Four hostages freed!
...and the media presents this as a bad news story
We are in Atlanta for the next two weeks visiting our son. That doesn’t mean we will stop reading and commenting on events affecting Canada’s Jewish community or on Israel’s just war of self-defense in Gaza and in the north.
Today we are delighted to bring you a new article from frequent contributor, Brian Henry. Brian has captured precisely the failure of the global media in reporting on the rescue of four Israeli hostages a week ago last Shabbat. You can read it below.
I read the Jerusalem Post every day so that I’ll have some idea what’s going on in Israel. Canadian media often just supplies Hamas’s latest propaganda release and calls it news.
Case in point: Did the CBC have a banner headline about the rescued hostages? Hardly. The CBC’s headline read: “274 Palestinians killed in Israeli raid that freed 4 hostages, Gaza Health Ministry says.”
Notice the focus isn’t on the hostages at all. The CBC prefers the media release from Hamas – a source the CBC whitewashes as the “Gaza Health Ministry”– as if it were Health Canada. But the Gaza Health Ministry is an agency run by Hamas, an arm of the terrorist organization that kidnapped the hostages in the first place.
We’ll never know how many Palestinians died in this rescue. The Israeli army says they believe they killed about 100. They were aiming at terrorist fighters, but Hamas was holding the hostages in a residential neighbourhood, so doubtless civilians were caught in the crossfire between the IDF and Hamas.
The actual raid to free the hostages didn’t kill any non-combatants; only the guards and jailors.
We know that the Palestinian who was acting as jailor for three of the hostages was a member of Hamas and a professional journalist and his father was a doctor. But doctors and journalists who hold hostages in their house don’t get to call themselves non-combatants.
Image: Noa Argamani and her father have a joyful reunion after her rescue from captivity in Gaza
The Israeli rescue party came under intense attack on their way out, with Hamas firing heavy machine guns and rocket propelled grenades in the midst of a residential neighbourhood. To defend themselves and save the hostages, the rescue party called in air support.
Hamas’s many supporters are objecting to the Israeli raid. Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s federally appointed Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, also objected. On X, she called the hostage rescue a “massacre.”
Elghawaby has a history. Readers will recall that in March, a pro-Hamas mob demonstrated in front of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, and many people called out the mob for antisemitism – what else do you call a protest against a Jewish hospital? Elghawaby objected. She accused those who pointed out the antisemitism of the protesters, of “racism” (here).
What does Elghawaby’s objection to Israel’s hostage rescue mean? Presumably it means that she would have preferred to see the hostages remain in captivity, for their captors to continue to beat and abuse them, and for their friends and family to suffer the agony of not knowing if they were even still alive.
Perhaps Elghawaby objects to the rescue party defending themselves. Presumably, in Elghawaby’s estimation, rather than risk the lives of any Palestinian civilians, the rescue party should have allowed themselves to be massacred.
On the other hand, Elghawaby assigns no responsibility to Hamas. But let’s be clear. Regardless of who fired the ordnance that killed them, Hamas is fully responsible for any civilians who died during the rescue operation.
It was criminal for Hamas to kidnap the hostages in the first place. It was criminal to hold them in a residential neighbourhood and put every civilian there at risk. And it was criminal for Hamas to attack the rescue party – just as it would be criminal for ordinary kidnappers to fire on police officers.
Moreover, it was Hamas attacking the rescue party that caused a battle to ensue, Hamas could have and should have anticipated that this would result in civilian casualties.
But of course, Hamas desires dead Palestinian civilians – the more of them, the better.
On June 10, The Wall Street Journal published an article detailing dozens of emails it had obtained that had been sent by Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza. In these emails, Sinwar makes clear that he has no interest in pursuing a ceasefire with Israel, as he believes the growing civilian death toll benefits Hamas more than a ceasefire would (here).
Sinwar explains his calculation thus: The higher the civilian death toll, the more pressure will be put on Israel to let Hamas win. And therefore, according to Sinwar, civilian deaths in Gaza are a “necessary sacrifice.”
The Wall Street Journal article is behind a paywall, but many other media around the world picked up the story. You can read about it in the Times of Israel here.
The CBC, though, ignored it.
That’s unfortunate. The uncomfortable truth is that Sinwar’s strategy depends on the CBC and other media going along with him. His strategy requires the media to report Hamas media releases uncritically, to ignore or downplay Hamas’s policy of hiding behind civilians, and to shift responsibility for any civilian deaths from Hamas to Israel.
By failing to expose Hamas’s strategy, the CBC shares responsibility for all those dead Palestinian civilians, because Hamas would have far less reason to put them in harm’s way if it couldn’t depend on the CBC’s help in spreading their propaganda.
It’s not just the CBC of course. But I pick on the CBC because I have an emotional attachment to it, nerd that I am. I’ve been listening to the CBC since I got addicted to the Ideas program when I was 16. Many Canadians share my attachment. Moreover, we pay for whatever the CBC does – to the tune of $1.4 billion a year – and I don’t want my money giving comfort and support to terrorism.
The CBC and other media have no excuse. Hamas hasn’t hidden its strategy. The stack of emails from Sinwar as detailed in the WSJ story, was new, but Hamas’s attitude toward civilian deaths is old news.
