The Times cartoonist Peter Brookes published this on Oct. 18th following the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
First, it’s odd, to put it mildly, that Brookes portrays Joe Biden as lecturing the Israeli prime minister on the putative futility of killing Sinwar, as the US President not only praised his death as “a good day for Israel, for the United States, and for the world“, but added that the US had been helping Israel find the terrorist leader, noting that among the 1,200 killed on Oct. 7th were 46 Americans.
Biden remarked that “shortly after the October 7 massacres“, he “directed Special Operations personnel and…intelligence professionals to work side-by-side with their Israeli counterparts to help locate and track Sinwar and other Hamas leaders hiding in Gaza“. With US intelligence help, the President added, “the IDF relentlessly pursued Hamas’s leaders, flushing them out of their hiding places and forcing them onto the run“.
However, the dishonest portrayal of Biden’s reaction to Sinwar’s killing is not the even close to representing the most deceptive element of Brookes’ cartoon. Far worse is its moral inversion – showing Biden asking Netanyahu if it was “worth all this” amidst the ruins in Gaza, when, of course, it was the Hamas leadership who started the war, not Israel.
It was Sinwar and his deputies who planned and carried out the largest and most barbaric massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, killing 1,200, knowing full well that it would result in war that would result the tragic loss of many Palestinian lives, a death count that would be particularly high given the terrorist group’s illegal tactic of placing fighters, rockets and other military assets within civilian buildings.
It was also Sinwar who refused to surrender and return the hostages, which would have ended his people’s suffering and stopped the destruction in the territory.
An anonymous account on X posted this extremely apt response to the Times cartoon.
Brookes’ decision not to vilify the Palestinian leader for choosing a course that would lead to untold suffering to Gaza’s civilians, or his fellow bloodthirsty pogromists who murdered, raped, tortured and mutilated innocent men, women and children in a doomed effort to destroy Israel, is sadly consistent with the primary operating principle guiding British media coverage of the region: that Palestinian leaders (including even terrorist monster like Yihya Sinwar) can never be held responsible for their destructive decisions.
As the Telegraph’s Allister Heath wrote, “robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil.” The fact that “so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the young, no longer take Israel’s side in this existential combat“, he added, “exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration“.
As we’ve demonstrated consistently on these pages, with few exceptions, this “ethical degeneration” has been on full display in the British media’s coverage of Israel’s war with the antisemitic extremist group in Gaza.
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The Times is going more and more anti-Israel – its readers should switch now to The Telegraph.
Totally in agreement.
British morals and ethics have been lost as the liberal woke mentality take over.
The church of England has failed to show any moral guidance except to one sidedly criticise Jews and Israel but failed to recognise the terrorist nature of both Hamas and Hezbollah