June-July 2024
Twenty years ago, wishing to apprise our readership of the "peculiarities of the American political landscape," the noted authors offered Christian Order the following helpful explanation. Published in our April 2003 number, it sets forth the zealous complicity of American Evangelicals, providing vital political and theological context to the post-October 7th horrors in the Holy Land.
Exposing the Lies
At Al-Jazeera's Investigative Unit we've conducted a forensic, meticulous examination of the events of October the 7th. We uncovered very real crimes committed by Hamas and others. But I think what was most significant, were the crimes we discovered that did not happen. And it's hugely concerning that these revelations have been virtually entirely ignored by the Western press.
What's extraordinary, is the Israelis were aware of the plans.
Hamas were actually training quite openly for this operation. They were actually placing the training videos online. So anyone could view them.
On the very night of October the 7th, before dawn, spotters along the fence [dividing the Gaza Strip from Israel] are reporting back to headquarters. And the head of [Israeli Security Agency] Shin Bet and the head of military intelligence take this seriously enough, that in the middle of the night they're up and talking to each other. And they conclude it's just another training exercise.
And what is extraordinary, is that they don't even raise the alert level to number one. The most basic alert level would have made a huge difference. And they don't do that. Which means when Hamas bursts through the fence at 6.30 in the morning, they catch many of the defenders in their beds. You can see many of the soldiers are killed in their beds.
Hamas had anticipated most of their fighters would be killed trying to get through the fence. In fact only a small number were killed trying to get through the fence. They were as much taken by surprise as anyone by the performance of Israeli intelligence and the Israeli military.
Crucially, also they were taken by surprise by this very large music festival that was taking place, which they don't seem to have been aware of.
Having overrun the military bases, the game plan was to grab hostages, and take them back. And they do this on a large scale. But they also clearly kill very large numbers of unarmed civilians as well.
The Israelis were then extraordinarily slow to respond. Now they scramble Apache helicopters, but there's no ground control. It's pretty clear that in the chaos some hostages at least were hit by Apache helicopter fire.
Hannibal Directive revived
We've identified 27 people who were clearly taken hostage, taken captive, and were taken away from their homes but never made it to the fence; died somewhere between their homes and the fence. There's a fair chance that a number of them were killed by Apache helicopters.
Within the Kibbutzes we've identified 18 people who were pretty much certainly killed by the police and the Army as they arrived. Twelve of them at a specific incident in Kibbutz Be'eri, where you have a large number of gunmen, around 40 gunmen, holed up in a house with 13 hostages. A tank is brought in and opens fire on the house. There are two survivors from this incident, which is why we know about it. There may be other incidents we don't know about because everyone was killed. But there are two survivors from this, who spoke to Israeli media.
There's a commonsense thing: you just have to look at the scale of destruction, and it's clear that 1200 men, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns did not do all of this.
The Hannibal Directive... was something that was developed in the 1980s by the Israelis, and it was basically to avoid situations where their enemies would capture one or two or three Israeli soldiers and then effectively hold them to ransom. There was one occasion where the Israelis released over a thousand Palestinian prisoners in return for a single Israeli soldier. So an order was issued whereby they said, it's better that we kill everyone, than allow people to be captured. Now this was supposedly rescinded several years ago. But at midday on October 7th, the Army revived the Hannibal Directive, put it into effect
[Extracts shown from an Israeli newspaper report:
"... the Air Force operated during those hours under an instruction to prevent movement from Gaza into Israel and return from Israel into Gaza."
"Seventy vehicles were hit. At least in some of the cases everyone in the vehicle was killed. The Israeli military does not deny the report."]
Deluge of propaganda
The peculiarity of the days after October 7, is that the Israeli media, and subsequently the international media, choose to focus not on the very real and extensive crimes that Hamas and others did commit, but on crimes they did not commit. And this had two focuses in the days immediately after. It's to do with babies.
The most dramatic one is we see an allegation that there were 40 babies killed, many of them beheaded. This is very simple to deal with because we have a comprehensive list of the dead. We know that two babies are killed on October the 7th. One is a 10-month-old child who is hit by a bullet fired through a safe room door. The other, is a child who dies after an emergency caesarian, a Bedouin child in fact. Now, any story about babies that does not relate to those two, and there are a lot of stories about babies, is not true. We know it's not true.
This has enormous implications for the other wave of atrocity stories that began very quickly, which has to do with sexual violence, and particularly the Israeli assertion that it was widespread and systematic. To be clear, in the film we are not saying that there were no rapes on October the 7th. We simply don't know. What we are saying is that there simply is not the evidence — there's not the forensic evidence, there's not the visual evidence, there's not the photographic evidence, and there is not the witness evidence to support the allegation of widespread and systematic rape.
