The Guardian published an op-ed on March 9 by Ramia Abdo-Sultan, titled “How can I sit down for a Ramadan feast while my loved ones in Gaza find no respite from their imposed starvation?“. Abdo-Sultan is anti-Israel propagandist and executive committee member of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), an organisation which justified the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre:
We stand by the Palestinian people in Gaza, calling for an immediate end to Israeli attacks and 16 year old illegal and inhumane blockade. pic.twitter.com/NV3NiF96bu
— APAN (@APAN4Palestine) October 8, 2023
The president of APAN, Nasser Mashni, according to the Herald Sun, liked a number of X posts justifying the massacre, lobbied the Australian government not to designate Hamas as a terror group and referred to Palestinians who plotted to carry out suicide bombings as “heroes”. He’s also called for Israel’s destruction, saying on his radio show that “the liberation of Earth starts with the first domino, and that’s the overcoming and the decolonisation of Palestine and the ending of Zionism.”
Abdo-Sultan herself, in an article in an Australian news site a week after Oct. 7, argued that the massacre didn’t happen in a vacuum – which is the default narrative for those who refuse to condemn Hamas’s pogrom.
So, her allegations of Israeli villainy in her Guardian op-ed should surprise nobody.
The main accusation in her piece is that Israel is intentionally starving Palestinians in Gaza,
How can I sit down at a table laden with steaming soup, bowls piled with fresh tabbouleh and fattoush, succulent meat and rice dishes, when my family and loved ones in Gaza find no respite from their imposed starvation?
If anyone “imposed” hardships on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, it’s of course Hamas – the proscribed terror group whose decision to launch the mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation of innocent Israelis – who caused the conflict, knowing full well the likely Israeli military response. Hamas, of course, isn’t mentioned at all in the op-ed.
Yet, Yahya Sinwar, in all of this meticulous planning for the attack on Israel, clearly didn’t take any steps to ensure the safety, health and well-being of Gaza’s citizens in the attack’s aftermath, by, say, stockpiling surplus food and medicine in the likely event of shortages.
As Bret Stephens observed in the NY Times on Oct. 15:
Hamas launched an attack with a wantonness like what the Nazis showed at Babyn Yar or ISIS at Sinjar. It did so knowing that it would provoke the most furious Israeli response possible. Why put millions of Palestinians at risk? Because Hamas has learned that it profits at least as much from Palestinian deaths as it does from Israeli ones — the more of each, the better”.
…
Hamas also achieves practical and propagandistic goals by putting Palestinians in harm’s way. More civilians in combat zones mean more human shields for its forces. More dead and wounded Palestinians mean more sympathy for its side and more condemnation of Israel.
Indeed, Hamas’s decision to embed their soldiers and weapons within or around civilian infrastructure, and constructing hundreds of miles of tunnels, most of which goes under civilian structures and densely populated urban areas, ensured that Palestinian civilians would be sacrificed for their fanatical plan.
Further, just yesterday, Reuters and other news outlets reported a Hamas linked website warned Palestinians who assist Israel in providing aid to Gaza that their actions won’t be tolerated. Those who do so will be treated as collaborators and be handled with an iron fist, the Hamas Al-Majd security website said on Monday.
Also omitted by the Guardian contributor – and nearly every piece on the conflict at the outlet – is filmed footage of Hamas operatives stealing humanitarian aid, and the testimonies of civilians in the Gaza Strip on the terror group’s theft of such supplies.
Moreover, the broad claim that Israel is taking actions to intentionally deny Palestinians food is completely inaccurate. There are no Israeli limits on the quantity of aid entering Gaza, and, on most days, hundreds of trucks carrying food and other humanitarian aid are inspected by Israeli authorities and enter the territory. In fact, the average number of food trucks per day entering Gaza is greater than before Oct. 7, according to Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy.
The denial of agency to Palestinians and their leaders is nothing new.
However, it is stunning, nonetheless, the degree to which Guardian contributors such as Abdo-Sultan erase the extremist group’s actions and decisions on, and following, Oct. 7 from the story. Hamas, perpetrators of the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, continues to be disappeared from the political and moral dimensions of the war, with the result being that blaming Israel – and only Israel – is the default narrative informing almost all Guardian reports and commentary about the situation in Gaza.
It isn’t the journalism or commentary befitting a serious media outlet. It’s anti-Zionist propaganda.
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Ah the Grauniad, another Islamic staffed and funded organisation determined to brainwash the British public into accepting their sharia based barbaric rules and regulations to further the establishment of a caliphate in the UK #journalismisdead