Zionist journalist charges LSN with ‘pro-Hamas’ reporting. Here is my response.

(LifeSiteNews) — Last August I heard directly from a Christian Zionist journalist and commentator who appeared to be highly scandalized by my reporting on Israel’s ongoing attacks upon the people of Gaza.

While many have judged these continuing assaults to easily fulfill the criteria for the crime of genocide under international law, this writer, whom we will call “William” (as this was a private correspondence), was highly offended that LifeSite would report on such matters, including the International Court of Justice’s preliminary ruling in January that the charge of genocide against Israel is “plausible,” refusing to dismiss the case as Israel demanded.

As well, even this week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes” committed in relation to Israel’s ongoing attacks  upon the people in their long-time occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank since October 8 of last year.

READ: Israel’s Zionist ideology the ‘principal cause’ of the war in the Middle East: eminent scholar

As a matter of general background, LifeSite’s coverage of this decades-long conflict proceeds from the unanimous and constant judgment of the Catholic and Orthodox bishops in the region, and is also confirmed by Pope Benedict XVI’s Synod on the Middle East in 2010 and the continuous approach of the Holy See to this conflict in international diplomacy. This same judgment is consistently confirmed, year after year, by approximately 93% of national governments of the world as well.

Thus, LSN’s editorial approach to these matters is not only backed by decisive moral authority, but is also supported by overwhelming majorities of the world’s population, even if Western citizens are prevented from understanding such important factors of the conflict by a variety of propaganda methods.

READ: Pontifical Mission officials lament destruction in Gaza, Lebanon: ‘Way beyond any imagination’

With his email’s subject heading reading “Israel is committing Genocide?” William claimed that since the population in Gaza “had ballooned to over two million people over the last twenty years … (thus) there is no genocide. There is no ethnic cleansing” and such “smears” are “beyond irresponsible,”  “dangerous and destructive.”

He defended the Israeli army saying they “go to great lengths to warn residents to flee targeted military areas,” and yet, “Hamas terrorists targeted WOMEN and CHILDREN, burning babies in their cribs,” he charged.

Claiming he “read numerous recent reports on LifeSiteNews” addressing this topic, he took particular interest in a March article titled, “Israeli soldiers celebrate the ‘torturing, humiliating, and mocking’ of Palestinians on social media.”

READ: The West cannot hide’: Compelling documentary presents Israel’s ‘live stream genocide’ in Gaza

Referring to several pictures of Palestinian male detainees blindfolded and stripped to their underwear with zip-ties binding their hands behind their back, he said, “What I see is Israeli soldiers mocking male MILITANTS, as they have every right to do.”

He also took issue with LifeSite’s reporting on the subject of this article, a documentary by the Middle East network Al Jazeera saying they were not credible. “Al-Jazeera news… is funded by the pro-terrorist Qatari government and is hardly reliable for information,” he wrote. “The Qatari government is complicit with funding and fomenting terrorism around the world.”

At the top of the same article is also an explanation from LSN co-founder Steve Jalsevac on why comments were disabled for that piece due to “hateful, condemning, intolerant comments and false accusations” especially from people who apparently had not even read the article.

William said the report was, “NOT truthful, and for that reason, there have been numerous comments condemning your awful reporting. The fact that the editor will not allow comments means that the site cannot handle the truth of others’ criticism.”

He also charged LSN with “fraudulent ‘reporting,’” and publishing “pro-Hamas lies” consisting of a “slanted, pro-terrorist narrative.”

”William’s” entire August 15 email can be accessed here with his actual name, and the names of others included in the correspondence redacted for the purpose of privacy.

After having responded to William on August 20, and not receiving a reply from him, I was told others may benefit from seeing my response to his missive which I include below.

My August 20 Response to ‘William’

Hi William,

Thank you for your correspondence, and we all understand the shock that some of our fellow Americans can go through when reading these reports on Israel / Palestine because, in my experience, each of us had to go through a similar process of discovering that we have pretty much been lied to on this topic by our Western media, and others, for decades.

