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chlorine-tangerine · 6 months

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Gaza Fights for Freedom (2019) - Thoughts

//tw for violence and death

My uni's social justice organization hosted a movie viewing night today where we all gathered around and watched Gaza Fights for Freedom, mostly a recounting of the events and massacres that took place during the Great March of Return in Gaza from 2018-19. It was everything that we're hearing about today, but it has been happening for so long. The same things are happening: severe restrictions on resources and freedom of movement, unsafe living conditions, and the killing of children, journalists, and medics. It is lying with ill intent to say that the IDF is acting in self-defense. They destroy houses, they destroy the land, and give nothing to allow the people to rebuild.

As I watched on and more Gazans were interviewed, from a father with a family of 16, a journalist, to the family members of a killed medic, I have to wonder if these people are still alive right now, 4 years later. The idea that the interviewees whom we got to hear speak so vividly on camera can be dead right now haunts me, but that's happening to everyone in Gaza as we speak.

The video went onto recount the various articles of the Geneva Convention the IDF has violated, from the aforementioned killing of protected groups, and using exploding bullets, which are prohibited. But given what we know now with their use of white phosphorus, it didn't surprise me. The snipers at the other side of the border fired calculated shots then boasted about it on video. Direct hits on the head or torso were made on those who were standing a fair distance away. Palestinians throw rocks and get bombs in return.

We know all of this, and yet all major news sources spin it around, somehow contort the story in a way that no matter what they see, Hamas would always be the bad guys and the IDF always comes out on top. It's vile; how could you lie like that? How can you see Rouzan Al-Najjar, medic on the front lines of the protest, be killed by Israeli soldiers and distort it to say this was their own fault?

It's mania the way that Zionists will be presented with the facts and refuse to think anything otherwise, that's the only way I can explain it. It's not "the IDF killed children", but "Hamas uses children as human shields"; it's not "the IDF bombed hospitals", but "there's an underground Hamas base under the hospital" (which, by the way, wasn't even true). The Israeli government and those who support them will do whatever it takes to spin truth on its head until it turns into a nonsensical way to justify murdering thousands of civilians. They're trying their best to eliminate the Gaza population, it's astounding and inspiring how they have managed to survive for this long.

I and many others in the room cried throughout the documentary, but by the end, I was more angry than anything. I wanted to do something, to show these videos of people suffering in Gaza to Zionists who still claim that all of this was in self-defense. I wanted to slap some sense into them, to make them understand that this was what they are supporting.

But then I look around the room at everyone who just finished watching as the credits roll. People were hugging and comforting each other. And even though there was nothing wrong with that, it filled me with even more rage. Why are you hugging? You aren't in this situation right now! You aren't in any danger! How can you have the time to be sad? This is no time to cry and hug each other on the floor like a fucking group therapy session. Get up!

It rendered me speechless as I left the building and two people hugging each other at the front door, as if one of them collapsed from an emotional breakdown or something. It all just felt ridiculous to me. It's not like I didn't feel sad, but I was astonished by this behavior. It's time to turn that grief into action, not curl up in a ball as others come to embrace you. It's time, Palestine has been oppressed and brutalized for far too long. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

#gaza strip #free palestine #palestinian genocide #from the river to the sea palestine will be free

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eretzyisrael · 5 years

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When al-Najjar was shot, the media reacted as it always does, accusing Israel of deliberately targeting a civilian non-combatant.

This media bias is a key part of Hamas strategy, as the media usually has no information from Gaza other than what the Hamas-run health ministry or Hamas-controlled Gaza media operations provide. Israeli military information is discounted or disregarded.

The NY Times undertook a massive investigation into al-Najjar’s shooting. While the Times indicates it simply wanted to get to the truth, there is little doubt that the Times hoped to find Israel guilty of deliberately shooting al-Najjar. The main story is A Day, a Life: When a Medic Was Killed in Gaza, Was It an Accident? with details on the investigation methodology in a separate post here.

As Lenny Ben-David points out on Twitter, the resources the Times devoted to the investigation were extraordinary:

The NYT’s indictment of #IDF is 5,500 words long & accompanied by 17 minute video! When was the last time NYT spent so many manhours & millions of $ on an investigation?

Not since Warren Commission on JFK’s assassination have I seen such research, stopped frames, diagrams.

