Chip Le Grand believes Israelis and not Palestinians

A few days ago, Chip Le Grand, a journalist at the Age, formerly of Murdoch press, sent some questions to Palestinian academic Randa Abdel Fattah. The questions indicated that a scurrilous hit piece was planned. His email indicated that ‘October 7 deniers’ were like Holocaust deniers, and that denial included seeking to ‘qualify’ the atrocities Israel claimed on that day, demanding proof, or doubting the mass rape claims. Among the offences of those he questioned were those who didn’t believe in the NYT story.

Chip also claimed that the UN investigation of the atrocities committed in South Israel on 7 October supported earlier allegations of multiple cases of sexual assault of women and girls.

The New York Times story

To note a few points:

• the NYT story is so controversial, it has its own wikipedia page to summarise all the issues with it. This includes that one of the lead authors had liked obscenely anti-Palestinian posts on twitter; that the lead purported rape victim in the NYT story was disputed by her own family, who denied that she had been raped; that the story relied on Zaka volunteers, who have been proven liars; that one of the claims of atrocities was disputed by a kibbutz spokesperson; that one of the witnesses purported to see a decapitated pregnant woman, when no pregnant women were beheaded. Note — the NYT severed its connections after this controversy with Anat Schwartz, and its podcast decided against publishing an episode on this story, due to questions about it.

This is aside from numerous other issues not covered in the Wikipedia entry. To take one item virtually at random — the Intercept reported that Schwartz desperately tried to find evidence of sexual assault, found multiple signs that it hadn’t occurred, and essentially ignored them — and did not report them — as she continued to chase for any signs she could find.

Schwartz began her work on the violence of October 7 where one would expect, by calling around to the designated “Room 4” facilities in 11 Israeli hospitals that examine and treat potential victims of sexual violence, including rape. “First thing I called them all, and they told me, ‘No, no complaint of sexual assault was received,’” she recalled in the podcast interview. “I had a lot of interviews which didn’t lead anywhere. Like, I would go to all kinds of psychiatric hospitals, sit in front of the staff, all of them are fully committed to the mission and no one had met a victim of sexual assault.”

The next step was to call the manager of the sexual assault hotline in Israel’s south, which proved equally fruitless. The manager told her they had no reports of sexual violence. She described the call as a “crazy in-depth conversation” where she pressed for specific cases. “Did anyone call you? Did you hear anything?” she recalled asking. “How could it be that you didn’t?”

The UN Report

Chip claims that the UN report is “largely consistent” with the NYT story. He cites paragraph 291 — which found that “sexual violence” was committed. It did not find that Hamas was responsible for these crimes.

What were the findings on the issue of rape? It was not “able to independently verify such allegations”, due to Israeli non-cooperation, but specific allegations that were reviewed were found to be “false, inaccurate or contradictory with other evidence or statements”.

What were the findings of sexual violence? Some people were found in states of undress — sometimes with exposed genitals — and also with signs of abuse. Note that this is presented under a category of gender based violence, but not of rape, nor mass rape.

As can be seen — these were acts of terrible cruelty, but they were not instances of rape.

Rather than deal with the actual findings of the report, Chip was presumably misinformed about their findings, and chose to use that as a basis to try to ambush people with political views he opposes.

Chip’s actual story

On 7 July, Chip published the story with an original deadline of Friday. The story made concessions inconsistent with his original email. For example, Chip wrote

There are well-documented examples, particularly in the chaotic days following the Hamas attacks, where either false or unsubstantiated allegations of atrocities were made. The most notorious was the reported discovery of 40 decapitated babies in Kibbutz Kfar Azar, an unverified claim first made by an Israeli television reporter after foreign journalists were taken to view the kibbutz. This horrific tale, now discredited, was repeated by an Israeli government spokesman and US President Joe Biden. A separate claim by a member of Hatzalah, an Israeli volunteer emergency service, about a baby being burnt to death in an oven, was never substantiated.

And

Within the IDF, there is a provision known as the Hannibal Directive — an operating principle that prioritises preventing the abduction of military personnel soldiers above their personal safety. The United Nations commission of inquiry found that the Hannibal Directive was employed in several instances on October 7 and that Israeli civilians were killed by their own troops. One of the most tragic episodes occurred at Kibbutz Be’eri, where tank shells were fired at a house where Hamas was holding hostages.

