Swallowing the Hamas Lie, Time after Time

I have just returned from the funeral of a brave young man who lost his life protecting me, my family and my country.

Natan Rosenfeld, aged 20, was a soldier in the IDF. He had a bright future ahead of him, cut short, tragically, by an IED in Gaza on Sunday (29 June).

When I arrived home the headlines were not about him, but about Bob Vylan, the rap punk duo who incited a mob at the Glastonbury music festival with the chant “Death to the IDF”.

The BBC may have since expressed regret for not cutting a live broadcast of the highly offensive performance, but its failure to act in the moment demonstrates how “normalized” hatred towards Jews in general and Israel in particular has become.

Let’s not forget, by the way, that when they say IDF they mean the hundreds of thousands of citizens – Muslims, Christians, and Druze as well as Jews – who serve as reservists in Israel’s army.

So how did we get to where we are?

I blame the media. I will call out the BBC in particular because I grew up with it and once trusted it (the BBC actually has a Royal Charter that requires it to be impartial in its news reporting).

What I say, however, holds true for an overwhelming majority of news organizations globally.

They are guilty because they swallow the Hamas lie, time after time after time.

They know only too well that the only news allowed out of Gaza is heavily censored by Hamas, a proscribed death-cult terror group that glorifies rape, murder and abduction.

The media knows the drill: Correspondents inside Gaza cannot tell the truth – either because their lives will be threatened or because they are part of Hamas’s totalitarian regime.

It is guilty by association, because it faithfully copies and pastes whatever fiction Hamas feeds it. “Five hundred dead in hospital bombing” was one of the earliest and most egregious examples of the current war.

In this case the Hamas lie machine managed to accurately count all the dead in the blink of an eye and apportion blame – wrongly – to the IDF. It was, in fact a rocket misfired by their own side.

Accounts of the daily death toll from IDF shooting civilians queueing for food queues are another Hamas lie, that the BBC insists on reporting as fact.

The drip-drip effect of such blatant lies undoubtedly shapes the views of readers, viewers and listeners.

So much so that a duo who (bizarrely) go under the pseudonyms Bobby and Bobbie are able to whip up a frenzied (and probably very stoned) crowd at Britain’s biggest music festival to chant “death to the IDF”. And nobody seems to think that’s unacceptable.

The media is being played by Hamas, and it lacks the conviction to stand up to the new incarnation of Goebbels in Gaza.

Useful idiots like the two Bob people aren’t blameless, but they have no insight. Their chant comes not from an objective examination of the Palestinian cause – from its 1964 roots to the present day – or frankly, from any sense of humanity. They’re simply jumping on woke bandwagon.

With every tragedy here in Israel – and sadly there are many – I am touched by the life-affirming positivity of people singing Am Yisrael Chai (the people of Israel live).

And with every tragedy in Gaza – and yes, there are also many – I despair as they do the exact opposite, and chant “Death to the Jews”.

Terrorists like Hamas will never change. Israel may have degraded their military might over the last 21 months, but their twisted ideology will persist.

As for the media, they could cut the strings to Hamas, their puppet master, if they had the courage, but it’s easier to carry on colluding with the devil.

And the two Bobs? Clueless. But dangerous.

Maybe they should meet Avi and Sam, the grief-stricken parents who buried their son Natan this afternoon, and see what “death to the IDF” really means.