I certainly went through this progressive realization following a pilgrimage I made to the Holy Land in 2006, and I know Steve (Jalsevac) has had to realize that many of the presumptions he also held (as so many of us have) were radically erroneous due to widespread and systematic propaganda.

With that background, I will offer some brief thoughts here on your note:

‘Genocide’ has a definition

First, if you want to argue that “there is no genocide,” shouldn’t you first define the term? Certainly, anyone can concede that according to your apparent personal understanding of this definition you might well be able to subjectively and very confidently conclude there is no such “genocide” being committed against the Palestinian people, as you did below.

However, it should not be surprising that useful discourse on this topic must operate according to a standard objective definition which happens to be recognized throughout the world in international law, specifically in the Genocide Convention from 1948 of which Israel is a signatory.

Here is the definition:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Thus, according to international law, the threshold for “genocide” is likely much lower than you have presumed it to be.

In fact, here is an article from 2016 by a Jewish attorney arguing that the brutal Israeli occupation and colonization of internationally recognized Palestinian territory had already fit this definition of the crime of genocide for quite some time.

And, of course, thirteen of the fifteen judges at the International Court of Justice provided a preliminary ruling last January, that according to this definition sufficient evidence was present to conclude that it was “plausible” Israel was committing this war crime and the case brought by South Africa could proceed. See the article below for more, including video embeds of presentations from prosecutors around the world demonstrating that genocide was indeed taking place.

SEE: UN’s top court rules genocide charge against Israel is ‘plausible’

Such arguments as these are what you will have to contest with should you wish to legitimately argue “There is no genocide.” (And just as an aside, were you even aware of these proceedings, and this definition? If so, why did you not address them below? If not, why not? What media outlets didn’t tell you about them that likely had an obligation to do so?)

Thus, the article which I wrote, and you cited as “claim[ing] that Israel is committing genocide,” was actually quite conservative and restrained in its use of the term. I wrote, “As much of the world charges Israel with committing crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people …”

And any reasonable person (especially those willing to follow the links) should have to agree this statement is 1.) True, and 2.) Relevant for reporting especially for those of us who wish to consider ourselves to be pro-life and especially Catholic and Christian, as it responds to the call of our brother and sister Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches in the Holy Land who have essentially begged Western Christians to speak out against such Israeli atrocities as their “only hope” for peace and an end to the oppression continually inflicted upon them by the Israeli government. And many of our Jewish brothers and sisters agree with them.

PLEASE READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?

Further, if you had kept reading this article, you saw that it quoted sources explaining these matters including Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein who provided significant evidence (linked in the story) which helps illustrate Israel’s explicit intent to commit genocide.

Thus, to the contrary of your own assertion, I would offer that it would be “beyond irresponsible” for a Catholic pro-life news organization, especially based in the United States, to gloss over the committing of a (to be restrained again) plausible genocide of which its own government is a necessary accomplice, especially as that genocidal attack continues to pile up the corpses of tens of thousands of children, women and men until it figuratively blots out the light of the sun.

‘Terrorism’ too must have a definition

Now, to be briefer, the next term you need to define is “terrorist” and “terrorism” if you want to use it in a logical fashion. You mention a “pro-terrorist narrative.” But what is “terrorism” and who are the main “terrorists”?

Interestingly, as is their custom, Zionists, at the slightest pretext, often conflate and construe the actions of their enemies into the gravest most outrageous and inflammatory crimes as a rationalization to isolate, dehumanize and aggressively punish them.

Thus, in their brutal occupation (that we are not allowed to acknowledge or discuss in the West) they rule these territories as a military dictatorship, and thus, with military orders have redefined virtually any protest or resistance to their occupation, including flag waving, participating in a non-violent protest, handing out fliers or writing something the Zionists don’t like on social media, as “terrorism.”

Thus, the Israelis simply use mass calumnies to refer to virtually all Palestinians as “terrorists.”

But the world generally understands and accepts the definition of terrorism to be “the use of violence, especially against civilians, for political ends.” And as has been covered at LSN and elsewhere, a fundamental objective of Zionism has always been to expel the Palestinian population from their ancient lands which many see as being the obvious objective in these present massacres.

READ: Expelling the Palestinian people has always been a goal of Zionism

So, who are the terrorists?

