The Media’s Minimization of Brutality of Hamas’s October 7 Attacks: A Response

By Anonymous Lawyer

Over the last two weeks, we’ve seen an emerging PR tactic among Hamas-sympathizers: faced with the realization that the public will not support the beheading of babies and some of the other gruesome acts perpetrated in the October 7 attacks, such as violent mass rape, they question or deny the reality of these atrocities. One such effort was published last week in Law.com, a major legal industry publication.  Written by Krishnan Nair, Law.com’s International Managing Editor, it purports to be a critique of lawyers who have taken to social media over the past two weeks to speak out about the atrocities from a place of “emotions” as opposed to “facts.” (See https://www.law.com/international-edition/2023/10/18/israel-gaza-lawyers-risk-becoming-agents-of-misinformation/#:~:text=False%20narratives%2C%20AI%2Dgenerated%20imagery,the%20untruths%2C%20not%20promoting%20them.). It’s important to note that we do not know Mr. Nair’s views on the situation in Israel other than what he’s written in this article, and have no reason to believe the piece was written with the intent to sympathize with or support Hamas. But it is nevertheless a particularly insidious example of the effort that is led by open Hamas sympathizers to undermine the reality of the barbarism of the attacks, since it appears not in some fringe publication or in a Tweet, but in a major legal industry publication, by a respected legal industry reporter and insider, under the guise of a call let the facts lead the coverage.

The open letter below is a response to Mr. Nair’s piece. The writer is one of the many lawyers who have spoken out on social media since October 7 to bring attention to the depravity of the attacks, the world’s silence (and too often approval) in response, and the threats to their safety Jews all over the world are facing as a result. Jew in the City has agreed to maintain the writer’s anonymity for fear of professional repercussions for criticizing Law.com and its international managing editor.

To @Krishnan Nair, @Law.com International Managing Editor: I write regarding your October 18 article titled “Israel-Gaza: Lawyers Risk Becoming Agents of Misinformation.”

As a lawyer who has taken to social media over the past week to, as you call it, make “impassioned arguments” about the crimes against humanity perpetrated by some 1,500 or more terrorists gleefully rampaging, attacking, murdering, raping, grievously wounding, and taking hostage hundreds and thousands of innocent civilians in Israel, including children, your article struck home. Thank you so much for your important critique of people’s “emotions … running high” during this time, and your ode to “evidence, forensics and facts.”

I was particularly taken by your focus on what you call the “discredited” assertion that Hamas’s massacres involved, among other things, the “beheading of babies.” How dare people suggest Jewish babies were beheaded when they were only shot, burned alive, and cut from their mother’s womb and stabbed to death by the dozens??? Have they no shame? Don’t people know—only adults were dismembered???!!! I’m sure it’s only a coincidence that this same argument has been the focus of so-called “debunking” of Israel’s “propaganda” about the massacres by Hamas sympathizers and apologists this past week.

But wait: there’s eyewitness testimony. See, for example, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-babies-killed-hamas-terror-attack-kibbutz-kfar-aza-first-responders-say/, which conveys multiple eyewitness accounts of Israeli babies found beheaded (including by, as it happens, a specialist in forensics whose job it is to literally pick up the body parts after a massacre and “saw with his own eyes children and babies who had been beheaded”). Or here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12653435/Israeli-morgue-worker-says-horrors-inflicted-Hamass-victims-worse-Holocaust-including-decapitated-pregnant-woman-beheaded-unborn-child.html%0A.

Perhaps because you are a distinguished journalist and not a lawyer you were not taught that direct eyewitness accounts are “evidence” and do establish the “facts.” In fact, the vast majority of crimes are proven that way; rarely is mass murder, mass rape, and mass abduction of children videotaped and photographed by its perpetrators. Oh wait, here it was. Again and again. As for the beheaded Jewish babies, perhaps you’ve forgotten that “picture or it didn’t happen” isn’t actually an evidentiary or journalistic standard.

But even if it was, the photos were released on October 12—six days before your article. See,

“Photos of babies being burnt, decapitated confirmed,” https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-767951. The verified photos of babies burned and decapitated in Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel were also shown to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his visit to Israel on October 12. Later in the day, the photos were published on Twitter (with a content warning covering them “until a button reading ‘show’ is pressed”).

The eyewitnesses who did the heroic work of clearing bodies after this massacre have spoken. And the pictures prove their account to be true. You only compound the trauma—theirs and all Jewish people’s—by using your platform to parrot Hamas-apologist denials, ignoring all available “evidence, forensics and facts.” If you or Law.com have any journalistic integrity, you will promptly issue a retraction and correction.

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