However, Chip still makes some shocking claims. For example, Chip writes:

According to the [UN] commission of inquiry, they set houses on fire when people were still inside, burnt, mutilated and decapitated bodies, stripped victims naked and used accelerants to set fire to their genitals. They stood over the bodies of their victims and posed for photographs. The commission concluded that women were sexually assaulted at multiple sites.

No — as seen above — they did not. As for the using accelerants to set fire to genitals — this also does not appear in the report. Paragraphs [123], [143] [153] are the only use of the word accelerant. One says a woman’s body was burnt using accelerant, the other says her face was burned. The report does not claim that accelerants were used to set fire to genitals: Chip is flatly misrepresenting its findings.

How does Chip deal with the enormous controversy over the NYT story?

As the conflict escalated and civilian deaths in Gaza climbed, pro-Palestinian activists dismissed evidence of rape and other sexual abuses by Hamas militants. Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian author, academic and human rights advocate, wrote in a blog published by the Beirut-brd Institute of Palestinian Studies that claims of systematic sexual violence, including the findings of a detailed New York Times investigation, republished by this masthead, had been “thoroughly and compellingly discredited”.

Abdel-Fattah brd this claim on material published by The Grayzone — a far-left website that supports the Putin and Assad regimes and denies the Bucha massacre in Ukraine — along with content on Chicago-brd website The Electronic Intifada, and Mena, an Egyptian feminist initiative that rejected the New YorkTimes report two days after it was published.

Rather than address the enormous controversy, Chip summarises its critics as extremists, to be dismissed sight unseen.

For much of the article, Chip cites the authority of an Israeli soldier, the Anti-Defamation League (!), and two people who founded and work for an NGO called “Israel is”. This is to show the horrors of the atrocities on October 7, how offensive it is to experience massacres like that and people to not believe them, to “want to see proof”.

How does Chip deal with atrocities committed by Israel?

Smith says confronting the truth of October 7 does not preclude critical examination of Israel’s conduct in a war that has killed an estimated 38,000 Palestinians.

An Independent International Commission of Inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, in its first detailed findings on the conflict published last month, concluded that Israel’s security forces deliberately attacked civilians, including children, forced the displacement of 1.7 million Palestinians, degraded civilians, sexually humiliated women and used starvation as a method of war. Any of these, if proven by a court, would constitute war crimes.

So in Chip’s mind — if someone disputes atrocities on 7 October, this is grounds for the multiple comparisons drawn in his article for Holocaust denial. What about atrocities committed by Israel? Aside from first noting the curt and abridged treatment given to Israeli atrocities, note that Chip does not deign to treat these as fact. Whilst anything claimed by the UN investigation — or indeed, by an Israeli soldier is treated as fact, war crimes by Israel might be war crimes if they are proven in court. For Chip, no claim against Israel can be believed unless it is proven in court — and given Israel refuses to investigate its atrocities, and will not cooperate with the ICC, it may be assumed he will never, ever believe any atrocities were committed by Israel. For atrocities committed by Palestinians — well, the evidence is there, and anyone who denies such atrocities is like a Holocaust denier. To Chip, accusing Jews of lying is offensive. Disbelieving the claims of Palestinians? Well, that doesn’t even need to be justified — they need evidence, more evidence, they need criminal convictions in a court of law.

Will Chip run a story on those who deny atrocities against Palestinians? Those who lied about the 38 000 Palestinians killed by Israel? Those who deny the warnings of famine from the IPC? Those who deny the adverse findings made against Israel by the ICJ on multiple occasions? Even to ask the question is absurd.

It may be noted that the issue here is not merely Chip. He writes for Ninefax, which apparently gave him carte blanche for his story, his blatant double standards, and his manifestly false claims about the UN inquiry which he plainly hasn’t read. Indeed, it may well be that he was given the assignment, and is merely the face of Ninefax’s editorial policy. So let us note one more feature of the story. It dwells in graphic detail on the suffering of Israelis, making sure to humanise them and their experiences on 7 October. There are pictures of an Israeli child and woman taken hostage, and distraught Israelis — to ensure that readers can relate on a personal level to the traumatic experiences of Israelis. There is no similar reporting on the experiences of Palestinians for the last nine months — of having one’s entire family murdered; of desperately seeking food, water and shelter for one’s children; of being detained, stripped, publicly humiliated and tortured by Israeli soldiers; of the anguish of Palestinians trying to survive famine, bombs and the destruction of a health system. Palestinians are not to be humanised: their lives are not precious like Israeli Jewish life is. This article can thus be taken as a fitting summary not just of the media coverage over the last 9 months, but also of the mainstream political class’s approach to the genocide in Gaza.