Would it be considered a terrorist act if Hamas legitimately threatened violence against Israeli civilians requiring them to be displaced for months? Would this crime against humanity and act of genocide be excusable if they said they were “going to great lengths” to protect them by this crime? And what if Hamas then bombed and massacred these Israeli civilians in the “safe spaces” they had directed them to go? Would that be an act of terrorism?

How about if Hamas dropped hundreds of American-made 2,000-pound bombs on Israeli residential areas destroying an estimated 50 percent to 62 percent of all buildings in their region by January alone? Would this be an act of terrorism?

And what if Hamas killed at least 16,251 Israeli children who included, according to reliable testimonies, children “incinerated,” “shredded,” “missing body parts,” “being crushed by buildings,” starving to death and toddlers being “definitively” and intentionally shot by Hamas snipers. Would these be considered acts of terrorism?

Of course, you understand that these are not the acts of Hamas, but criminal terrorist acts committed by the Israeli army, and they are just a few examples, there are many, many more.

These all fit the definition of acts of terrorism, and systematic acts of terrorism are committed by people called, “terrorists.”

Therefore, as explained by Miko Peled, a former Israeli soldier whose father was a general in the 1967 war, and whose grandfather signed Israel’s declaration of independence, the Israeli army is “one of the best trained, best equipped, best fed terrorist organizations in the world. And yes, they have generals, and they have nice uniforms. But their entire purpose is terrorism.”

And as far as I can see, there is no terrorist organization or effort in the entire world that compares to the Israeli genocidal terrorist enterprise.

So, when you mention “the pro-terrorist Qatari government” which “is complicit with funding and fomenting terrorism around the world,” have you considered what government is the greatest funder of terrorism in the world? Didn’t they just approve another $20 billion to rearm Israel so they can continue to massacre displaced children, women and men in Gaza?

See the irony? Who is the biggest funder of “terrorism around the world”? You are, through your tax dollars being spent by your government and more importantly through your material cooperation in defending these crimes as you have done here.

Media Bias at Al Jazeera?

Now you mention having read “numerous” reports treating this topic on LSN, yet I don’t see much of any evidence that you even completed reading one such report. You cite only a single article and then raise an objection within your missive which is thoroughly treated within the text of that article itself. Apparently, you didn’t get that far, or even beyond the article’s lead paragraph.

“Al-Jazeera news, the source of the video in your article, is funded by the pro-terrorist Qatari government, and is hardly reliable for information,” you wrote. Besides being an ad hominem fallacy, your statement also betrays that you didn’t even read the section in the same article titled, “Al Jazeera a highly credentialed news network, Western legacy media ‘skewed by a systemic and institutional bias’ toward Israel.”

Please read it for a response to your statement. I will not reproduce it here but will point out a further irony.

In supporting your case that the “Israeli military forces go to great lengths to warn residents to flee targeted military areas,” you cite a July BBC report which explains how Israel drops leaflets from aircraft to instruct Palestinians to leave their homes to avoid a “combat zone.”

Can you imagine this happening in your neighborhood? Leaflets dropped from a hostile military instructing you and your family with your children to evacuate your home, disrupt your lives and the lives of your children to seek refuge in some area with little humanitarian assistance for an indefinite period of time?

While you see this as a virtue when it is committed by the Israelis, it actually qualifies as an act of terrorism, a crime against humanity, and an act of genocide according to the definition above. Additionally, when the Israelis further bomb and massacre such displaced children, women and men in these “safe zones” the war crimes compound to a much higher gravity.

And a likely scenario that follows includes the Israeli army wantonly bombing or otherwise destroying your home and neighborhood in an attempt to ensure you have nothing to return to and will have to leave the area to pick up your lives. This has been a routine process for the Zionist enterprise since 1948 when they wiped out hundreds of Palestinian villages in a similar way.

You can hear about it in a lecture here by Melkite Archbishop Elias Chacour who lived through it as a boy in Palestine (book here). First the Israeli army asked the population to leave, and then prevented them from returning and bombed their village to smithereens.

So, even what you see as an act of virtue by the Israeli army is part of an enormous crime violating at least both moral and international law.

