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lansplaining · 11 months

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why i don’t think jin guangyao killed rusong

(or had him killed)

“Then... then even if you had no choice but to marry Qin Su, you still could have neglected her,” Lan Xichen said. “Why did you have to... And why go through with the trouble of siring A-Song, only to kill your son with your own hands?”

Jin Guangyao clutched his head in his hands and said in a bitter tone, “...After the wedding, I never touched A-Su again. A-Song... was conceived before we were married. At the time, I was afraid that a delay would cause complications...”

So he and Qin Su had consummated their union in advance. If not for that, he would never have ended up committing incest with his own younger sister. He didn’t know whether he should hate his father, who was hardly a father at all, or his own paranoid, overthinking self!

Lan Xichen sighed. “Next-- and do not attempt to prevaricate-- but answer me. Did you intentionally plot Jin Zixuan’s death?” (7 Seas trans., 86-7)

This is the sequence where Jin Guangyao lays everything out. Given what he chooses to reveal, it seems safe to assume that he isn’t hiding anything. So why do he and Lan Xichen just completely drop the Rusong question? There’s potentially an answer in the way Xichen frames the question-- that is, it’s a two-in-one of “why did you sleep with her and conceive a son only to kill him” and JGY’s response answers both-- I didn’t know when I slept with her and when I conceived him.

But why does even the narration seem to forget about it? Why doesn’t it say, “he would never ended up committing incest with his own younger sister and having to kill his own son”?

I think... because he didn’t. I get annoyed by attempts to answer questions that hinge on how someone “would” or “should” act because everyone is different! But! Murdering your own son is something that would demand at least a little emotional unpacking, surely?? Or at least a little more explanation. He was a total innocent, and a child! But we get more time breaking down murders that are ten times more understandable, if not justifiable in the eyes of those listening, just from surface knowledge of the relationships.

We even get other opportunities for it to come up, and it doesn’t. In the very next section, for example:

“Despite us being born of the same man, why was your father able to spend his leisure time at home with his beloved wife, playing with his child, while I didn’t dare be alone with my wife and my blood ran cold at the sight of my own son?” (88).

Again, dropping in “while I was driven to kill my own son” feels a little more rhetorically powerful-- if it happened.

JGY leaves out potentially morally exculpatory evidence again and again when he isn’t asked for it directly-- like SiSi, like an explanation of how his mother was treated in the brothel he burned. The fact that he doesn’t go into Rusong’s death, and the fact that Lan Xichen just lets it pass without explanation, makes me think that the official version of events-- that he was killed in political retaliation-- is true.

#book reference

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chosetherose · 8 days

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*WSJ Link*

There Are Plenty of Power Publicists. But Only One Works for Taylor Swift.

By Allie Jones

April 18, 2024 at 8:00 am ET

Taylor Swift was celebrating the end of the Australian leg of her Eras Tour in late February when a bit of unpleasantness sailed out from Down Under and landed on the home page of TMZ. The New South Wales Police Force was investigating a 71-year-old man for allegedly assaulting a 51-year-old man at a wharf north of the city, according to their media unit. Per TMZ, the septuagenarian was Scott Swift, Taylor’s father and a key member of her management team, and the younger man was a photographer.

The story had all the makings of a public relations nightmare: (1) Celebrity family member allegedly behaves badly while (2) disembarking from a luxury yacht, resulting in (3) a police investigation. To make matters more complicated, Taylor was reportedly present for the alleged altercation—hiding under an umbrella, TMZ said. Though the man didn’t require medical treatment, the police said, there was video footage. Would this be the end of the pop star’s marathon run of fawning press?

Not if Tree Paine could help it.

Swift’s longtime publicist first released a statement that did not refute TMZ’s story, exactly, but offered some exculpatory evidence: “Two individuals were aggressively pushing their way towards Taylor, grabbing at her security personnel, and threatening to throw a female staff member into the water.” Subtext: Scott Swift was simply protecting his daughter and another defenseless woman from a couple of rogue aggressors. He was not charged.

