Politics
Israeli film crew attacked in Belfast, but they shouldn’t even be there
So-called ‘Israel’s’ i24 News, which spread genocide-boosting fictions about beheaded babies post-7 October 2023, has released footage of a man attacking their ‘journalists’ in Belfast. Since then, dishonest media and politicians have sought to falsely conflate the anti-Zionist attack with antisemitism, offering zero evidence for the presence of the latter.
Yet this should have all been avoided by the British government imposing proper sanctions on the settler-colony, including barring entry for all ‘Israeli’ media outlets.
The attack occurred earlier in August, when an ‘Israeli’ cameraman and reporter were preying on people in Belfast’s cathedral quarter, an area packed with pubs and music venues. i24 News claims:
…i24NEWS reporter Jonathan Roe and photographer Nadav Abs were filming a documentary series examining the rise of antisemitism in Europe.
Their reporter Yonatan Raveh told the Jerusalem Post:
He came over to us and started asking questions. We put the camera on him, and then he gave us the middle finger and shouted: “f*** Israel.
We were not looking for any trouble; we were trying to be as peaceful as we can get, and we just walked away. But he started to follow us.
i24 News Footage reveals lies of ‘Israeli’ hacks
However, i24 News’ footage directly contradicts this account. The man does appear to make some sort of gesture to the apartheid entity’s propagandists, but then walks away. The next clip reveals that actual events are the exact reverse of Raveh’s account. The Zionists did not “just walk away”; instead they followed the man and began filming him close-up.
The man can be heard repeatedly asking his harassers to delete footage of him, and to stop recording him. When they refuse these reasonable requests, he becomes aggressive, and finally throws a pint glass towards them.
Many online have seen through the fiction dreamt up by the provocateurs masquerading as journalists. One commenter on Belfast Live’s coverage remarked:
They intimidated a drunken man. He warned them and they antagonised him again.
Another said “Not all heroes wear capes”. Taking a very different take were the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), whose leader Gavin Robinson sought to deceitfully imply an antisemitic motive:
If this attack was motivated by antisemitism, it must be recognised and condemned unequivocally. There must be no place for antisemitism or any form of intimidation on our streets.
The available footage shows the man making no antisemitic remarks. If he said “fuck Israel”, then a) good for him, and b) criticising a genocidal settler-colony is not remotely the same as demeaning all Jewish people. As we tire of saying, to conflate the two things is itself to be antisemitic. Implying Jewish people are somehow inherently linked to the vile West Asian land theft project is a horrible slur upon them.
Massive sanctions on the Zionist entity now, including its propaganda outlets
i24 News themselves chose to also run with suggestions of antisemitism, with the help of another DUP figure – David McIlveen, who founded DUP Friends of Israel. The Zionist propaganda outfit doesn’t need to confect new fantasies, given it still has the grotesque beheaded babies lies up on its website, years after actual journalists debunked the story.
Such disgraceful organisations simply shouldn’t be allowed to operate in the north of Ireland, or anywhere else. Barring entry for them would protect ordinary people from harassment, and would form what ought to be a comprehensive range of sanctions against all ‘Israeli’ institutions, be they military, political, academic, sporting, cultural, media or anything else.
Devastating restrictions that prevent this deeply abnormal and criminal entity from operating like a normal state are the only way to curb its murderous and racist policies. External pressure is essential, given there is zero current prospect of any internal shift.
The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, in its guidelines for dealing with ‘Israeli’ academic and cultural institutions, says:
As a general overriding rule, Israeli cultural institutions, unless proven otherwise, are complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation and denial of basic Palestinian rights, whether through their silence or actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel’s violations of international law and human rights.
All such institutions must be boycotted, divested from and sanctioned. Logically, this ought to extend to media outlets too.
We don’t condone attacks on journalists, or even ‘Israelis’ pretending to be journalists, needlessly provoking people in the street. Yet the island of Ireland should never serve as a platform for those who benefit from a genocidal settler-colony, and seek to produce fresh fictions to justify its intolerable ongoing existence.
Featured image via screengrab
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