And why didn’t your trusted news outlet the BBC tell us this?  Likely, because as many of their own employees complained last January, their coverage has been “biased against Palestinians.”

In fact, Norman Finkelstein has stated that the “ethnic element” relating to “a large Jewish presence” in the Western mainstream media and a resulting “sense of Jewish ethnic solidarity [with Israel]… plays a role” in the presentation of a broad media bias in favor of the Jewish state.

Of course, while the Zionists have been successful at bending the coverage of the Western media toward support and protection of their interests, it should be admitted that every media outlet has some type of bias.

And unlike the West, Al-Jazeera’s bias would include being less likely to suppress news revealing massive bloody crimes by the Israeli state, which is likely why they were expelled from Israel itself and why an “unparalleled” number of journalists, including from AJ, have been apparently targeted and killed by the Israeli army.

My own bias is to support and uphold the objective moral law which is binding on every human being endowed with reason, even, and I mean even, Zionist Jews. As St. John Paul II taught, there are “no privileges or exceptions for anyone” when it comes to the natural moral law. The Israelis don’t get to impose a bloody occupation over many decades, massacre and starve to death hundreds of thousands of children, women and men and not be called-out by authentic Christians and pro-lifers. In fact, disciples of Jesus Christ are morally bound to oppose this.

Still believe the ‘burning babies in their cribs’ narrative? You need better news sources.

You have also asked “why is there not attention paid” to Hamas atrocities such as “burning babies in their cribs”? We have covered that topic (here and here) reporting on how Israeli media themselves confirmed such propaganda tales never happened but rather had a purpose to create “more political space to destroy all of Gaza, kill a large percentage of the population and commit genocide.”

This is old news. Why are you not aware of these facts? What media sources do you rely on who have not had the integrity to fulfill their moral obligation to tell you the truth on these matters? In other words, why do you rely on news sources that lie to you by omission?

The same is the case for the concocted “mass rape” stories, along with the “beheaded babies” and  the “fetuses cut from women” lies. Why are you still in the dark on these fabricated stories which have been debunked since late last year?

And how about the lie repeated by Netanyahu to Congress that Hamas had “butchered 1,200 people” on October 7? Are you aware that the Israeli press reported that many of the 1,139 Israeli deaths, including 782 unarmed civilians, were killed by the Israeli forces themselves through indiscriminate fire and even the deliberate targeting of homes and vehicles where Israeli hostages were known to be present?

This means that the Israeli army killed maybe hundreds of its own citizens, as has been reported by the Israeli media themselves. And Netanyahu, who is at least remotely in charge of the murdering army goes before Congress and the American people and lies about it, blaming these bloody deliberate deaths at the hands of his own army on Hamas.

As Max Blumenthal commented, “Israel’s whole mission, its reason to exist, is supposed to be to keep Jews safe. And here they are killing more Jews than any other anti-Semite in recent history and doing it deliberately for political reasons.”

‘Combatants’ and ‘Militants’?

Though I didn’t see a citation for it, you state “The death rate ratio of civilians to combatants… is two to one.” This is clearly hogwash. When you investigate your source, you will certainly find that as the Zionists shift definitions such as “terrorists” and “genocide” to fit their narrative, I expect you will find “combatant” has a ridiculously broad definition, likely to be, I would guess, any male between 16 and 60 or the like.

In fact, many in power in Israel have classified the entire population in Gaza as essentially being combatants. “There are no innocents there,” stated lawmaker Yitzhak Kroizer last November pronouncing “there should be one sentence for everyone there – death.”  And others such as Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu claimed “there are no uninvolved [civilians]” in the Gaza Strip, meaning all of them including women and small children are virtually considered “combatants.”

Indeed, you seem to use this shifting of definition yourself stating, “What I see is Israeli soldiers mocking male MILITANTS… Notice how the prisoners are men, not women and children.”