Around the same time, as if by magic, People found a video of Scott passing out sandwiches to young female fans at one of the Sydney shows and published it along with fan commentary. “Isn’t he the sweetest and cutest,” one cooed.

Online, Swifties clocked the People story as good old-fashioned damage control. As a chorus of fan posts put it: “The devil works hard, but Tree Paine works harder.” (In late March, the New South Wales Police Force media unit said that the North Shore Police Area Command finished its investigation and that it is taking no further action.)

The public often sees Paine expertly attending to Swift’s needs, from smoothing out Swift’s red carpet dresses to leading her past scrums of paparazzi.

The average celebrity publicist does not have fans. But Paine, the 52-year-old redhead seen trailing Swift at awards shows and rubbing shoulders with Gayle King in the Eras Tour VIP area, has become a Swiftverse cult figure in her own right. Fans post reverently about her PR machinations and share videos of her expertly attending to Swift’s needs: smoothing out Swift’s dress on the red carpet, leading Swift right past a scrum of reporters whose questions have not been approved, subtly offering Swift what appeared to be water at the Video Music Awards—a night when the star was filmed dancing in a manner that suggested inebriation.

Swift has trained her followers to look for meaning in her every gesture, outfit and Instagram caption. Paine’s own work—the stories she chooses to respond to, the narrative she puts forward in the media—has become part of that lore.

And Swift and Paine are creating a lot of lore lately. Swift spent the fall cheering on her new boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, as he sailed to Super Bowl victory, and dropped by the Grammys to pick up album of the year for Midnights and announce her new album in an acceptance speech for yet another award. The Tortured Poets Department, which fans speculate is at least partly inspired by her breakup with the British actor Joe Alwyn, drops this month, and Swift will promote it while balancing her public relationship, continuing her sold-out international Eras Tour amid growing criticism of her private jet usage and brushing off baseless conspiracy theories that she is secretly working as a Democratic operative to swing the 2024 election for President Joe Biden.

In a long career of riding high, Swift has hit the stratosphere. It’s Paine’s job to keep her there.

Back in 2014, Swift’s world domination was not yet assured. That March, trade publications reported that the pop star’s publicist of seven years, Paula Erickson, had submitted her resignation. Fairly or not, during Erickson’s tenure, Swift developed a reputation for being both boy-crazy and unwilling to joke about it. See: Swift’s string of high-profile relationships with Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles; her alleged wedding-crashing with Conor Kennedy; her humorless response to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s joke at the 2013 Golden Globes about her dating life. (“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” she told Vanity Fair when asked about the incident.) Erickson declined to comment for this story.

Paine, who had been working as the senior vice president of publicity in the Christian and Country divisions of Warner Music Nashville, came on board and quickly flipped the script. She launched her own firm, Premium PR, and signed Swift as her first and only client. “There isn’t a publicist in NY, LA or Nashville that wouldn’t jump at an opportunity to work with someone as talented as Taylor Swift and her management team,” Paine told Page Six at the time.

That year, Swift moved from Nashville to New York, went full pop with the release of 1989 and began flaunting her friendships with a gaggle of famous women, known colloquially as The Squad. The public started to forget about the time Swift, age 22, allegedly bought a house across the street from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

Now that Swift has hit the stratosphere, it’s Paine’s job to keep her there.

Throughout this transformation, Paine refused to let rumors about her client fester. The very week her hiring was announced, she began issuing public rebuttals to the tabloids. “Never believe the National Enquirer,” she tweeted about an apparently false story that Swift declined to record a duet with Randy Travis. Ten years later, the gossip about Swift has changed, but Paine’s approach has not: She recently called out the anonymous gossip account Deuxmoi for causing “pain and trauma” by posting false rumors about Swift secretly marrying Alwyn before the two broke up.

