More Bogus Charges Against the IDF

The media has failed to learn its lesson from the previous bogus reports about Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza which came from a few IDF soldiers based on hearsay and was quickly discredited by one of the soldiers himself who made the claim. Once again the media is rushing to report accusations of IDF atrocities without any basis in fact. You would think they would be cautious after having been burned so many times regarding charges leveled against Israel every time it engages in a military operation. But the reality is that they don't care if they are being hoodwinked. This is because the western leftist media does not care about truth and providing their readers with the facts or even about their own integrity and credibility, but instead their priority is to promote an anti-Israel agenda and therefore will seize on any opportunity to demonize Israel. They just figure if they throw enough against the wall something will stick or that even when the charges prove to be a hoax, that gets scant coverage so that only the initial accusations are remembered. The western media, especially the British media is satanic in nature since it has clearly taken sides with the islamic terrorists over Israel.

Breaking the Silence: More Rumor & Hearsay

The media rushes to promote another report based on unverifiable allegations from Gaza.


Will the media never learn?

In March 2009, Ha'aretz published a story alleging "war crimes" and serious ethical failures on the part of the IDF in Gaza. Predictably, many international media outlets repeated the allegations without bothering to do any rudimentary checks.

Subsequently, it was revealed that the soldiers' testimonies were based on nothing more than rumors and hearsay, causing acute embarrassment to Ha'aretz and serving up a salutary lesson for those media outlets that reproduced such shoddy journalism.

Now, Israeli non-governmental organization Breaking the Silence has published a new report reliant upon testimonials from soldiers who served in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Once again, allegations of "war crimes" and misdemeanors are based on second-hand evidence and hearsay. Once again, international media outlets rushed to publish a story from another flawed source.

While the BBC gleefully pushed the story to the top of its agenda, The Independent produced a two-page center spread with a screaming headline "Israeli soldiers reveal the brutal truth of Gaza attack". Others also covered the story, including CNN, The Guardian, Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, Financial Times, Times of London, Daily Telegraph, NPR, Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail.

The G & M's Orly Halpern even wrote on her personal Twitter page: "I'm reading a really moving report which I will be writing about for the Globe and Mail. It makes me sick to my stomach." Can an objective and balanced story emerge when emotions rather than facts are the driving force?

Defending the IDF operation against charges including the use of human shields, Golani Brigade commander Col. Avi Peled stated that one of the soldiers who testified in the report was not even in the field at the time: "He told his commander about a week [during] which he wasn't even in the field. He reported about what he heard happened."

NGO Monitor's Dan Kosky points to the Breaking the Silence report's central problems - flawed methodology and absence of any reasonable research standards:

By Breaking the Silence's own admission, the allegations are comprised of "the testimony of around 30 combatants" – a fraction of the thousands of Israeli combat troops deployed during the Gaza conflict. This extremely narrow and presumably hand-picked sample is an absurd basis on which to pass judgment, and even these limited testimonies were entirely unverifiable.

All statements are anonymous, and so-called "evidence" is further compromised by the absence of any details of where and when alleged incidents occurred. Consequently, were the report intended to prompt the IDF to investigate individual allegations, Breaking the Silence has made this impossible.

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