Pages
  • First Page
  • Economy
  • Iranica
  • Special issue
  • Sports
  • National
  • Arts & Culture
Number Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Forty One - 22 November 2023
Iran Daily - Number Seven Thousand Four Hundred and Forty One - 22 November 2023 - Page 5

’Bye bye Israel’

How do pseudo-journalists like Edy Cohen attempt to cover up Israel's defeat on October 7 on media with fictional scenarios?

Israel was built on three pillars: lies, war, and terrorism. That goes for its preferred strategy for survival, too. In its 75-year history, Israel has never taken responsibility for its crimes and consistently distorted realities.
Following Hamas’s surprise operation on October 7, Israeli warlords turned to the dissemination of false or misleading information to divert public attention, complementing their war crimes. The spread of fake news by the Israelis in the Israel-Gaza war served several purposes, including undermining factual information, manipulating public opinion, and diverting attention away from their crimes in Gaza. It also aimed to demonize and delegitimize Palestinians and their resistance against the occupation and occupiers. This was done by resembling their resistance to Daesh to evoke sympathy for Israel as the supposed victim.

Lies to cover up a major defeat

The disinformation spread by Israel, initially revolving around themes such as beheading infants, assaulting women, or burning some of the victims alive, and more recently, around discovering a military base beneath hospitals, continues to be echoed by many Western politicians and mainstream media. One such example was the contradictory, distorted images that were published by the IDF after the bombardment and massacre at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital in Gaza.
Lies abound regarding the Re’im Festival as well. Yasmin Porat, an Israeli settler who was captured and subsequently freed by Hamas, talked in a radio interview on This Morning Show hosted by Aryeh Golan about Hamas’s humane treatment of captives, revealing that the settlers were killed by Israeli forces.
numerous fake news pieces by the Israeli army, politicians, and media have been published and sometimes repeated by Western politicians and mainstream media.
Apart from the dissemination of fake news, since the October 7 operation, the abundant use of negative and biased language by Israel’s allies and mainstream media soon became evident to all. We have also witnessed the removal and restriction of voices that were critical of Israel’s crimes in mainstream media. For example, Steve Bell, a cartoonist for The Guardian English newspaper, was fired after 40 years of collaboration for drawing a cartoon of Netanyahu. Anchors of the American TV network MSNBC Mehdi Hasan, Ayman Mohyeldin, and Ali Velshi were “quietly taken out of the anchor’s chair” as well. The BBC has launched an urgent investigation into six of its journalists, including Sally Nabil and Nada Abdelsamad, working for its Arabic service after they allegedly liked or published posts on social media. There is also evidence of the removal of some content or blocking of user accounts that stood in solidarity with Palestine on some social networks, including YouTube and Instagram.
Israel has shown that it does not distinguish between military and non-military targets, repeatedly targeting schools, universities, mosques, churches, homes, hospitals, emergency centers, and ambulances.
Israel repeatedly claimed Hamas had built tunnels under non-military centers, including hospitals, and demanded their evacuation, ignoring the fact that patients and displaced persons seeking refuge in hospitals had nowhere else to go. Israel did not stop there and launched a series of brutal attacks on hospitals. Immediately after each attack, Israel’s propaganda machine went into action.
Edy Cohen, an Israeli journalist and analyst, tweeted about the killing of dozens of Hamas leaders who were hiding near the Al-Ahli Hospital, then immediately deleted his tweet. Hananya Naftali, a social media adviser for Benjamin Netanyahu, also claimed in a tweet that the Israeli Air Force attacked a Hamas base in a Gaza hospital, killing some “terrorists”. However, this tweet was deleted minutes later and replaced with a new tweet, stating: “The mysterious explosion in Gaza. Hamas blames Israel for this.” Afterwards, Naftali released a clip from August 2022 as evidence of the false claim that a misfired missile by Islamic Jihad had hit the hospital. This tweet was also later edited by Naftali, who added a video from Al Jazeera to prove their new claim.
The Israeli security and military personnel also published a recorded file of an allegedly intercepted conversation between two Hamas fighters, one of whom says that the hospital was hit by a rocket from Islamic Jihad. However, the fabricators of this file did not notice that after the Palestinian leaders were tracked by phone and assassinated, resistance fighters do not use mobile phones anymore. Also, the proximity of the cemetery to the hospital, with the direction and height of the rockets launched in the Al Jazeera video that the Israeli authorities cited, does not match. Furthermore, the accent, tone, and dialect, and the ignorance of one of the alleged fighters about the hospital and cemetery’s locations are other factors proving the forgery of this file. New analyses indicate that the recorded audio file was from two separate and independent channels, and, after editing, these two sounds were combined in a digital audio workshop.
The Al Jazeera investigative team concluded that Israel targeted the Al-Ahli Hospital four times in the hour leading up to the explosion. It further declared that the missile launched from Gaza by Islamic Jihad was tracked and completely destroyed in the air by an Iron Dome missile before the hospital was hit.
In the past, Israel repeatedly denied and blamed others for its assassinations and crimes or deferred them to future investigations at an unknown time. However, considering the unprecedented scale of the massacre and destruction and its attacks on non-military centers in Gaza, including 51 hospitals and health centers, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people since October 7, there is no room for doubt who committed this crime. Israel’s withdrawal of its initial claims, resort to old videos or fake files, deletion of flimsy evidence, and contradictions in its official documents support this claim. It seems that Israel has failed in its propaganda war, and its lies are not finding buyers.

