Hamas And Its Media Allies Baffle With Bulls***

The story of the current Israel-Hamas conflict happens to be extremely simple.

Hamas is a genocidal Jew-hating organization that openly seeks the extermination of Israel. This makes it only the latest and most radical iteration of a radical Muslim movement that has sought Israel’s destruction since long before Israel was born. That mission has not waned in the 76 years of modern Israel’s existence. Unfortunately, that mission also happens to be the passionate belief system of a vast majority of Muslims living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

Israel is a democracy, the world’s only Jewish state, and has repeatedly sought to make land-for-peace deals with Arab countries and organizations. Those concessions have bought Israel no friends in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Far from it: Concessions have generally emboldened Israel’s enemies.

That’s exactly what happened in Gaza.

In 2005, Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in an attempt to stop the costs in blood and treasure associated with policing the area. All Jewish assets in the Gaza Strip were promptly destroyed by Palestinian Arabs.

Elections were held in the Gaza Strip; Hamas was elected to lead and promptly consolidated their control by killing members of the Palestinian Authority. They then stole as much international aid as they could to build rockets and terror infrastructure, ignored the needs of their population entirely, and launched repeated rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. 

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For the last two years or so, as Hamas themselves say, the organization attempted to deceive Israel into believing they had been deterred from large-scale terrorist action. Then, on October 7, Simchat Torah, the happiest day on the Jewish calendar, at least 1,500 Hamas terrorists and even some “civilian” fellow travelers crossed the Israeli border by breaching the border wall around Gaza and killed some 1,200 Israelis in their beds at a music festival and elsewhere. They raped women, then murdered them or dragged them in captivity back to Gaza; they kidnapped or slaughtered babies. 

Gaza and the West Bank are not filled with moderate Muslims. Far from it. They are filled with people who despise the state of Israel and agree wholeheartedly with Hamas’ genocidal aims.

This is the entire problem: Were these areas filled with moderates, Israel might find a peace partner. That peace partner does not exist. As a new poll from the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) shows, 75% of those polled in the Gaza Strip and West Bank support the October 7 massacre; 76% support Hamas; 98% have a negative view of America; and 78% believe in the total extermination of Israel.

As the old saw goes: If the Palestinians were to put down their arms tomorrow, they would have a state; if Israel were to put down their arms tomorrow, they would all be dead.

So, if the conflict is that clear-cut, then why does it seem so complex?

The answer is a strategy undertaken by the radical Muslim world, its far-Left allies, some far-Right allies, and the international media. It’s called baffling with bulls***.

Here’s how it works.

First, you construct institutions that mirror your perspective, so as to create an echo chamber. For example, you take over or create pseudo-“human rights” organizations dedicated to promoting the anti-Israel point of view. Then you trot them out routinely in order to claim that, despite all evidence, Israel is the real threat to human rights. 

How can you tell which “human rights” organizations are biased and illegitimate? It’s not that hard: If you’re a human rights organization, presumably you should have had some pretty strong condemnation of Hamas’ assault on Jews, the worst since the Holocaust. 

Here is a partial list of those who have been extraordinarily weak in their condemnations of Hamas or who have engaged in full-scale moral equivalence with Israel’s defensive actions in Gaza: 

• UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell
• Amnesty International
• WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus
• The International Committee of the Red Cross
• U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights Volker Türk
• The U.N. Relief and Works Agency
• Save the Children
• Doctors Without Borders
• U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
• Human Rights Watch
• Oxfam
• Open Society Foundations

And the list goes on and on.

This sort of attitude is extraordinarily common in the legacy media, as we’ve been detailing for weeks.

Once you have your mouthpieces, the true magic begins: You begin the baffling.

You obscure the main story entirely. Instead, you focus on details so as to avoid discussing the main story. You try to discredit a single detail from Israel, and then use it to suggest that everything emerging from Israel is false — despite the fact that Israel has a robust free press and routinely admits to mistakes and despite the even more obvious fact that Israel’s enemies routinely lie. That lying is, in fact, a key component of their strategy.

Take, for example, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, a consistent propaganda opponent of Israel, dating back to his days at Al Jazeera. He suggested that because the Israeli government’s public relations team may have mislabeled a calendar in their exposé on Hamas’ terror tunnels beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, this means that Israel is a totally unreliable source on everything.