Paine became even more visible to fans in 2020, when she appeared in Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana. Wearing white shorts and blue nail polish, she clinked white-wine glasses with Swift as the singer-songwriter anxiously prepared to post her first political statement on Instagram. Swifties have since turned Paine into something of a meme: Online, they joke that Swift’s “Out of the Woods” lyric “the monsters turned out to be just trees” is a reference to the publicist and that a redheaded Eras Tour backup dancer is Tree-coded. They have decided that in the inevitable Paine biopic, the publicist will be played by Amy Adams, and that she will win her first Oscar for it.

The fan obsession has been fueled, in part, by how little Paine has shared publicly about herself. Her Instagram is private. The last time she sat for an interview was 2012, when she was a VP at Warner and appeared in Nashville Lifestyles’ “Most Beautiful People” issue; she posed for a photo in front of a shiplap-covered wall wearing a peasant blouse and made the astonishing revelation that she was “trying to enjoy life.” I cannot report whether that is still true; Paine declined to be interviewed for this story.

Born Trina Snyder, Paine grew up in Costa Mesa, California. She was still going by Trina when she was initiated into Pi Beta Phi at the University of Southern California in 1990, according to the women’s fraternity’s official publication, The Arrow.

Like her client, Paine is a Nashville transplant. In her early career, she worked her way up at a variety of L.A. record labels—World Domination, Maverick and Interscope, whose roster included Snoop Dogg, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. She launched her own guerrilla-marketing company, worked for the Academy of Country Music and eventually joined Warner Music in Tennessee.

In 1998, she married Lance Paine, a businessman and onetime president of the Nashville candy brand Goo Goo Cluster, in Las Vegas, according to public records. (Lance also served as president of the company owned by HGTV’s Property Brothers.) The Paines have one teenage daughter, and according to the society pages, they have spent some nights mixing with locals at Nashville charity galas.

Paine has built a fearsome reputation in media circles, closely guarding access to Swift.

But mostly, Paine works. She has built a fearsome reputation in media circles, closely guarding access to Swift and sending emails to journalists with surprising velocity whenever she disagrees with a story. “Once I started working in media, I would always hear about people getting emails from Tree Paine, or maybe, people being afraid of getting emails from Tree Paine,” says Hunter Harris, a self-described “Painiac” and the writer of the entertainment newsletter Hung Up, which regularly chronicles Paine’s engagement with the press. (Harris has also contributed to WSJ. Magazine.)

In the past 10 years, Paine has guided Swift through some of the more tumultuous moments of her career: her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West; her trial accusing a former DJ of sexual assault; her battle against her former label, Scooter Braun and private-equity giants for the control of her master recordings. At almost every turn, Paine presents Swift—arguably the most famous woman on the planet, a billionaire with a private jet—as a relatable underdog fighting for her voice to be heard.

It has, for the most part, worked. In the process, Paine has become one of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry.

Getting any kind of journalistic access to Swift has become a fool’s errand. The star sits for few magazine interviews, and in between, Paine does her best to ensure that no information about Swift that Swift has not expressly chosen to share with the public becomes available. One magazine writer recalls the slightly fraught process of interviewing another artist on one of Swift’s stadium tours a few years ago. As a condition of the interview, the writer had to agree that anything they witnessed or discovered about Swift while spending time with the other artist before a show would be off the record. Paine was clear: No journalist is going to catch Swift in her sweatpants backstage and write about it.

When writer Emily Kirkpatrick reached out last year to seek Swift’s comment for a profile of the actress and musician Suki Waterhouse for the fashion website Ssense, Paine surprisingly acquiesced, with the caveat that Swift’s quote be printed in full—no edits, no line breaks. (Kirkpatrick, annoyed, accepted the terms.)

This is an understandable sticking point for Paine. The Kardashian-West debacle revolved, in large part, around a truncated recording of Swift. Before the rapper released the single “Famous,” which contained lewd lyrics about Swift, they spoke by phone, where he asked her to promote the track on Twitter. For years, a snippet of the call released by Kardashian painted Swift as a liar who publicly rejected the lyrics but privately approved them. When someone released the full call online—a friendly heads-up but one in which West never shares the final lyric (“I made that bitch famous”)—Kardashian tried to save face. “To be clear, the only issue I ever had around the situation was that Taylor lied through her publicist who stated that ‘Kanye never called to ask for permission…,’ ” she tweeted. But Paine never said that exactly. She tweeted a rejoinder: “I’m Taylor’s publicist and this is my UNEDITED original statement. Btw, when you take parts out, that’s editing. P.S. who did you guys piss off to leak that video?”