Who is Edy Cohen?

Edy Cohen is an Israeli journalist who became infamous among Iranians for his hostility towards Iran. He strives to support Israel and portray it as legitimate and just. He uses the Holocaust as his main theme to depict Jews as victims and attempts to justify the Israeli occupation of Palestine through this narrative.
He has close ties to the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and uses that to manipulate media narratives in line with Israel’s security goals. At times, he releases pieces of news that Israeli authorities do not want to officially publish themselves. These are often untrue stories aimed at media manipulation and spreading the Zionist regime's propaganda. His main platform is X — formerly Twitter.
His brothers have served in the Mossad. One of his brothers, Eli Cohen, was an Israeli spy in Syria who was executed. His other brother served as the Minister of Intelligence in Israel. Edy Cohen’s father, Haim Cohen, was kidnapped on March 29, 1985, and later murdered on December 25, 1985. Cohen’s father, at the time of his death, was 39 years old and held an Iranian passport.
It is suspected that the entire Cohen family has been involved in Israeli intelligence and espionage services. It is possible that his father’s Iranian passport and his residence in Lebanon were related to such missions. Although he is known as a journalist in the media, Cohen maintains constant communication with Mossad and promotes Israel’s media policies. Informed sources state that during the war on Gaza, Edy Cohen was linked with bloggers and online activists, presenting various scenarios to overcome Israel’s defeat on October 7.
Among these scenarios are unfounded claims of a misfired missile attack on Al-Ahli Hospital by Islamic Jihad and the existence of military facilities under Gaza hospitals. All these claims were proven false. Posing as a blogger, Cohen supported Israel with the hashtag #HamasISIS during the war, which later became one of the most trending hashtags in Israel on X.
Another influencer, Yoseph Haddad, who is an Arab defender of Israel, conducted numerous interviews with foreign media and uploaded several videos on social networks, attempting to portray Hamas as criminals. Celebrities like Gal Gadot, Sacha Baron Cohen, and the Olympic medalist Avishag Semberg also shared pro-Israeli content on social networks.
The events of October 7 were not just a defeat, but a media and field disgrace for Israel. However, it seems that and its propagandist men have not learned from the embarrassment of spreading fake news and continue to miserably cover up their failures.
ישראל ביי ביי

Search
Date archive