This is absolutely incorrect.
You don't know America that well then, if you believe this is the case.
Saw a journalist almost battered to death by some illegal settlers in Palestine yesterday. The irony was - HE got arrested on a stretcher covered in blood!
A cameraman films while smoke plumes billow during Israeli air strikes in Gaza City on October 12, 2023. (Mohammed Abed via Getty Images)
Why We Shouldn’t Trust ‘The Facts’ Coming Out of Gaza
Abdalla al-Jamal was a ‘journalist.’ He was also guarding hostages for Hamas.
By Eli Lake
June 9, 2024
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-we-shouldnt-trust-the-facts-coming#
Imagine, if you will, living during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. You come upon an article in a small progressive newspaper, describing how the CIA had a plan to poison the water supply in Tehran. Later, you learn that the reporter who wrote that piece was one of the people responsible for keeping U.S. citizens hostage at the embassy. You’d probably start doubting that reporter, his outlet, and whether news can actually be reported from inside the Ayatollah’s Islamic Republic.
Well, that’s pretty much what happened in Gaza.
After Israel rescued four Hamas hostages over the weekend, Israel Defense Forces said that three detainees had been held in an apartment belonging to Abdalla al-Jamal. Al-Jamal, who was killed in the raid that liberated Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrey Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, had been a correspondent for The Palestine Chronicle. Since October 7, al-Jamal had published 16 stories for the Chronicle, an English-language news website and nonprofit registered in Mountlake Terrace, Washington, which has featured contributions from prominent progressive American intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky.
And al-Jamal’s articles read like a parody of Palestinian propaganda.
“Cries of Gaza Survivors: When Will We Rescue Our Children from Under the Rubble?” blares one headline. “Actions, Not Words,” featuring interviews with local Gazans pleading with Hezbollah to increase attacks on northern Israel, is another. For one of his last stories, al-Jamal covered survivors of what his outlet called the “Nuseirat School Massacre.” A Gazan named Ibrahim Ayad said that Israel’s strikes on the building that harbored between twenty and thirty terrorists were “the very definition of genocide.”
Photo of Abdallah Al Jamal shared by The Palestine Chronicle. ( @PalestineChron via X)
In an obituary, the Chronicle wrote that al-Jamal (who wrote a total of 107 stories) had contributed on a volunteer basis. But if the Chronicle ever paid al-Jamal for his work, they could be in violation of U.S. counterterrorism laws preventing any material support or payment to designated terrorist groups like Hamas.
Whether or not he was paid, Al-Jamal’s reports offer a window into the slanted coverage of Gaza in the western media. If one wonders why it always seems that every building hit by Israel is a hospital and every casualty is a child or a woman, the story of a journalist with a side hustle as a hostage guard provides some answers.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has said 108 reporters and media workers have been killed so far in the Gaza war. As the story of al-Jamal shows, the definition of “journalist” in a place like Gaza is loose to say the least. And yet that statistic has been recycled many times over since the war began, painting the picture of Israel as a criminal regime.
Hamas’s most effective weapon is the war’s high body count. According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 36,000 Palestinians have perished since the war began. That’s more than thirty times the approximately 1,200 people slaughtered by Hamas in Israel on October 7.
The Gaza Ministry of Health, like all branches of Gaza’s local government, is controlled by Hamas. And yet very few mainstream journalists have expressed skepticism about the statistics it publishes. During Israel’s raid, which freed four hostages, several outlets focused on the number of civilians that allegedly died in the process. One BBC headline, for example, said: “Gaza Health Ministry Says Israeli Hostage Rescue Killed 274 Palestinians.”
But recently, a Western report has cast doubt on the accuracy of one of Hamas’s key facts, namely that “70 percent” of Palestinian casualties in the war are women and children.
On June 7, the Associated Press published an analysis discrediting this claim. By combing through actual data behind the ministry’s figures, the agency found that the percentage peaked in late October, when 64.4 percent of 6,745 dead were women and children. That percentage dropped to 59.3 percent for casualties reported on January 5, then 45 percent for March 29, and 38.1 percent for April 30.
The total percentage of women and children casualties in the war so far is 54.3 percent. Adult-aged males are most likely to be combatants in wars. The AP analysis shows that the ratio between combatants and civilians killed in Gaza is closer to one to one, a figure much closer to counterinsurgency wars America and its allies have fought in the Middle East.
The 70 percent figure has become a key talking point for Israel’s opponents. It was cited prominently, for example, in a report by UN Women in January. Here is that figure again from an NPR story at the end of February.
The AP analysis is a watershed moment, said David Adesnik, the director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who has tracked the casualty numbers since the conflict began.
“This is a scrutiny that has not been applied by any mainstream prestige outlet until now,” Adesnik told The Free Press. “And it’s particularly important coming from the AP because they were among the most vocal in defending the ministry’s credibility.”
The AP analysis only goes so far. Adesnik pointed out, for example, that the agency still hasn’t examined how at least 10,000 of the total casualties reported from the Ministry of Health lack complete information like names, ages, and gender. Adesnik argues that these statistics were not based on reports from morgues and hospitals, but rather what the ministry initially called “reliable media reports.”
Which brings us back to al-Jamal. If the IDF is correct that the hostages were rescued from his apartment, then it indicts more than just The Palestine Chronicle. A Hamas-run ministry has relied on media reports in a place where many alleged “journalists” are helping the Hamas war effort. Perhaps the Western press should notice that its supposedly objective sources in Gaza are sometimes the combatants.
Eli Lake is a Free Press columnist. Follow him at @EliLake, and read his piece, “Rashida Tlaib Speaks at Detroit Conference Tied to Terrorist Group.”
Can you please stick to the current conflict rather than delving back into the history books?
Wtf, what makes you think I look up Hasan Nasrallah, lol.
I'm actually American and you're Canadian.
Well I mean technically not wrong Americans at least vast majority of Americans do not practice their faiths, someone asks an American what religion they are it’s like saying your nationality but knowing nothing of the history of it.
english.almayadeen.net
pjmedia.com
