But let's talk about that moment.

Right.

The, the British filmmaker, Richard Sanders, who did a couple of documentaries, has done a few documentaries for Al Jazeera, one is October 7th.

And he looked at oodles of footage, you know, from, from the helmets of the fighters, and he, he, they, they, they really surveyed it, and he has a, a layout of how Hamas went in.

Um, and of course, they didn't initially, th- they didn't have any pushback from the Israelis.

And you know what Richard Sanders points out is that Hamas had been posting on social media that they were practicing with the balloons, that they were basically gearing up to go into Israel.

Now- For some reason, the Israelis weren't prepared, um, even though they were prepared with their Hasbara, their propaganda, right away.

Um, but they're just shameless about blaming the Palestinians, uh, for their own suffering.

Do you know if anybody has made an estimate right now that sounds reasonable? I'm just curious.

Well, at first, JAMA, The Lancet published years, you know, actually, probably a year ago, or at least, or probably two years ago, 187,000.

Then somebody did a calculation that kind of went over the internet that said, no, it was more like 650,000.

But Reasonable people I have heard say it has to be at least a half a million.

But the thing is, it's...

It's only about, in this ceasefire, under a ceasefire, another 1,400 at least, and more are killed, and people are dying almost every day.

People have gotten out of Gaza, some, but we can account for those people.

Let me ask you, why do you think the media has gone along with this? Why do you think that there very clearly is an intention not to look further into these things, not to scrutinize what the Israelis are saying, not to report the facts, and to really cover up the facts? What's going on with the media?

I would love... for you to walk us through what that organization is and what role they played in that immediate aftermath of October 7th and the days after.

Right.

Zaka was a membership organization that is billed as almost a humanitarian NGO that goes in and does forensics in situations.

one spokesperson for Zaka said, oh gosh, we've really had some success here.

So what he was talking about is they would present these Zaka members who would give testimony to the assembled international media, representatives of international media, the journalists, international journalists, many of them.

And one particular one that I write about, because he was the most, deceitful, shall we say, was Yossi Landau.

He was the head of the Southern Command and he went into several sites.

But I also think there's a disconnect that I already mentioned between a lot of wonderful journalists that are on the ground and and they're reporting every day and the management and the media owners knowing what you know about media how do you feel about the changing media landscape i mean the ellison family coming in and the impact on cbs you know that's that's not going to destroy an israeli narrative that's going to support it time and time again

would

be treated differently.

They would be subject to the type of oppression of the Israeli military and how they treat Palestinians in the West Bank.

But, of course, they never did that.

So you get these bureau chiefs.

In Jerusalem, the likes of Geordie Redoran.

So she lands in Jerusalem as a Zionist youth organization at 16 and says, oh, I just love the city and I just wanted to tell its story.

So talk about what happened in the encampments.

Legacy media was really... was really doing much to even kind of be fair

here.

No.

No, they weren't.

And they were closing out Palestinian voices regularly.

But, yeah, really good point that they were engaging all of those falsities and twisted and misdirected understanding of the history of the conflict to work their persuasion for them.

So if you're talking about civilian support of a government, so therefore they are part of who can be attacked, That is absolutely against any way of humanitarian thinking, any way against the laws or rules of war.

Particularly if you are relying on an algorithm that is easily tricked by just changing a word.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yes, you're right.

It goes back to, of course, in Britain, the Balfour Declaration of 2017 and Rashid Khalidi's wonderful book, The Hundred Year War on Palestine, tells that history.

I think that people who are on the left... who still want to say Israel has a right to exist, they don't know the history.

They simply don't know the history.

And right now, you know, Rashid Khalidi, who wrote The Hundred Year War on Palestine, he wrote the introduction to my book.

And the fact that these people who are running legacy media outlets do not understand that they're

So what explains, Robin, what explains the fear of US media outlets to report on Israel in ways that are reported in Israel? Why is the US media more afraid of covering Israel than the Israeli media?

Yes.

That's, that's the, that's a big question.