In the 1990s when Sinwar was serving time for murder, Yuval Bitton, Intelligence head of the Israeli Prison Service, asked Sinwar if his cause was worth 10,000 innocent Gazans dying. He replied, “Even 100,000 is worth it” (here).
In 2018, Carol Off of the CBC (which hasn’t always done a terrible job reporting on Hamas) interviewed Ahmed Yousef, a senior adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Carol asked: “Is there a limit to the numbers of Palestinians you would urge to become martyrs and put themselves in the way of death?”
Youself replied: “No ma'am, there is no limit for sacrifice” (here).
On October 19, 2023, Al-Arabiya TV interviewed senior Hamas official Khaled Mashaal. He upped the ante from the 100,000 civilians Sinwar is willing to sacrifice to millions. He said:
Peoples are not liberated easily. The Russians sacrificed 30 million people in World War II in order to be liberated from Hitler’s attack on them. The Vietnamese people sacrificed 3.5 million people until it defeated the Americans. Afghanistan first defeated the Soviet Union and afterwards America with millions of Martyrs.
The Algerian people [sacrificed] 6 million Martyrs over 130 years. The Palestinian people is like all the peoples, there is no people that is liberated without sacrifices” (here).
To give one more out of many examples: on October 24, 2023, Hamas Political Bureau member Ghazi Hamad was interviewed on LBC TV in Lebanon. He stated:
We need to educate Israel, and we will educate it a second time and a third time. The Al-Aqsa Flood [the Oct 7 terrorist attacks] won’t be [only] one time. No, it will be a second time, a third, and a fourth, because we have the will, the decision, and the capabilities to fight. We will pay a price, indeed, we are prepared. Allow me to tell you clearly, we are called “the people of Martyrs” and we are proud to sacrifice Martyrs (here).
Indeed, the Hamas Health Ministry doesn’t even count the number of dead; it refers only to the number of “martyrs.” And clearly Hamas is happy to sacrifice an unlimited number of martyrs in its quest to destroy Israel and kill Jews.
People call Hamas a “death cult.” That’s not a mere dismissive insult; it’s a precise description.
I’ll reiterate what I said October 15, 2023, when I first felt compelled to write about this terrible war Hamas has unleashed:
When Hamas commander Muhammad Deif, who’s believed to have planned the Oct 7 terrorist attack, was interviewed on al-Aqsa TV in 2014, he stated: “We love death like Israelis love life” (here). And many other Hamas leaders have said much the same, numerous times.
This is what Israel is fighting against.
On the other hand, it’s true Jews love life. Am Yisrael Chai, “The people of Israel live!” is our rallying cry. This is more than a cry of unity and a cry of defiance to our enemies; it also is a commandment: The people of Israel must live.
This is what the Israel Defense Forces are fighting for. And it’s why Jews in Israel and the diaspora, secular and religious, right and left, remain united about the necessity of this war – despite its horror and despite numerous disagreements about how precisely to pursue it – because life must be defended.
(You can read Brian Henry’s full first article about the October 7 War here.)
Recent News
With the Hamas having rejected Israel’s extraordinarily generous truce offer, after the Biden administration put its full diplomatic weight and credibility behind it, and pushed it through the UN Security Council, it was encouraging to see that the US has lifted restrictions on the export of armaments to Israel which were put in place a few weeks ago. At the same time we have news today from the IDF that Israel has eliminated half of the remaining Hamas fighters in Rafah. It seems now that Israel will complete the task of destroying Hamas as an organized fighting force in the next few weeks.
It would be nice to see Canada’s government taking similar measures to remove restrictions on arms exports to Israel, but we are not optimistic.
Within Israel there are rumblings of discontent within the governing coalition as they advance laws to exempt ultra-orthodox students from military service on the one hand and to increase the already heavy burden on those who do serve. Today Prime Minister Netanyahu announced the dissolution of the war cabinet which was created when National Unity joined the government in October. The Prime Minister and defense Minister will make decisions on the conduct of the war, while changes in policy will be brought to the existing Security cabinet.
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I thought I had an emotional attachment to NPR, but then October 7 happened. I spent too much time responding to show after show full of anti-Israel distortions, writing letters to the producers, and getting ignored except for once. I've stopped listening to their shows, stopped donating to them (and never will again), stopped getting their newsletters, and unsubscribed from all their feeds. Guess what, I still have plenty of interesting things to listen to on my commute, and the rage at all the manipulative language and outright lies of their pro Hamas staff has evaporated. In the end, very few people are listening to NPR, and now it'll be less. I think the same process would work for the CBC. Give it a try.
Thank you for an informative read. And as I'm always scouring articles for something that I can present to my acquaintances at the gym, to try to explain anything, I will put this analogy to use - that "it would be criminal for ordinary kidnappers to fire on police officers."
In regards to your article, more generally, so much of the media is skewed. Their readers / listeners are gullible or unbelieving or antisemitic. And can uninvolved Canadians and Americans even understand that "civilian deaths in Gaza are considered a “necessary sacrifice" by their leaders? Or really understand that the Hamas fighters believe that they are victorious whether they are successful in killing Jews, or die trying?
Israel is fighting a war like no other. Jews worldwide are still fighting a version of hundreds of years of the same onslaught.
Am Yisrael Chai.