Israel failing in Global PR Campaign to demonize Hamas

The Israeli government has reached for comparisons to some of the most notorious international antagonists of recent years in its effort to demonize Hamas so as to avoid a substantive conversation about the ultimate cause of decades of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

The latest claim to emerge about Hamas’ deadly border raid on October 7, which killed more than 1,300 Israeli civilians in several towns near the Gaza Strip, is that the Hamas militants were carrying plans for chemical weapons during the attack.

In a broadcast on Sunday, Israeli President Isaac Herzog held up a document he claimed had been found in one of the settlements, across the front of which it says Al-Qaeda in bold white lettering.

Social media users quickly dissected Herzog’s claim, pointing out that the document he is holding is a biography of Ramzi Youssef, an Al-Qaeda member who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people, which was published by Al-Qaeda.

A former Al-Qaeda operative who turned coat and became a spy for MI6 told British media that one of the documents Herzog held up was a diagram of a simple bomb that was posted online by Al-Qaeda in 2009 and widely downloaded.

But the diagram did not gave instructions on how to make such a weapon. However, the Youssef biography doesn’t contain the image in question.

Herzog’s claims follow rhetorical attempts by Israeli officials to link Hamas with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and Israeli supported ISIS.

Herzog was calling the October 7 attacks “Israel’s 9/11” and said that if the USA was justified in pursuing its War on Terror, then so is Israel justified in launching its all-out war on Gaza, which has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians as of Tuesday.

Former UN weapons inspector and weapons of mass destruction whistleblower Scott Ritter told Radio Sputnik’s The Backstory that in attempting to destroy Hamas, Israel has asked a question it is still unwilling to answer?

What is the ultimate cause of the violence on October 7, 2023. The Israeli parliament can basically veto any judge that they disagree with. They can impeach at will. ‘

So any judge who heard a corruption case against Ben Netanyahu, who allowed it to go forward would be subjected to impeachment, removal. It makes Benjamin Netanyahu literally above the law, ready to erase 1 million Palestinians at free will.

He’s the guy who said, ‘trust me, I will protect you from Hamas’, even though he empowered Hamas; ‘I will protect you from Iran by manufacturing the case about nuclear weapons.

‘I will protect you from Iraq by lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction’.

All these have come back to haunt him, but he continues to tell the Israeli people ‘I, Benjamin Netanyahu alone, can secure you’. And now October 7 comes and it turns out he can’t protect them.

The last thing he needs or wants or desires is [for] people to honestly reflect on it. Because something horrible happened on October 7, I think we are all in agreement about that.

Whether you believe that Hamas had a right to rise up and attack Israeli military targets, that’s a separate debate. I happen to believe they should be able to do that.

But there’s no carte blanche ever for anybody to kill innocent civilians, and a lot of innocent Israeli civilians were killed.

And I think it’s imperative that Israel, like the United States after 9/11, instead of saying ‘we must exact our revenge’, to sit there and say, ‘how did this happen? Why did this happen and how can we prevent it from happening again?’

But in order to answer that question, you have to define the problem. Israel doesn’t want to have that discussion, Netanyahu doesn’t want to have that discussion, because the answer is: he is the problem.

The right-wing policies of Israel is the problem. Zionism might be the problem.

Sputnik/ ABC Flash Point News 2023.