Yet despite all those words, the investigation conclusion is almost buried in the headlines, diagrams, video and verbiage: Israel did not deliberately or directly shoot al-Najjar. The was hit by a ricochet of a bullet that fragmented hitting a total of three people.

Here are the key quotes from the main Times article, several paragraphs into the article:

The bullet that killed her, The Times found, was fired by an Israeli sniper into a crowd that included white-coated medics in plain view. A detailed reconstruction, stitched together from hundreds of crowd-sourced videos and photographs, shows that neither the medics nor anyone around them posed any apparent threat of violence to Israeli personnel. Though Israel later admitted her killing was unintentional, the shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime, for which no one has yet been punished.

Notice how in that key paragraph, the first to introduce the Times’ conclusion, no mention is made of the ricochet. The paragraph makes it seem as if al-Najjar was deliberately and directly shot when Israel fired “into” a crowd that included medics. Only much later does the Times acknowledge that al-Najjar was not directly shot, the bullet did not go “into” the crowd, it struck the ground several yards away.

You have to read deep down into the article, to find these details:

Three medics down, all from one bullet. It seemed improbable.

But The Times’s reconstruction confirmed it: The bullet hit the ground in front of the medics, then fragmented, part of it ricocheting upward and piercing Ms. Najjar’s chest.

It was fired from a sand berm used by Israeli snipers at least 120 yards from where the medics fell.

To get even more details, you need to go to the separate methodology article the Times ran, including that Israel did not fire at the medics, but rather, people near the medics, and that the bullet hit the ground “a few yards away from the medics, and ricocheted off the ground:

What’s more, behind the target was a group of bystanders and medics in white coats. Former snipers in the United States Army and the Israel Defense Forces told us that, without a backstop, it was a reckless shot to take.

The bullet missed and hit the ground a few yards in front of the medics. Michael Knox, a forensic ballistics investigator, told us that the type of bullet used by the Israeli sniper could skim like a stone off the rocky soil. When it hits soil at a low angle, it pushes the soil ahead of it into a miniature ramp and projects itself up and out of the ground. Mohammed Shafee was hit in the torso with shrapnel. The bullet grazed Rami Abo Jazar’s thigh and continued its upward trajectory to pierce Rouzan just above her chest, severing her aorta.

#rouzan al-najjar #new york times #media bias #hamas #gaza #idf #snipers

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tdshay · 5 years

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Israel’s ‘shooting routine’ on Gaza border Israel must re-examine the army’s open-fire orders that result in Palestinians shot to death during Friday protests near the Gaza border; one such gunshot killed Gaza volunteer paramedic Rouzan al-Najjar in 2018. Source: Israel’s ‘shooting routine’ on Gaza border

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jacobsvoice · 5 years

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False News in The New York Times

The Times of Israel (January 3, 2019)

The Algemeiner (January 4, 2019

The New York Times cannot let go of David Halbfinger’s three-and- a-half page, 4,700 word screed (December 30). He recounted the death of a young Palestinian medic at the Gaza border from a richocheting bullet fired from Israel. Fragmenting after it hit a rock, it wounded two Palestinian men before mortally wounding Palestinian medic Rouzan al-Najjar. She became the tragic focus of Halbfinger’s expansive – and blatantly unjustified - indictment of Israel for her death.

As if that false conclusion was insufficient, it was followed four days later in the Times daily “Story Behind the Story” (January 3). Written by Malachy Browne, a “senior story producer” at the Times, he felt “duty-bound to investigate her death.” With his colleagues and Halbfinger, they spent five months interviewing more than 60 people and gathering video evidence “to piece together what happened.” Their “goal,” Browne explained, “was to freeze that moment in time and find out why that shot was taken.” They collected “more than 1,000 videos and photographs directly from the cellphones and cameras of more than 30 key witnesses,” using them “to create a 3-D model using photo-grammetry software.” Partnering with a British forensic research agency, Browne and his colleagues created their 3-D model of the tragedy.

Meanwhile Halbfinger had interviewed a senior Israeli commander who provided details of the four shots that wounded four protesters that day. Browne concluded that the second shot, the one that killed Ms. Najjar, was inaccurately reported. According to the Israeli military, the shot that killed her targeted and hit a protester “who was throwing stones and pulling at the coils of barbed wire” near the security fence.