The biggest year of Swift’s career has also been her most public yet. There’s the tour, the new album, the NFL boyfriend, the constant tabloid coverage of her relationship with the NFL boyfriend, the never-ending paparazzi strolls with her famous friends at sceney New York City restaurants. There have been stumbles: Swift forgot to thank Celine Dion, who presented the album of the year award, when accepting her Grammy. (A photo of the two singers hugging circulated online later.) She’s still taking heat for her private jet. She dated Matty Healy.

But the sheer volume of information about Swift that pours, ceaselessly, out of every tabloid and news outlet from the Daily Mail to the New York Times typically washes away negative stories as soon as they are published. There are fans who speculate that Paine sent Swift to Kelce’s regular-season game against the New York Jets in October so that internet searches for “Taylor Swift jets” would return cheery images of Swift dancing in a VIP suite with Blake Lively instead of stats about CO2 emissions.

Swift is at a point in her career, however, where she could completely disappear from view and still generate more headlines than just about any other person on earth. Scientists at Caltech and UCLA recently published research proving the existence of “Swift quakes” (seismic activity caused by fans dancing and jumping at concerts). Ancestry.com shared on social media that Swift is a sixth cousin, three times removed, of poet Emily Dickinson. The New York Post talked to experts to guesstimate how much Kelce has spent wooing Swift so far (more than $8 million, allegedly).

If Swift released The Tortured Poets Department with zero fanfare, it would probably still hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. But she chooses to feed the beast—with black-and-white Instagram posts, snippets of possible lyrics, a pop-up poetry library, so many vinyl editions—and, with Paine’s help, make her own news.

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1americanconservative · 2 months

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Chicago1Ray

Raise your hand if you want these fucken liars to trade places with the innocent J6ers

Arrest Liz Cheney

The feds set up January 6 to frame Trump, the J6 Committee concealed exculpatory evidence showing he asked for 10-20,000 Natl Guard troops to protect the Capitol, & then they used the lies to prosecute him. But Trump’s the traitor?

@GuntherEagleman

If January 6th was a real insurrection, Liz Cheney would not have had to destroy the evidence saying otherwise

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 4 months

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[Editor’s Note: This is Part One of what will be a five-part series addressing flaws in a number of CNN “investigations” into allegations against Israel.]

Good investigative journalism is journalism at its best. In an era in which many media outlets simply serve as amplifiers of social media posts, press releases, and partisan cliches, curious and professional journalists truly devoted to uncovering the truth are all the more important.

Unfortunately, that kind of good journalism is all too often missing at CNN. Rather than producing impartial, professional investigations, many of the network’s journalists are acting as one-sided prosecutors when it comes to Israel.

CAMERA has raised some of these issues in regard to past CNN “investigations,” including those relating to the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, the February violence in Huwara, and the IDF’s presentation of terrorist weapons at al-Shifa Hospital. More recently, the network has put out two more deeply flawed investigations of Israel, including one regarding the munitions the IDF is using in Gaza and one regarding IDF operations at Kamal Adwan Hospital.

The consistent bias and flaws found in these investigations fall into five general categories: (1) omitting exculpatory evidence; (2) ignoring questions of credibility; (3) presenting one-sided and dubious “expert” analysis; (4) excessively using skewed context and language to mask shortage of evidence; and (5) demonstrating a partisan agenda.

Below is an analysis of the first flaw. There will be analyses of how each of the other four categories plague CNN’s investigations in forthcoming articles, as well.

