jaydog
Football God
...We come to U.S. media — mainstream media, corporate media, legacy media. However you wish to name them, they have gambled and lost, too. Their coverage of the Gaza crisis has been so egregiously and incautiously unbalanced in Israel’s behalf that we might count their derelictions as unprecedented. When the surveys are conducted and the returns are in, their unscrupulous distortions, their countless omissions, and—the worst offense, in my view—their dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza will have further damaged their already collapsing credibility.
...We come, finally, to The New York Times. No medium in America has had further to fall in consequence of its reporting on Israel and Gaza since last October. And the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record, fairly suffocating amid its well-known hubris, falls as we speak. It has erupted, by numerous accounts including implicitly its own, in an internal uproar over reportage from Israel and Gaza so shabby—so transparently negligent—that it, like Israel, may never fully restore its reputation.
Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, described the crisis on Eighth Avenue better than anyone in the Jan. 30 segment of The Hill’s daily webcast, Rising. “We’re looking at one of the biggest media scandals of our time,” he told Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave. Indeed. This well captures the gravity of The Times’s willful corruptions...
...The Israelis began alleging that Hamas militias were guilty of rape and sexual violence during their Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel more or less immediately after the events of that day. They claimed to be developing “considerable evidence”—Gettleman’s phrase in his initial report, on Dec. 4—from witnesses, photographs, and emergency medical teams. In the same piece, Gettleman quoted a police official saying that women and men numbering in the dozens had been raped on Oct. 7. Women’s rights advocates convening at the U.N. at this time introduced the thought that the alleged sexual abuses were part of a pattern: They were systematic, weapons of terror.
...After these initial assertions...the drift was clear. “Extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence of killings, including videos posted by Hamas fighters themselves,” Gettleman wrote, “support the allegations.”... “witness testimony and documentary evidence” includes a link to a lengthy piece on Hamas’s post–Oct. 7 political deliberations that makes no mention of rape or sexual violence and has nothing whatever to do with the topic of Gettleman’s piece.
Gettleman’s byline did not appear again in The Times until Dec. 28, when his sprawling investigative takeout appeared under the headline, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct.7.” It took as its central figure “the woman in the black dress.” This refers to a corpse found and videoed on the side of a road on Oct. 8. “In a grainy video,” Gettleman writes, “you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.”
Gettleman reports this woman’s identity as Gal Abdush, a 34–year-old mother of two who was partying with her husband along the Gaza border in the early hours of Oct. 7 and was later murdered, as was her husband. Within seven paragraphs of his lead, it appears perfectly clear Gettleman has taken the “evidence” bait as proffered by Israeli officials: ...Equally, The Times “verified” the video, did it? In what way this? What did it verify, exactly? That the video existed? Is Gettleman suggesting that The Times verified from the video that Abdush was raped? No video of a dead body could verify this.
This video has a strange story, to stay with it briefly. Gettleman wrote that it “went viral,” but it is nowhere to be found on the internet, and nobody recalls referring to Abdush as “the woman in the black dress.” There is also a chronology question attaching to this video, as a Jan. 3 report in Mondoweiss analyzes. Gettleman recounts the last text message, with time-stamp, Gal Abdush sent to her family. During this time Abdush’s husband, Nagy, was with her and sent his own texts to the family, also time-stamped. Four minutes elapsed between Gal Abdush’s last message and the time Nagy Abdush messaged the family to report his wife’s death—a message Gttleman did not mention. Nagy Abdush made no reference to rape. He sent his own final message 44 minutes later – a message Gettleman’s report does mention...
...Since Gettleman published, Abdush’s family, evidently irate, has accused him of distorting the evidence and manipulating them in the course of his reporting. “She was not raped,” Mira Alter, Gal Abdush’s sister, wrote on social media a few days after Gettleman published. “There was no proof that there was rape. It was only a video.”...
And then there are the official statements. Among the most categoric of these is one from the Israeli police, issued after The Times published “‘Screams Without Words’” Dec. 28 and asserting that they have found no eyewitnesses to rapes on Oct. 7 and see nothing in media reports such as The Times’s constituting evidence of systematic sexual violence...
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