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CNN’s Nima Elbagir Parachutes Into Israel to Whitewash Palestinian Prisoners

Mia Leimberg, a hostage who was abducted by Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, holds her dog Bella while she and others are handed over by Hamas terrorists to members of the International Committee of the Red Cross, as part of a hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel amid a temporary truce, in an unknown location in Gaza, in this screengrab taken from video released Nov. 28, 2023. Photo: Hamas Military Wing/Handout via REUTERS

Over the past couple of weeks, CNN’s chief international investigative correspondent, Nima Elbagir, has been reporting from Israel, focusing on the Palestinian prisoners who were released as part of the hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.

However, rather than providing an objective look at the subject, Elbagir’s seven written and video reports are overly sympathetic to these prisoners, whitewashing them and their crimes while simultaneously deriding Israel’s justice system.

In separate reports, Elbagir spotlighted four different female Palestinian prisoners, all of whom were released as part of the deal: Hanan al-Barghouti, Marah Bkeer, Malak Silman, and Fatima Shahin.

Hanan al-Barghouti’s story is told by her sister-in-law, Iman al-Barghouti, who claims that “neither she nor Hanan is involved in the politics of this war, yet they suffer its consequences.”

Aside from the fact that Hanan al-Barghouti’s arrest was unrelated to the current war between Israel and Hamas (she was arrested in September 2023), it is inaccurate to portray Hanan as apolitical, as she was arrested on allegations of supporting terrorism.

Following the airing of Elbagir’s report, Hanan al-Barghouti’s political stance has been made very clear, as she has publicly expressed support for both Hamas and Hezbollah.

In her first interview after release from Israeli jails with Palestinian TV, Hanan Barghouti called ‘mother’ of the Palestinian prisoners describes the joy in the female wards on October 7th:

“We cheered at the top of our lungs ‘We are all men of Muhamad Dief!’” pic.twitter.com/WMTMmEk2mE

— Gaza Report – اخبار غزة (@gaza_report) November 27, 2023

Elbagir also referred to al-Barghouti’s brother, Nael al-Barghouti, the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jail, describing him as a “political prisoner.”

In a written report that Elbagir published alongside other journalists, Nael al-Barghouti is also described as having first been arrested in 1978 for “engaging in attacks against the Israeli military.”

What the terms “political prisoner” and “attacks against the Israeli military” don’t tell us is that Nael al-Barghouti was originally incarcerated in 1978 for the murder of an Israeli bus driver, Mordechai Yekuel.

 

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A post shared by HonestReporting (@honestreporting)

In another video essay, Elbagir reported on the case of Marah Bkeer, who she describes as having been “just 16 when she was arrested.”

In an interview with Elbagir, Marah’s mother describes her as “a child and she’s so innocent.”

The impression one gets from this report is that Marah Bkeer was an innocent Palestinian teen who was unjustly incarcerated by Israel.

It’s only at the end of the report that CNN notes that following its initial publication, the news organization was made aware that Bkeer was in jail for “stabbing an Israeli police officer.”

The fact that Nima Elbagir could initially publish such a sympathetic portrayal of a prisoner without informing the viewer that she’s imprisoned for committing a violent crime is the height of journalistic negligence, especially for someone considered to be the “chief international investigative correspondent.”

The child is Marah Bakir. On Oct 12, 2015, age 15, she left school, took a knife and stabbed two Israelis in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah quarter. Shot by police before she could finish off her victims, she was saved by an Israeli medic whose father was murdered some weeks earlier. pic.twitter.com/ZYfnCs5vE5

— This Ongoing War (@ThisOngoingWar) November 24, 2023

The third Palestinian prisoner who is profiled by Nima Elbagir is Malak Silman, whose boisterous reunion with her mother was highlighted by CNN in two separate reports.

While Elbagir does acknowledge the reason for Silman’s imprisonment (she attempted to stab an Israeli police officer), she almost immediately downplays this by claiming in one report that her family, lawyers, and some human rights organizations have described her imprisonment as a “miscarriage of justice” and by noting in another report that she was imprisoned for attempted murder even though no one was injured (which is not the legal threshold for attempted murder).

Are you saying that membership of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization is not grounds to call Malak Salman a terrorist, @nimaelbagir?!

All of these people were in prison for a reason. Most of them for committing violent acts of terror.

Shame on you, @CNN. pic.twitter.com/iolHEXxxHO

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 25, 2023

The last Palestinian prisoner featured in Nima Elbagir’s reports was Fatima Shahin, who was arrested after stabbing an Israeli outside Gush Etzion in April 2023.

In her piece, Elbagir reports that Shahin was accused of “attempted murder” but then allows her to deny this and accuse Israeli forces of recklessly shooting at her.

At no point does Elbagir alert the viewer that, unlike Malak Silman, Shahin is accused of actually stabbing someone and wounding them.

In the report, Elbagir claims that Shahin was “only detained, not charged. She didn’t go to trial. She wasn’t given any opportunity to defend herself.”

However, in acting as a passionate advocate for Fatima Shahin rather than as an objective journalist, Nima Elbagir is disregarding the fact that her incarceration is fairly recent and that, like in many other democratic countries, it can be a while before cases go to trial.

In addition, a report from June 2023 shows that Fatima Shahin had appeared at least once in a hearing before a judge.

 

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A post shared by HonestReporting (@honestreporting)

Alongside her sympathetic portraits of these four Palestinian prisoners, Nima Elbagir’s bias against Israel is further evident in several of these reports.

Elbagir refers to the Israeli government’s prohibition of public celebrations for these released prisoners in eastern Jerusalem as the demonization of “Palestinian joy.”

In these reports, the testimonies of Palestinian prisoners and their families (including blatant falsehoods) are published without criticism and comment, but Israeli claims are investigated and denigrated.

In her report on the first batch of released Palestinian prisoners, Elbagir claims that “there is no grounds to call them terrorists” even though this group included Malak Silman (who is also a member of Islamic Jihad) and Fatima Shahin (who stabbed a civilian).

The Israeli military justice system is described as being “murky” and a report alleges that the administrative detention system allows “Palestinian prisoners to be detained indefinitely, without trial or stated charge.” This ignores the fact that Jews can also be subjected to administrative detention, that there are a wide variety of safeguards in place, and that the detention has to be renewed by a judge every six months.

Lastly, Elbagir’s reporting equates the families of Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages, with such statements as “Families on both sides … are dealing with the reality of those who won’t be coming home,” and “This week’s diplomatic breakthrough offers a glimmer of hope for the families of Palestinian prisoners, as well as those of Israeli hostages.”

This false moral equivalency between prisoners detained for violence and terrorism and hostages kidnapped from their homes is emblematic of Nima Elbagir’s recent reporting from Israel — a sympathetic portrayal of Palestinian prisoners that depicts them as innocent victims of a malicious justice system, an empathetic eye to the families of these prisoners, and total disregard for the severity of their violent pasts.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post CNN’s Nima Elbagir Parachutes Into Israel to Whitewash Palestinian Prisoners first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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