[laughs] And, um, and ironically, right after October 7th, that, that gave the lie to this origin story of October 7th.

There were other, y- you know, Israeli media itself revealed other holes in that standardized frame that US media never gave up.

So, you know, the standard line, "This is all in defense after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians." Well, in Israeli media, they were actually reporting and putting on their airways testimony, uh, from, from Israelis who had experienced, uh, October 7th, who ge- reported, several of them, who reported that Hamas, that, um, when Israeli forces finally did arrive at, for example, Kibbutz Beeri, they simply opened fire on everybody.

And the young woman, uh, Yasmin Porat, told, you know, Israeli media, she was all over Israeli media saying they opened fire, and they killed the hostages along with Hamas.

How would the Israeli narrative structure, which it so, it tries so hard to enforce, how would it change if at even this late hour, the US media b- reported, admitted that the Israeli military chose to target and kill, uh, Israeli civilians and hostages on October 7th, uh, and, and, you know, was duped by the Israeli government? Uh, how would that knowledge change the na- narrative, not only outside of Israel, but would it have any effect inside Israel?

So what explains, Robin, what explains the fear of US media outlets to report on Israel in ways that are reported in Israel? Why is the US media more afraid of covering Israel than the Israeli media?

Yes, that's, that's the-- that's a big question.

[laughs] And, um, and ironically, right after October 7th, that, that gave the lie to this origin story of October 7th.

There were other, you know, Israeli media itself revealed other holes in that standardized frame that US media never gave up.

So, you know, the standard line, this is all in defense after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians.

Well, in Israeli media, they were actually reporting and putting on their airways testimony, uh, from, from Israelis who had experienced, uh, October 7th, who ge- reported, several of them, who reported that Hamas, that, um, when Israeli forces finally did arrive at, for example, Kibbutz Beeri, they simply opened fire on everybody and the young woman, uh, Yasmin Porat told, you know, Israeli media, she was all over Israeli media saying they opened fire and they killed the hostages along with Hamas.

She was the only one left after about 12.

How would the Israeli narrative structure, which it tries so hard to enforce, how would it change if at even this late hour, the U.S. media reported, admitted that the Israeli military chose to target and kill Israeli civilians and hostages on October 7th and, you know, was duped by the Israeli government? How would that knowledge change the narrative, not only outside of Israel, but would it have any effect inside Israel?

And what are the journalism schools doing, the so-called monitors of the media?

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's hard to think of one international rule of war that Israel has not violated.

The rules of war were developed after the latter half of the twentieth century to prevent these types of genocides, which is not just killing people, not just mass murder.

It's killing an entire group of people, their identity, their place of living, their land, their ability to survive, any bit of infrastructure.

Because that grows sanct among, among the Geneva Conventions.

And, and in fact, the Geneva Conventions were first thought of by the aid workers and the doctors and nurses who went into the field of battle after major world wars and cared for the soldiers who were kind of left dying in the field.

So describe what happened there.

... language necessary to understand what is going on.

Well, that's what-- Restricting those kinds of words, Bob, um, ethnic cleansing, anything like that, what The New York Times specifically did is take out any of the language of humanitarianism, the principles by which we understand that, that peoples actually, uh, are, are entitled to human rights under international law.

When you, when you tell journalists they can't write about that, they don't have the tools they need to explain what's actually going on there.

So if you can't say, um, uh, disproportionate violence.

So, so Hamas comes in.

You, you tell us, Israel, that they killed twelve hundred Israelis, mostly civilians.

Well, right off the bat, that's not true.

It's exactly what the First Amendment prohibited.

Um, could you tell us a bit about what was going on here and how this degree of censorship was made acceptable? The, the, this, these are editorial directives from the best news- newspapers or news organizations.

Right.

Right.

These are our legacy press.

These are the very influential CNN globally, The New York Times, the agenda-setting paper of record.

That's why they were so influential.

You're right to point that out.

Could you tell us about what happened and in the end with the encampments and, um, what happened in Colombia and why he's describing it this way?