Ignoring or Omitting Exculpatory Evidence and Context

The most glaring problem with CNN’s investigations is the disinterest shown toward evidence that contradicts the central allegations. Such behavior is to be expected of prosecutors or spokespersons, who seek to present a certain narrative. It is not appropriate for anyone trusted to impartially present the information necessary for the public to understand the issues for themselves.

As has been explained in journalistic codes of ethics and principles, one of the “cornerstones of truthfulness” is “not leaving important things out.” Even prosecutors are obliged by the rules to disclose material, exculpatory information in their possession. Yet, time and again, CNN’s attempts to investigate, or create, allegations against Israel leave the important, exculpatory information out.

The Munitions Investigation

Perhaps the clearest illustration of this comes from CNN’s 12/22 investigation into the use of certain munitions by Israel, authored by Tamara Qiblawi, Allegra Goodwin, Gianluca Mezzofiore, and Nima Elbagir.

The main allegation is that the IDF has been using large numbers of 2,000-pound bombs which cause fragmentation that is “capable of killing or wounding people more than 1,000 feet away.” These heavy munitions, it is claimed, are responsible “for the soaring death toll.”

But the article never actually connects the use of these bombs with substantial numbers of deaths. The only way it can charge that is by omitting, or in one case hiding in small text, details that undermine the entire allegation.

The most significant detail the authors glossed over is explained in a subsequent statement by the Israeli Air Force Chief of Staff: “Heavy munitions are detonated underground, preventing fragmentation and significantly reducing the blast wave and debris as a result.”

As pointed out by Lenny Ben-David at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, CNN appears to be using data on general-use MK-84 bombs, which explode aboveground, to make the claim about the large fragmentation radius.

And it’s perfectly clear that the authors knew the bombs were not being detonated aboveground. In the main text of the article, the second sentence says that the “500 impact craters” it analyzed are “consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs.” But hidden in small text in an image caption, the authors quietly add an important detail: the craters are “consistent with underground explosions produced by 2,000-pound bombs.”

Realize what the authors did. They deceptively combined data for fragmentation radiuses for a munition exploding aboveground with the number of craters consistent with that munition exploding underground in order to imply that those craters were caused by bombs sending lethal fragmentation as far as 1,000 feet away and killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians.

The apparent deception is jaw-dropping in its level of dishonesty.

Consider two of the specific examples given in the article, neither of which actually demonstrate the authors’ main claim.

One example given is a 10/24 airstrike “about 328 ft” away from the Wafa Hospital. CNN tells the audience that the crater was “consistent with 2,000-pound bombs,” and writes about how “terrified the patients and medics” were. But the article itself admits that even though the hospital was within the 365 foot “lethal fragmentation radius,” it is “unclear whether the October 24 blast caused significant damage to the hospital.” In other words, they show evidence Israel used a 2,000-pound bomb, but they don’t have evidence it actually caused any harm to civilians nearby.

The other example given is a 10/31 airstrike that targeted Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari in his command compound in Jabaliya camp. The article tells readers that the bombing killed over 100 Gazans “and caused catastrophic damage in the densely populated area.”

An image, posted originally by UNRWA, showing what appears to be a sinkhole next to its facility, possibly caused by the collapsing of a tunnel underneath.

But the story omits a critical detail: much of the damage wasn’t directly caused by the munitions. Rather, it was the collapse of the tunnel network in the area minutes later which brought down nearby buildings. It seems that many, if not most, of the victims weren’t killed by the bomb’s “lethal fragmentation radius” – which is the central allegation of the article – but rather the collapse of tunnels Palestinian terrorists built underneath their homes.

The party thus responsible for the danger to civilians in the area wasn’t the IDF, but rather Hamas, which built terror tunnels underneath civilian infrastructure. As the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual states, “The party that employs human shields in an attempt to shield military objectives from attack assumes responsibility for their injury…” Of course, the attacking party must still take feasible precautions – which the IDF appears to have done by detonating the explosives underground – but CNN’s investigation did not even address that question.

