The Media's Eager Terrorist Lies That Set the Middle East on Fire and Got Synagogues Burned to the Ground

Drew Holden put together a tremendous thread yesterday documenting the propaganda media's many "errors" and lies and eager assistance of their terrorist extremist ally's disinformation campaign.

Today, he teams up with a Free Beacon reporter to write that thread up into a less twittery sort of thing.

Both are very much recommended. This post takes from both.

When a hospital in the Gaza Strip blew up on Tuesday night, U.S. and international news media uncritically reported Hamas terrorists' claims of an Israeli massacre. The White House and Israel have since refuted that account, citing imagery, intercepts, and open-source information.

Many of the same outlets have obsessed over the spread of "misinformation" in recent years yet created their own by parroting Hamas during a war the terror group savagely provoked with Israel.

The journalistic fiasco was an example of the media's tendency to adopt the Palestinians' narrative about the conflict with Israel, even when that narrative is unsupported by the facts. In this case, there were geopolitical consequences: U.S. Democratic lawmakers and Arab leaders condemned Israel for the bombing, Jordan canceled a planned summit with Biden, and riots broke out in the West Bank and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Immediately after the hospital blast, which occurred around 7:30 p.m. local time, outlets reported that Israel had bombed the facility, killing hundreds of Palestinians. The reports generally referred to their source--the Hamas terrorist group that governs Gaza--as "Palestinian officials" or "health authorities."

That shows a clear intent to deceive -- they knew they were on shaky ground reporting the terrorist group Hamas' claims, and they knew that The Wrong People would Seize and Pounce upon this as a reason to disbelieve them, so they just lied about their sources, claiming they were disinterested, third-party "health authorities." Maybe from UNICEF or something.

Definitely see the article for all the propaganda outlets pushing actual terrorist propaganda.

This BBC propagandist was particularly Authoritative in offering his own Expert Testimony that this must have been Israel, because Hamas rockets just can't kill 500 people at a time like this one did.

Source for that "500 people killed"?

Third party "health authorities," of course. And by third-party Health Authorities, we mean "Hamas terrorist propaganda ministers."

We know that 500 people died because Hamas said so. We know Israel must be behind this because Hamas says so. Also, we know Israel is behind it because Hamas' rockets can't kill 500 people in one go, and we know 500 people died because Hamas says so.

You really have to absolutely hate Jews to be willing to pretend you don't see the circular logic here.

Journalists on X also promoted Hamas's version of events without proof. Then, as evidence began to emerge suggesting that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas affiliate in Gaza, bombed the hospital, many of those journalists fought to prevent the media coverage from shifting.

The "journalists" trying the most to rescue Hamas' propaganda effort? One was the Washington Post's terrorist whore Karen Attiah, who recently retweeted a statement that the slaughter of innocents is "what decolonization looks like" -- what, you thought that this would all be singing and chanting? No, some babies are going to have to be riddled with bullets, Bae...

Karen Attiah @KarenAttiah

A basic critical, technical question of the hospital bombing: To ask whether a typical Hamas rocket is even capable of that much damage?

Fellow journalists, do your jobs.

LOL.

"Fellow journalists," LOL.

The other "journalist" aggressively trying to repair Hamas' damaged propaganda was the guy who engaged in aggressive War Crimes Denialism claiming that Hamas was just striking military targets and that we had no evidence, none at all, that babies were decapitated.

Like the last terrorist, this terrorist is not a "journalist," but a journalist-herder, using his Absolute Moral Authority as a Person of Virtuous Color to tell other "journalists" the proper propaganda line to repeat:

Adam Elmahrek @adamelmahrek

Seeing lots of reporting saying "both sides" say the other caused the hospital bombing.

If you're not making it clear that Palestinian rockets haven't historically been able to kill more than one or two at a time, you're not doing this right https://twitter.com/adamelmahrek/s

This post is unavailable.

Even this terrorist cocksucker had to delete one of his own posts -- that must have been one honey of a tweet, if even he feels it's so egregiously false that he must hide the evidence. I mean, look at the tweets he keeps up!

Adam Elmahrek @adamelmahrek

How U.S. media would cover the hospital bombing if they were treating it like a Hamas attack:

Israeli militants launched a deadly terrorist strike on a hospital in Gaza today, killing hundreds of innocent people, including the sick, elderly and children.

That is exactly what they did.

Someone asks him if he isn't violating his own "rule" -- after all, he rushed to claim this was a Jew Terror Bombing, and it turned out to be a rocket launched by Hamas terrorist ally the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

He says no, no hypocrisy at all. And the US media has been "very cautious" in how they all immediately took Hamas' word about the Jew Terror Bombing.