According to Malachy Browne, however, who reports talking with (unnamed) “international legal experts about the rules governing the use of live fire,” the fatal shooting of Ms. Najjar “appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime, for which no one has yet been punished.” Browne concludes: ”What’s certain is that Ms. Najjar’s was an innocent life needlessly taken.”

Curiously, but significantly and revealingly, Browne omits mention of the description of Ms. Najjar’s death buried in Halbfinger’s report. “Suddenly,” Halbfinger wrote, “there is another gunshot.” A medic in front of Ms. Najjar is “sprayed in the chest by small bullet fragments.” A second Gazan “screams in pain” as he is “grazed in the thigh” by another fragment. “Behind them,” Halbfinger noted, “Ms. Najjar reaches for her back, then crumbles.” She died soon afterward.

However “improbable” it may seem that two people were wounded and Ms. Najjar was killed by one bullet, according to Halbfinger: “The Times’s reconstruction confirmed it: The bullet hit the ground in front of the medics, then fragmented, part of it ricocheting upward and piercing Ms. Najjar’s chest.” He goes on to state: “To deliberately shoot a medic . . . is a war crime.”

But there is not a shred of evidence, either in Halbinger’s 4,700 word report, or in Malachy Browne’s “Story Behind the Story,” that Ms. Najjar was shot “deliberately.” Indeed, Halbfinger convincingly demonstrated that her death, resulting from a fragmenting bullet that had already wounded two others, was purely accidental. Browne’s ��story” is effectively undermined by his Times colleague, whose finding of Ms. Najjar’s accidental death he ignores.

Halbfinger and Browne have effectively collaborated in propagating a stunning example of false news. Perhaps that is the real story that requires investigation by the Times. I’m not holding my breath until that happens. The palpable bias of its reporters, who find Israel guilty of crimes that it did not commit, is the buried story that is never part of “All the News That’s fit to Print.”

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Print to Fit: The New York, Times and Israel, 1896-2016, will be published this month by Academic Studies Press.

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eretzyisrael · 5 years

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Last weekend, it published a 4700-word story on the life and death of Rouzan al-Najjar, a young Gazan female doctor who was killed during the riots on the southern border last June.

The story, by its Jerusalem correspondent David Halbfinger, oozed sympathy for al-Najjar and her cause. It described the rioters as “protesters”, obscuring their leaders’ aim of storming the border to murder Israelis.

It presented Al-Najjar’s death with studied but false equivalence as part of a “cycle of violence” with simplistic “narratives” on either side.

Israelis were then portrayed as trigger-happy killers who “obliged” Hamas’s aim of using bloodshed to win international sympathy and whose snipers – despite the IDF’s stated tactic of aiming at rioters’ legs unless they presented an immediate danger – deliberately shot Gazan civilians in the back.

This included al-Najjar. It was only towards the end that the story revealed she was in fact killed accidentally, when an Israeli bullet struck the ground away from her and ricocheted into her body.

This epic account resulted from a six-month investigation by Halbfinger and six others. They collected 30 testimonies and more than 1,000 pictures and videos. That’s a tremendous financial and human investment for just one story.

Yet one week after al-Najjar’s death, the IDF had said it was accidental. Despite all their time and effort, The New York Times couldn’t shift from the fact that it was an accident. But they still dressed it up improbably as a likely war crime.

Yet they didn’t suggest that Hamas was guilty of war crimes thousands of times by setting out to murder innocent Israelis. They skated over the missile attacks from Gaza, the terror tunnels, the fact that Israelis were forced to live in bomb shelters.

Instead, the paper produced a radically decontextualized and tendentiously slanted version to obscure the fact that Israel was defending itself against a genocidal onslaught, and wickedly depicted it instead as a criminal aggressor.

#new york times #melanie phillips #media bias #israel #david halbfinger #rouzan al-najjar

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jacobsvoice · 5 years

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The New York Times “War Crime”

Times of Israel (December 31, 2018)

The Algemeiner (January 1, 2019)

Imagine appropriate news coverage of the horrific Nazi slaughter of six million Jews. Then imagine coverage, by the same newspaper, of the accidental killing - six months earlier - of a 20-year-old Gaza nurse by a ricocheting bullet fired by an Israeli soldier. The Holocaust story, in the memorable title of Laurel Leff’s scathing book, was “Buried by the Times.”