Logically, the category of “men” is not the same as the category for “militants.”  The facts are these are men just rounded up from the streets, sheltering in schools, hospitals or other residences to be detained, humiliated, tortured and interrogated apart from any evidence of their being involved with Hamas. A report from B’Tselem, the Israeli Center for Human Rights, states 4,781Palestinian men “were detained without trial, without being presented with the allegations against them, and without access to the right to defend themselves, in what Israel terms ‘administrative detention’” (See “Welcome to Hell”).  This report from the UN details the same as do many other articles on the topic in the mainstream press.

Obviously, LSN needs to assess and pass along the best factual information available, even if it contradicts what William [last name] thinks he “sees,” or what he would like to see, and even if we have to risk his disappointment with our reporting it.

Concluding

I could continue, but suffice it to say that, in summary:

1. You have a very long way to go to prove that Israel is not committing the grievance crime of genocide against the Palestinian people, especially in Gaza. In fact, my personal opinion is that such an effort on your part is futile. I agree with Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg when he says Israel is “undoubtedly” committing genocide.
2. Irony: An objective definition and application of the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” reveal the Israeli army to be “one of the best trained, best equipped, best fed terrorist organizations in the world,” and that the “pro-terrorist narrative” in no way comes from LSN but, according to logic, is rather being promoted by you in your material support for these many crimes in (your) correspondence below.
3. Irony: Despite your ad hominem fallacious attack upon Al Jazeera, your apparent ignorance regarding fundamental aspects of this issue reveal your own media sources have deprived you of aspects essential to understanding this conflict, including the definition of genocide, the ICJ’s decision, the debunking of the war propaganda porn put out by the Israeli PR machine, and the fact that the displacing of populations in Gaza is a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.
4. The category of “men” is not the same as “militants” and despite what you think you see, William, the facts reveal these are largely or even mostly just male civilians being detained and systematically tortured.

Finally, the fact that you wrote me this email without apparently even having read the article you were primarily complaining about demonstrates exactly why Steve disabled comments for that piece, as he wrote himself: We “encourage careful reading of our articles and viewing of the full videos BEFORE making any conclusions.”

Perhaps due to heavy information control over many decades in the U.S., some commenters typically jettison any logical discourse whenever Israel is criticized, as if this secular nation in the Middle East is an object of religious devotion or consists of angels from heaven who are beyond any and all criticism and must be automatically deferred to.

Instead of addressing what the piece actually says, along with its sources, they just throw out trite Zionist talking points the West has been swimming in for decades and which consist of half-truths at best (Candace Owens relates her same experience very well, here) and then often bundles them in with vicious calumnies.

In his April interview with Tucker Carlson, Christian pastor from Bethlehem, Munther Isaac reflected on his efforts to lobby on Capitol Hill for the Palestinian people, in which he spoke with diplomats, politicians and congressional staffers. What struck him most was the strange contrast between their significant lack of knowledge “about the reality on the ground” and their resolute and misguided opinions regarding the topic.

“Their knowledge of the situation here [in the Holy Land] seems to be very, very shallow,” Isaac said. “Yet they hold very strong opinions, and oftentimes these opinions are shaped by political parties” and not on “knowing the facts.”

Assessing this situation in a more recent (and highly recommended) piece, one supportive commenter wrote Steve explaining his impression: “Steve, you are trying to reason with closed-minded zombies who support Israel irregardless of condemning evidence, or you are dealing with lying propagandists who know the truth but spout the lie. Nevertheless, the truth MUST be told for the sake of the suffering innocents. Thank you and thank LSN!”

It is precisely due to my desire for restoring “serious journalism when it comes to coverage” of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, that I’m resolved to report the facts in light of Christian moral principles which apply equally to all, even the Zionist Israeli government which has succeeded in basically securing a high degree of control of the United States government, the mainstream media and even many outlets of the so-called alternative media.

Furthermore, as a pro-life Catholic disciple of Jesus Christ, I am bound to always oppose the grave and deadly violations of human rights perpetrated by anyone including the Israeli occupation regime in Palestine, and, though I do not speak for LSN, it is my understanding the organization shares these same commitments.

Please read and honestly consider the links present within this text or the many more which are easily accessible within these stories for more, clear, truthful and relevant information on this very important matter with the universal moral law as a guide for our analysis.

God Bless+

Patrick Delaney, M.A., M.Div.

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