jewish death into Israeli guilt, that the human rights infrastructure would perform against Israel on schedule, and that the aftermath would damage Israel more than the attack damaged Hamas."
That piece, now also published on The Future of Jewish website, was originally called “What Hamas Understood That We Didn’t".
Everyone at the Bondi royal commission should read it.
Chris Mitchell began his career in late 1973 in Brisbane on the afternoon daily, The Telegraph. He worked on the Townsville Daily Bulletin, the Daily Telegraph Sydney and the Australian Financial Review before joining The Australian in 1984. He was appointed editor of The Australian in 1992 and editor in chief of Queensland Newspapers in 1995. He returned to Sydney as editor in chief of The Australian in 2002 and held that position until his retirement in December 2015.