The Gaza story, accompanied by two photos, appeared on the Times front-page (December 30). Together they covered more than half the page. Credit was given to five reporters, with authorship by New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Halbfinger. But that was only the beginning. Coverage spread across three full inside pages, half of them devoted to the Times reconstruction of the death of Rouzan al-Najjar. To show how she was killed, the Times proudly claimed to have analyzed “over 1,000 photos and videos,” while capturing “the fatal moment in a 3-D model” and interviewing “more than 30 witnesses and commanders.”

What actually happened? According to the Times account, which there is no reason to doubt given the range and depth of its research, Ms. Najjar became “fearless and outspoken,” and determined to become a nurse, after witnessing the death of her pregnant aunt, intentionally pushed down the stairs of their Gaza home by her grandmother.

Ms. Najjar “saw her role as part of the Palestinian struggle . . . never refusing an interview request” to plead her righteous case, as she explained back in May when the Times first noted her admirable ambition. She proudly proclaimed: “I’m an army to myself, and the sword to my army,” writing on Facebook that “her bloodstained uniform carried the ‘sweetest perfume.’” The Times recounts how “young men and their parents paraded through the Najjars’ home seeking betrothal to the now famous Rouzan.” But she rejected their entreaties because “she had her own goals in mind.”

The remainder of her story of service to wounded Gaza protesters gathered at the border fence with Israel to protest “occupation” (ironically, by Hamas) is interspersed with paragraphs revealing the timeline leading to her death. Among the salient moments: Gaza “protesters throw home-made firebombs” across the border fence at Israeli soldiers, who respond by aiming at their feet to avoid fatalities. As sunset approaches, “things seem to be quieting down.” The Times assures readers: “No one in the area is doing anything menacing.” Indeed, Israeli tear gas “is doing what it is meant to: making the use of lethal force unnecessary.”

But “Suddenly there is another gunshot” from the Israeli side of the border fence, 120 yards away. A Gaza medic is “sprayed in the chest by small bullet fragments” after the bullet strikes a rock. Another Gazan “screams in pain” as a fragment grazes his thigh. As the Times reconstruction of the event confirmed: a bullet “hit the ground in front of the medics, then fragmented, part of it ricocheting upward and piercing Ms. Najjar’s chest.” David Halbfinger gratuitously added: “To deliberately shoot a medic, or any civilian, is a war crime.” He offers no evidence, because there is none, that Ms. Najjar was targeted. It is unlikely that the shattered rock was chosen for its lethal potential. Nonetheless, she “has joined the ranks of those lionized as Gaza’s martyrs” as “a symbol . . . of a hopeless, endless conflict and the lives it wastes.” Hamas is not identified as the unrelenting source of the conflict.

Accompanying the Times narrative of martyrdom are two front-page photos, one showing Ms. Najjar being carried after “she was shot in the chest”; the other depicting a Bethlehem mural identifying her as the martyr she became. Inside page photos show her funeral, her portrait in her family’s home, and her closest friend (who had “urged her to leave the protest . . . before she was shot”).

As if that was insufficient coverage there also were two half-page models, based on a Times review of “over a thousand photos and videos” of the protest area. Undermining its own preposterous claim that “the shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime,” a model depicts the ricocheted bullet hitting two men before piercing Ms. Najjar’s chest and fatally severing her aorta.

If that accident of fate was a “war crime,” what language aptly describes the Times evasion of the intentional murder of six million Jews because it did not want to be seen as a “Jewish” newspaper? The death of Israeli four-year-old Daniel Tragerman, victim of a Hamas rocket that exploded in his kibbutz home four years ago, received four paragraphs. The recent death of baby Amiah Israel, who survived for only three days after an emergency Cesarean following the shooting of his parents by a drive-by Palestinian - a tragedy that riveted Israelis in sorrow - received four sentences in the Times based on a Reuters report.

Once again “All the News That’s Fit to Print” conceals the palpable bias of New York Times reporting that incessantly blames Israel for the crime of responding to Palestinian attacks.

Jerold S. Auerbach is author of Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel 1896-2016, to be published by Academic Studies Press.

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