Steven Greenhut @StevenGreenhut

Doesn't your quick posting of this (note reports suggesting it might have been a Hamas misfire) along with your conclusions, you know, undermine everything you've been lecturing us about for days about verifying facts?

Adam Elmahrek @adamelmahrek

Not at all. U.S. media has been very cautious in how they describe what happened at the hospital, and I haven't said they shouldn't be.

But that standard isn't applied the other way. That's my point

Another Twitter user confronted him with CNN's "very cautious" reporting repeating:

I'm not going to call it "reporting" any more, I'm going to call it, more accurately, "repeating." And I won't call them "reporters," but repeaters.

So this terrorist is lying. 1, the media did eagerly repeat Hamas' propaganda lie, and 2, you were not just making a point about balance, you also were ranting about the evil perfidity of the Jew Terror Bombing Campaign.

He also retweeted this claim from "The Middle East Eye" that the Jews are lying about this being an errant rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, it's all those evil Jews!

Centrism Fan Acct @Wilson__Valdez

Are you same 'journalist' who just went on a week-long tirade about verifying the facts (needing to see babies beheaded) before pushing inflammatory claims? Just checking, because that would be pretty crazy journalistic behavior if you were the same guy.

Enough of this terrorist.

Washington Post reporter Evan Hill, Post columnist Karen Attiah, and Los Angeles Times reporter Adam Elmahrek last week nitpicked evidence that Hamas gunmen beheaded the Israeli babies they killed in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that sparked the Gaza war.

The media gradually backtracked on blaming Israel for the hospital explosion--albeit without admitting they were wrong in the first place.

This drives me insane. The media constantly accuses others of disinformation and presses to have them deplatformed and for advertisers to boycott them. When it's pointed out the media pushes much more disinformation than anyone else, they always say the same thing: "We get things wrong occasionally (LOL), but when we do, we own up to our mistakes and try to make things right."

BUT.

MISTAKES.

The most they do is stealth correct an article or delete a tweet. They never explain "We got this wrong, and here's why, and here's what we're doing to make sure we don't make the same mistake in the future."

They have refused to admit error on RussiaGate;

on the Laptop;

on the vaccines;

on the need for lockdowns;

on the need for masking;

on the threat posed to children by covid;

and on and on and on. And not a single longform article pouring through their old reporting explaining how they'd been misled by sources. (If they were "misled by sources" -- they're actually co-conspirators in these lies.)

The Washington Post and New York Times still cling to the Pulitzers they were awarded for their disgracefully dishonest Russiagate reporting repeating, insisting they got everything right!

Hey, when they reported repeated their political-operative sources' lies, they got that all right -- their political-operative sources really did tell those lies!

They successfully transcribed those lies and did no fact-checking at the time or retroactively! Pulitzer Me!

In fact, the New York Times "reported" that their gross deadly error wasn't their fault at all! The real villain here -- "fast-moving events."

Drew Holden @DrewHolden360

If you're wondering what the @nytimes has taken from their & their press peers' failure, it's that they did nothing wrong & were the victims of circumstance: "The fast-moving events highlighted the difficulty of covering the war between Israel and Hamas."

Jordan Schaechtel had a great tweet, showing how CNN's coverage shifted slightly, but was still firm on the Propaganda Take-Away: No matter who bombed the hospital, Israel is to blame.

Here was their headline when they were pinning the "air strike" on Israel:

Once they discovered their initial propaganda lie was unsustainable, they deleted it, without admitting error.

But they still blamed Israel for any deaths -- their blockade was slowing critical medical aid to the victims of the bombing (whoever did it).

Your "disinformation" earns deplatforming, demonetization, and debanking.

Their disinformation earns Pulitzers.

Drew Holden wrote that he can't get these two screencaps out of his head:

If Trump isn't allowed on television because his Disinformation is "too dangerous" to transmit, what can we say about the media's Disinformation, which has the world's Jewry hiding in their basements awaiting the slaughter of the "Arab Street" that the media deliberately inflamed?

Related: Nate Silver says "Please have sympathy for the propaganda media!"

Nate Silver @NateSilver538 · Oct 18

As someone who frequently criticizes the media, I'd just say you should be approximately 10x more sympathetic to media fuck-ups on stories that are unfolding in real time (i.e. over minutes/hours versus days/weeks). It's literally 10x harder.

The media straight-up falsified the sourcing of this story by claiming it came from "health authorities," instead of the truth, which was "Hamas terrorist commanders."

No "fast-moving events" forced them to lie about who was telling this lie. That was their own choice, made with the intent of deceiving the reader.

He does grudgingly allow this:

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

To be less sympathetic, media outlets need to be a lot better about admitting when they fucked up, though.

Yes, maybe the disinformation peddlers who say that they don't spread disinformation because they "always admit their errors" should try admitting their errors once in a while.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:17 PM

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