Remember when blowing up a hospital was something “Israel would never do”?

Martin Odoni at The Critique Archives does – and has discovered that something fundamental has changed in that country’s attitude since that time and this, in the light of the bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital last weekend:

You may remember at the start of Israel’s onslaught of Gaza in October 2023 that al-Ahli was hit before, when a missile struck an outer compound.

The Israelis were quick to deny blame, and tried to convince everyone that the missile was a misfire by Islamic Jihad fighters in Gaza.

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They went to considerable lengths to persuade everyone of this too, holding forensic-appearing press conferences with helpful show-and-tell descriptions of what they claimed happened.

This was reinforced by presentation of a conveniently-timed bit of IGF [Israeli Genocide Force – “defence” having become an anachronism for Mr Odoni] radio espionage that ‘just happened’ to pick up a communication between two jihadists as they were discussing the rocket launch.

This was all quickly debunked, when the recording was found to have been faked, sound recordings of the missile flight showed that its trajectory was in the opposite direction to the one claimed, and close analysis of Israel’s overall narrative found it was based on the laughable idea that the rocket was launched from two different places at once.

But what I notice about this is that the attitude has now completely inverted.

A refrain we were hearing from Israel apologists at the time was, “Israel just wouldn’t do that!” This claim, really just a rewording of the tiresome crock of, “The IDF is the most moral army in the world,” seemed to be their easy-way-out of bothering to assess the evidence and draw an objective conclusion.

In the eighteen months since al-Ahli was first struck, the IGF has laid waste to almost every medical facility in the besieged enclave, with no sanction from any of its main supporters, such as the USA, Germany or the UK. The Israelis have found that just saying, “It was a Hamas base,” is some kind of universal get-out.

In eighteen months, we have gone from, “Israel would never do that!” to, “Oh Israel bombed another hospital, same old same-old.” What is one more ruined hospital in a genocide, eh?

And that is what I find more frightening than the act of bombing the hospital itself. It is how the attitude to Israel committing atrocities like this has shifted to almost shoulder-shrugging approval.

He goes on to make a statement that is critically important at this time:

In his landmark essay, Politics & The English Language, George Orwell noted that, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Now, as when he wrote it in 1946, that is the real purpose of mainstream news reports on international affairs – to corrupt our thoughts.

Reports are always worded in ways that are technically true, at least from a certain perspective, but that also cause such shifts in emphasis that the viewer/reader can get an impression of events that is one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees the inverse of reality.

The whole notion that Israel is “defending itself,” still accepted by startling numbers of people, is an example of this.

When reading or hearing news reports, especially about global affairs, we must be constantly on our guard. We must not relax our scepticism, even momentarily.

It can be a tiring process always questioning everything the BBC wants us to believe, but we have to do it.

The only alternative is effectively Zombie-ism.

Source: Gee, do you remember when blowing up a hospital was something “Israel would never do”? | TheCritique Archives

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