Of course Al-Shifa was a military site. It was used as such. There is surveillance footage from the day of the attacks showing terrorists ushering hostages into the hospital.

Medical personnel were standing there, who knew Hamas was operating from Al-Shifa. They worked with them. They then told the media lies about it.

And the media ran with that story.

A witness from Al-Shifa even talked about how it was used as a base by Hamas.

Yet the big story, obviously, is whether a calendar on the wall of a terror tunnel kept track of terrorist hostage handlers or not.

It’s not just Mehdi Hasan. It’s the usual suspects at CNN too. CNN reported over the weekend that the Israel Defense Forces, in showing the media the weaponry found at Al-Shifa, “might have rearranged weaponry” prior to exposing that weaponry to the media. The implication is that Israel was falsifying something. Which is absurd. Were Israel to leave all weaponry in place, that would be dangerous to the press, given booby traps have already killed or wounded a high number of Israeli soldiers.

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We’ve seen this sort of game laundered into false accusations by pro-Hamas forces that real photos of burned babies are, instead, “AI generated” images; the insistence by pro-Hamas propagandists that if babies were mostly burned alive rather than beheaded, this somehow means Israel is dishonest and Hamas is its moral equivalent; and now, most amazingly, that Hamas didn’t even conduct a massacre at all.

That’s a contention making its way around the internet and the Arabic world thanks to a report from Haaretz, a far-Left Israeli publication. That story from Haaretz states that according to Israeli officials, Hamas terrorists initially didn’t know about the music festival they ended up devastating — that instead, they “found out about the Nova music festival through drones or from those flying in parachutes, and directed the terrorists to the location using their comms system.” That report also included a single unsourced police allegation that an IDF helicopter targeting terrorists at the site “apparently harmed a few partygoers who were in the area.” The police have, by the way, denied the report, stating, “the police investigation does not refer to the activity of IDF forces and therefore no indication was given of harm to civilians as a result of aerial activity at the site.”

Nonetheless, that report has now metastasized into the pro-Hamas allegation that Israel slaughtered its own citizens en masse. The most viral X (Twitter) account on the site yesterday tweeted, “Will you CONDEMN ISRAEL NOW, given they have ADMITTED to Haaretz (Israeli media) that ISRAELI HELICOPTERS MURDERED ISRAELI CIVILIANS on October 7th?”

Yesterday, the Palestinian Authority — the supposed “moderate” peace partner — announced that Israeli helicopters had killed all 364 people at the music festival, citing the report in Haaretz. No surprise there: The leader of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas, is a full-scale Holocaust denier.

The baffling with bulls*** isn’t relegated to focusing on details, then blowing them up into entire false narratives. It also extends to giving credence to total liars. That’s precisely why the legacy media claimed that Israel had bombed a hospital early in the conflict, when in actuality Palestinian Islamic Jihad had; why the legacy media have claimed each and every day that electricity was out at Al-Shifa, when it wasn’t; and why they have claimed that Israel is targeting civilians, when they are not.

In fact, as journalist David Collier points out, the media routinely use accounts from open terror supporters for their Gaza coverage: Dr. Khaled Abu Samra, who claimed that Israel was shooting at those waving white flags and posted that “history is being made” on October 7; Mohammed Abu Salmiya, director of Al-Shifa Hospital, who routinely praises terrorists on his social media; Munir al-Borsh, director general of the Palestinian Health Ministry, who claimed dogs were eating bodies of civilians and who is a part of the Hamas government.

There is one other element to baffling with bulls***: pretending you just don’t know enough to make a judgment between Israel and their enemies. Who knows what’s true and what’s not? It’s just all too complicated to say. This allows journalists — who are supposed to be focused on truth — to give equal credence to propagandists and truth-tellers.

“Both sides!” they cry, as they host people who openly call for the destruction of the state of Israel and valorize Hamas.

It doesn’t take much to turn a clear narrative into a muddy one. Just some lies, some laser-like focus on irrelevant detail, an echo chamber, some shoulder-shrugging ignorance when questioned, and a lot of radical and fellow travelers to promote all that bulls***.

From these elements, truth can be turned to falsehood.

And we’re watching it happen in real time.