Zaka's flagrant lies
The Israelis have this strange system where they farm out the collection of bodies after disasters and terrorist attacks and so on, to an organisation called Zaka, who are Ultra Orthodox religious volunteers. They collect the bodies, prepare them for religious burial and so on. A character that many people will have seen in the days afterwards is Yossi Landau, who was the southern commander of Zaka, who was on television a great deal. He said, "two piles of 10 children each were tied to the back, burned to death." You then see a phone call which Netanyahu makes to President Biden, where he repeats this story. In fact he embellishes it.
[Video footage shows Netanyahu making the actual call, telling Biden: "They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them, and executed them."]
Terribly important, this, because it was entirely untrue. We know the house he's talking about, the house in Kibbutz Be'eri, which was the house that was stormed by Israeli police and military, and where it is almost certain that all of the hostages were killed by the Israeli police and military. There were two children there, two twins, but no other children. So we know the story is untrue.
Mr Landau told a number of other stories. There's one particularly notorious one about the fetus being cut out of a pregnant woman.
[Footage of Landau weeping while stating: "The baby was connected to the chord, was stabbed, and she was shot in the back."]
We simply know this is untrue. The list of the dead show there's no such victim. Mr Landau said, you know, I have a picture of this atrocity:
[Footage of Landau saying to Sanders: "If you want to see the picture I have the picture of it." Landau shows his mobile phone to Sanders, stating: "This is the baby." Looking carefully at the mobile screen, Sanders says:
"I'm sorry to be graphic here but I can't see a baby here." Landau responds: "You can't see the baby because, but this is the picture of the mother."]
It was a piece of charred flesh. It wasn't a baby, it certainly wasn't a baby. So it was interesting. And psychologically I'm not quite sure why he offered to show me a photo that he didn't have.
I would point out as well that Zaka was an organisation that was in trouble. There had been a major scandal. It's founder [Meshi-Zahav] had been accused of [decades of] child sexual abuse. There was a financial scandal. It had been found to be cooking the books. It's raised an awful lot of money since October the 7th. These stories were clearly useful. And they were useful to the Israeli government.
In the film, we see Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Zaka volunteers and thanking them for talking to the world's media and stressing that this is another front in the war.
[Footage shows Netanyahu seated at a conference table flanked by Zaka volunteers, addressing them in Hebrew: "You have an important role in influencing public opinion, which also influences leaders."]
To trigger and dehumanize
Why does this matter? Why does it matter whether this type of atrocity was committed or not that type, people killed in this way not that way? It matters because the murder of babies, and widespread rape has a particular resonance. It's particularly triggering. The Israeli government and its supporters, when they justify the brutality of the subsequent bombardment and invasion fo the Gaza strip, again and again and again, what they always reference is babies and rape.
[1. Footage of a Jewish man stating at a Republican Jewish Coalition [RJC] press conference: "Young girls who were raped, and then murdered."
2. Footage of Netanyahu on the phone to Joe Biden stating, "Women brutally raped and murdered."
3. Back to RJC speaker: "Little kids, who are beheaded."
4. Footage of Joe Biden stating: "Pictures of terrorists beheading children."
5. Back to RJC speaker again: "These bastards put these babies in an oven and put on their oven! We found the kid a few hours later."]
This is something you see in previous conflicts as well. If you want to dehumanise an enemy, if you want to desensitise people to the suffering that is inflicted on that enemy, then you portray them as barbarians, basically as savages; as people who are not deserving of humane treatment. And that is why it's relevant, why it's important to pick apart a lot of the world's leading media outlets [who] have done in-depth investigations where they have concluded there was widespread systematic, instrumentalised, weaponised rape.
New York Times' Big Lie
The New York Times makes a particular feature of the story of a young woman. She was killed early in the morning, 9 miles north of the music festival site as she and her husband were fleeing. The New York Times, in its big December investigation into sexual violence leads with this, and about a third of the article consists of her story. And its immediately undermined because the woman's sister then posts on Instagram, immediately afterwards, this isn't true, we know she wasn't raped. She was texting us until minutes before her death.
[Shows an English translation of an extract from the sister's Hebrew post: "Yes they raped but in the case of my sister, no!"].
It's also the case that her husband had a lengthy phone conversation, immediately after her death, with his brother. And again, no mention of rape.
So, it's very important, that, because it's the central most compelling piece of information in one of the biggest investigations done by one of the world's most prestigious media outlets, The New York Times, and it turns out not to be true. It's done by three journalists. One of them [Anna Schwartz] turns out to be somebody who worked in some capacity for Israeli intelligence, previously, who has virtually no journalistic experience, and who had liked genocidal media posts.
[Displays one such post 'liked' by Schwartz, in which the person raged: "...one principle that needs to be abandoned today: proportionality. Need a disproportionate response. ... If all the captives are not returned immediately, turn the strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head — execute security prisoners. Violate any norm, on the way to victory."]