This leads to the broader issue that is regularly omitted in CNN articles: the context within which the IDF is operating. As explained, both legally and morally, the party using human shields is responsible for the injury of those civilians. Yet CNN’s investigations gloss over this. At most, the reporters include a bland statement from the IDF and leave it at that, as if they don’t have a journalistic responsibility to look into the full story themselves.

As explained in 2021 by two experts on the law of armed conflict, LTC (ret.) Geoffrey S. Corn and Lt. Col. (ret.) Rachel E. VanLandingham:

Israeli attacks may cause damage and destruction, but the responsibility for the tragic impact on Gaza civilians belongs exclusively to Hamas. This is because the terror organization pervasively and illegally exploits the presence of civilians to shield its targets and complicate IDF attack decisions. And Hamas knows that no matter the attack decision the IDF makes, it wins: If the IDF exercises restraint, Hamas wins a tactical benefit, but if the IDF launches the attack, Hamas wins a strategic information benefit by exploiting the attack’s collateral civilian impact.

By failing to do their journalistic responsibility, the authors are, willingly or unwillingly, serving as accomplices to Hamas’s cynical media strategy.

#cnn #media bias #camera

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workersolidarity · 1 year

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Seymour Hersh has the number of the CIA on the Nordstream pipeline explosions.

The reaction of the media establishment to completely ignore the Hersh piece before going all in on a narrative that makes no sense whatsoever just shows the level of control exercised by the political-econonic elite and their willingness to completely stifle and ignore anti-establishment voices.

How coincidental that exculpatory articles (there's literally zero evidence in the articles themselves) for US responsibility in the Nordstream pipeline explosions should just magically appear a week later in the pages of the NY Times in the US and Die Zeit in Germany at the exact same time?

In these articles they claim that a small "Pro-Ukrainian" group somehow boarded a tiny sailboat with 2200lbs of plastic explosives, tanks and diving equipment, as well as drills, welding equipment and more into one of the most surveilled water bodies on the planet, and dove down into the deepest section of pipeline in the Black Sea to setup these explosives and escape back without anyone noticing, and all without formal training.

Now compare that to Hersh's story and YOU consider which one makes more sense:

According to Si Hersh's source, a team of Navy divers working with the CIA and Norway used the cover of Military games going on at the time to secure access to the location with the cover of the NATO forces operating in the area. They set the explosives while diving with overt permission to be in the area to perform an exercise. This is backed up by radar that tracked the ships in the area at the time as well as the overt permission the diving crew had to be operating in the area.

Not exactly an unbelievable story knowing the history of terrorism by the CIA. The establishment's narrative around the Nordstream pipelines is a joke. It doesn't even stand up to basic common sense.

Sorry Bidenites, you'll have to do better than this

#nordstream pipelines #Nordstream explosions #socialist news #socialist politics #us hegemony #us imperialism #us terrorism #socialism #communism #marxism leninism #socialist #communist #marxism #marxist leninist

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reality-detective · 9 months

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The shit show 👆

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourselves #think about it #think for yourself #gateway pundit #news #national news #do your homework #ask yourself questions #question everything

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eretzyisrael · 3 months

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[Editor’s Note: This is Part Two of what will be a five-part series addressing five categories of flaws repeatedly found in CNN investigations into allegations against Israel. Find Part One, regarding the omission of exculpatory information, here. Part Three will address the use of one-sided and dubious “expert” analysis. Part Four will address the use of skewed context and language. Part Five will address the partisan agenda repeatedly found in the investigations. Note that these issues are not universal at CNN, and there are outstanding CNN journalists and fair-minded hosts. Nonetheless, these issues are pervasive enough that they require exposure.]

Ignoring Questions of Reliability

A common concern with CNN investigations is the frequency with which they mislead the audience about the reliability of the evidence presented. Often, this takes the form of omitting details that cast serious doubt on the credibility of witnesses or other evidence used to make allegations against Israel. Other times it takes the form of misleading the audience about the strength of evidence in support of Israeli claims, falsely portraying situations as “he said she said” situations. Sometimes, even objective facts are rebranded as “Israeli claims.” The tendency to leave unexplained how evidence was acquired similarly raises questions about whether the conclusions are actually supported by the facts.

