An op-ed by the Financial Times (FT) editorial board (“The west’s shameful silence on Gaza“, May 6) provides a hint as to the direction of the piece in strap line, which reads “The US and European allies should do more to restrain Benjamin Netanyahu”.
It clearly doesn’t occur to FT editors that the party which needs to be ‘restrained’, or, more accurately, pressured into surrendering unconditionally, is Hamas, the terror group whose fanatical decision to launch an unprovoked war of aggression on Oct. 7th, and engage in the barbaric mass murder and of Jews, is the sole reason for the suffering of Gaza’s civilians.
The piece – which, tellingly, was enthusiastically endorsed by Owen Jones – begins by noting the “tens of thousands of Palestinians” killed in 19 months of fighting and “accusations of war crimes against Israel”, while it’s not until the second to the last paragraph until they get around to mentioning Hamas’s massacre which killed 1,200 and started the “19 months of fighting”.
Editors warn of Israeli plans for a new offensive against Hamas, which they write “would be a disaster for 2.2mn Gazans who have already endured unfathomable suffering”, and then opine that “each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land”.
Unexplored, of course, is the question of what Hamas’s “ultimate goal” was and is: initially in their bloody Oct. 7th pogrom, their cruel and illegal human shield strategy over the last 19 months, and their morally warped decision to continue fighting. By the group’s own account, their objective was to destroy Israel. Since that failed, it seems fairly obvious that their new, more limited objectives are to survive as a military force in Gaza regardless of the consequences to innocent civilians in the territory.
Editors then warn of the new threat of starvation in Gaza, ignoring that the outlet’s past reporting predicting famine in the territory turned out to be untrue. As even the Economist acknowledged, previous “predictions of famine [in Gaza] turned out to be badly wrong”.
The FT also grossly misleads readers by warning that Jerusalem is “implementing Trump’s plan to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza”, when, in fact, Israeli leaders have made clear they are narrowly facilitating the voluntary emigration of Gazans who wish to leave. As Shany Mor recently observed, such voluntary departures are fully consistent with international law, noting that the West’s “normal impulse in such situations”, whether in Syria or Ukraine, is to try to end the war, and where that is not possible, “to ensure that civilians who wish to leave can do so”.
It’s so revealing of the moral incoherence of the anti-Israel movement and its accomplices in the Western media that, before Oct. 7th, they complained that Gaza was an “open-air prison”, while after war they began insisting – for “humanitarian” reasons – that the strip be sealed shut, and no departures allowed.
Later, the FT writes that “the expanded [Israeli] offensive would imperil the lives of the hostages”. However, what really “imperils” the hostages is the decision by Hamas to continue holding and brutalizing them in the tunnels of Gaza, as well as the silence of Western “humanitarians”, who either ignores their plight, or, like the FT, only evokes sympathy for them when doing so can be used a cudgel against Israel.
The longer the war goes on, the FT editorial ends, “the more those who remain silent or cowed from speaking out” against Israel “will be complicit”.
However, it’s those who effectively frame the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust – perpetrated by Iranian-backed extremists at war with Jews and the West – as a non-event, a mere footnote to the ‘real’ story of Israel’s putatively ‘disproportionate’ response to Hamas’s attack, who are complicit in Oct. 7th revisionism, which is morally akin to framing the gas chambers as a “mere detail” of WW2.
The Financial Times silence about Hamas is shameful, and places their editorial board squarely on the wrong side of history.
The FT caved in to Muslim appeasement long ago. After all, huge financial markets are at stake. They wouldn’t want to offend Qatar, Hamas’s sponsor
FT under its news owners Nikki https://www.nikkei.co.jp/nikkeiinfo/en/ Has adopted a more anti Semitic stand than when it was independent!
It should come as no surprise to readers of the paper since its editor is Roula Khalaf “Before taking up the deputy editor role, Khalaf was the FT’s foreign editor and oversaw the FT’s operations in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Before that, as Middle East editor, she launched a Middle East edition and led coverage of the Arab Spring. Khalaf was named foreign commentator of the year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards in 2016 and her series on Qatar won the Foreign Press Association’s Feature story of the year in 2013. She joined the FT in 1995 as North Africa correspondent and before that was a staff writer for Forbes magazine in New York.”
Her email is roula.khalaf@ft.com