GNITN - Special Edition

Israel At War Day 648

The Truth Is Out There

Fighting On 8 Fronts

In an interview on the Fox News channel, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the host Mark Levin that Israel is fighting not on 7 fronts, but 8 fronts. The 8th front is the lamestream media he said and he told Levin this after the host noted that these news agencies routinely use Hamas sources for their reporting:

Well, that’s the other front. We have a seven front war and we’ve won on all fronts, but this the eight front, this disinformation campaign…it takes a second for a lie to circulate the world and you have to battle it with the only weapon you have, which is the truth and truth is slower than lies and more difficult to ascertain because you have to get the facts…When you lie you can say anything and it’s instantaneous. When you tell the truth you have to ascertain the facts and until you do that in the electronic age, boy that lie can encircle the earth, you know a thousand times, so it’s a handicap. But we’ll fight the information war, too.

I know when I talk with people about the war I usually have to either educate them or reeducate them after they’ve listened to hours and hours of lies or at best half-truths. One person I begged to stop listening to 60 Minutes or the BBC so they could see what was really happening. Unfortunately, they were adamant and they walked away very unhappy with me because I just wasn’t agreeing with them. After almost 650 daily updates on this war I see all the lies that Hamas puts out, the false reports and numbers are endless and I can spot them a mile away. But if all you do is let these media outlets literally brainwash you, well the detox can be long and hard, but worth it.

One Example

In an article from the Jewish News Syndicate the BBC admitted that a documentary they commissioned featured the son of a Hamas minister, something they failed to disclose:

A BBC report published Monday confirmed the existence of an ethical and editorial issue in a documentary about Gaza that the broadcaster had pulled offline in February, but claimed this was the result of an honest mistake by an external production firm.

The 31-page review by Peter Johnston, director of the BBC’s Editorial Complaints and Reviews department, upheld complaints of misleading audiences of the documentary film “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” due to the fact that its main narrator, a boy named Abdullah, was later found to be the son of a Hamas government official, Ayman Alyazouri, deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas-run Gaza government.

The BBC admits that they were responsible for truth fiasco:

The London-based production company Hoto Films, which produced the documentary for the BBC, “had to bring this information to the BBC’s attention” but did not and is therefore “the party with most responsibility for this failure,” Johnston wrote.

They seemed to think that the father had no influence at all on the boy’s opinions, but that is hardly believable:

Johnston also wrote that he had “not seen or heard any evidence to support a suggestion that the Narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the Programme in any way.”

David Collier, an independent British journalist who exposed the family ties of the narrator Abdullah, dismissed the inquiry’s findings as insufficient and criticized the latter assertion.

“They didn’t find evidence to suggest ‘daddy’ had any input. Seriously? He only went home to his Hamas daddy EVERY NIGHT,” Collier wrote on X.

More Examples

The admission was performed internally, though and that in and of itself makes this suspect. In another article earlier in the war, the BBC was found to have violated their own editorial guidelines at least 1,553 times in a four month period starting with the beginning of the conflict. In another article on the controversy and the misinformation reported as fact we read this:

“This documentary appears to have been a failure of due diligence by the BBC, with Hamas propaganda promoted as reliable fact at the taxpayers’ expense,” said Alex Hearn, director of Labour Against Antisemitism.

“Misinformation is the story of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and this is not an isolated case. There has been a failure of news platforms to adequately scrutinize sources and a willingness to regurgitate Hamas disinformation repeatedly,” Hearn continued. “There needs to be an urgent investigation into how this happened once again.”

And the newest of the above referenced article tells us the result which was tepid in its response. One journalist noted this:

Investigative journalist David Collier, who was the first to expose the controversial nature of the film, questioned how the filmmakers, and particularly the two local cameramen, could not have known of Abdullah’s family ties.

“The two photographers followed these children around for months. They absolutely knew who he was. Did either of the producers?” Collier asked. “How did the BBC let a son of a Hamas minister walk around looking for sympathy and demonizing Israel for an hour in a BBC documentary.

And a former executive with the BBC added his opinion on his former company:

Danny Cohen, a former BBC executive who has said that there is an “institutional crisis” at the national broadcaster and called for an independent inquiry into its Gaza war coverage, told The Telegraph that the latest revelations confirmed his fears that the broadcaster risks becoming a Hamas shill.

“This appears to be another appalling example of journalistic failure and anti-Israel bias,” he said. “Questions must be asked as to whether the BBC carried out the most basic journalistic checks.”

As a Christian I am always taught that I need to make sure I use my discernment all the time. And as I research my daily updates I am leaning on that discernment when I report on the war in Israel. The amount of antisemitism is rampant and it definitely affects these reports. Is Israel perfect? No, but neither is Hamas or the other terrorists and Netanyahu is right when he calls the media another front in their fight. Fortunately for us the information available to us is not restricted to a handful of sources anymore. As a popular television show heralded the truth is out there. I pray we discipline ourselves to find it.