It's very interesting with Anna Schwartz. She gives an interview in Hebrew to an Israeli channel. She actually lays out, how difficult they were finding it to find evidence. That they were talking to all the hospitals and all the psychiatric clinics and so on, and that there was simply no evidence at all, there were no witnesses [who] had come forward, no victims had come forward. I think she's telling this as if to show what digging they had to do. But it's actually very revealing. In the end it's quite clear they fall back on the same sources as everyone else: Israeli government officials, IDF officers, and first responders — all which were discredited by the baby stories.
So no babies were beheaded.
No babies were thrown into ovens.
And there is no real evidence for widespread and systematic rape.
Media complicity
Now, it's quite clear why the Israelis might want these stories to circulate. What's less clear, is why very reputable Western news and media outlets should swallow them so uncritically. Particularly given the track record of the Israeli government and the idea, which has been shown again and again and again, in the past, to have been less than truthful in the accounts it gives.
[Footage of a female IDF spokesman stating: "Because our war is against Hamas. Not against the people of Gaza. While this mission is urgent, we will continue to fulfil it with care, and with a commitment to the sanctity of life, both Israeli and Palestinian."]
The response to our film, "October the 7th", has been interesting.
The response is not to criticise, and to pick apart and say we've got it wrong. They don't do that at all. What they do is they simply ignore you. Which on one level I take as a compliment because I think there are all sorts of people out there who would very much like to pick apart what we're doing and to destroy it and to discredit it. And I think they take one look at it and decide they can't really do it. So what they do do, which in a way is even more damaging, is just to entirely ignore us. This is significant, because so often what we are doing is critiquing the way the mainstream media has covered the story, which may well be of course precisely why the media doesn't want to look at what we've done.
Weaponised 'anti-semitic' canard
So in a way the treament of this, in many ways, echoes the treatment of our earlier series, "The Labour Files", which offered a critique of the dominant media narrative about [fomer British Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn and the Corbyn years, on the anti-Semitism crisis. The allegation of anti-Semitism clearly is a very powerful weapon that can be wielded in defence of the Israeli State. I think sometimes particularly by the Israeli State it is wielded very cynically and very deliberately.
[Footage of Netanyahu stating: "When the ICC investigates Israel for war crimes, this is pure anti-Semitism!"]
It's not the case in Western media and Western societies that you cannot criticise Israel. You can, though you have to be a bit careful about how you do it. But certainly at the moment during the assault on Gaza you certainly can. What you cannot do is to question the fundamental philosophy of Zionism. What you are not allowed to do is to say, well all Palestinians would say that Israel is a state whose defining feature is and has always been that it is structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another. That it is, in effect, an apartheid state — which is what all of the world's human rights' organisations now describe it as.
The enormous peculiarity and dysfunction of Western media with Israel is, not only does it not say that, you're not allowed to say that. And this renders criticism of Israel perilous terrain. People are very on edge. They're very aware that they're straying into dangerous territory. They're very aware they have to choose their words terribly carefully, otherwise they will be misconstrued. You can see this happening at its worst within the Labour Party where, particularly Jewish people are far far more likely to be suspended and expelled for anti-Semitism from the Labour Party, than non-Jewish people.
But there is something more fundamental that goes on, which regards the Palestinian people as a whole. Once you have tainted them with the stain of anti-Semitism, you have opened the door to, you have facilitated the dehumanisation of Palestinians, which is the psychological prerequisite of Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians, and of Western complicity in that brutality. Palestinians will often make the point that they did not choose who their occupier was, who their coloniser was. So in fighting back, yes, they are inevitably fighting back against Zionists and Jews. It doesn't mean they're anti-Semitic. One has to ask oneself the question: are we really saying that if they had been colonised by Greeks or Italians they wouldn't be resisting their occupation? Of course they would.
Alienation and rupture
Thirty-six Israeli children were killed on October the 7th. And this understandably got widespread international media coverage. At this stage, I think over fourteen thousand Palestinian children have been killed and you would expect the outrage and the coverage to be proportionately greater, and it's not.
In future, people will look back at what is being done, which is essentially the flattening of a whole series of towns, and the mass murder of thousands and thousands of unarmed civilians, almost half of whom are children, and they will be absolutely bewildered by how the West allowed this to happen under its very noses — with weapons that were being supplied by the West.
There is a rupture in the relationship of large numbers of people with the political-media class. There is a fundamental alienation that is going on right now as a result of what is happening in the Gaza strip. I think that's very dangerous for the future.
The events of October the 7th are a case-study in how traditional media can let us down, and how we desperately need alternative voices that will genuinely probe these things and not simply accept the narratives that are fed to them.