Below are examples of these shortcomings from three of CNN’s investigations into allegations against Israel.

The Kamal Adwan Hospital Investigation (Background available here)

CNN’s Kamal Adwan Hospital investigation illustrates multiple ways in which the relative credibility of witnesses, or rather lack thereof, is hidden from readers. The article includes allegations of a number of horrendous abuses at the hospital by Israeli forces, including digging up and desecrating bodies, shooting innocent doctors, and falsely accusing innocent civilian men of being terrorists. Almost all of the evidence comes from statements by three hospital staff: Hossam Abu Safiya, the head of pediatrics; Eid Sabbah, the head of nursing; and Asmaa Tanteesh, a nurse. The article mentions satellite imagery and video footage, but this evidence supports only the proposition that a burial spot was dug up and little else.

One way in which the article gives a false appearance of credibility to the three witnesses, while downplaying the credibility of contrary Israeli statements, is by not sharing the existence of material evidence that makes one of the claims by the hospital staff highly unlikely. This, in turn, raises questions about the truthfulness of their other claims.

Specifically, the three hospital staff would have us believe that hand grenades are standard equipment for hospital security guards instead of terrorists.

After referencing a video showing a number of military-age males carrying weapons above their heads as they exit the hospital, CNN quotes Tanteesh saying that there “weren’t any resistance fighters in the hospital.” The article also cites Abu Safiya and Sabbah for the claim that “the guns that they were pictured with had belonged to hospital security guards.”

The authors also include a statement from the IDF that it found numerous weapons, including RPGs and explosive devices at the hospital.

But this suggests a “he said she said” situation when, in fact, only one side has produced evidence supporting its claim. The IDF didn’t just say there were weapons. They released multiple videos showing soldiers finding weapons, including hand grenades, hidden inside the hospital. In one video, a soldier is seen pulling out what appears to be a makeshift grenade from an incubator for infants, apparently after unidentified hospital workers confessed about the presence of hidden weapons there.

It’s unclear whether the journalists, Abeer Salman and Kareem Khadder, bothered to press the three staff members as to why hospital guards would need hand grenades. It is also unclear why, given this extraordinarily dubious claim made by those three witnesses, the journalists go on to rely on those same witnesses for other sensationalist claims.

A still from a video released by the IDF showing weapons found in Kamal Adwan Hospital, including hand grenades.

A still from a video released by the IDF showing what appears to be a hand grenade that was pulled out of an incubator seconds earlier at Kamal Adwan Hospital.

Another reason their claims must be treated with skepticism: they work at a Hamas-administered hospital. To be clear, the article does acknowledge that the hospital “falls under the administration of the Ministry of Interior,” suggesting to the audience there is a conflict of interest here. But leaving the issue at that is entirely inadequate, as it does inform that the same Hamas-run Interior Ministry has both motive and a long record of lying about the use of such hospitals by Hamas terrorists. Nor do the authors warn their audience that there is an established record of hospital officials in Gaza lying about these things, too.

Consider, for example, that both Hamas officials and the director of al-Shifa Hospital repeatedly denied that there was any presence of Hamas terrorists, weapons, or infrastructure at the hospital.

By mid-November, these lies were already being publicly exposed with incontrovertible evidence, including drone footage showing the location of terror tunnels underneath the hospital, caches of weapons found inside, and CCTV footage of armed terrorists bringing in hostages by the front door in broad daylight. Since then, U.S. intelligence has independently confirmed that Hamas used the hospital as a command center, too.

Abu Safiya, who is the sole source of evidence for the most sensationalist allegations, has himself previously made claims and used rhetoric that should have put CNN on alert. For example, when speaking to Arabic-language news outlets, Abu Safiya displays a fondness for Holocaust inversion, referring to Israelis as “Nazis.”

#cnn #media bias #hamas propaganda #al shifa hospital #kamal adwan hospital

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