Pearls and Irritations

On 3 July 2024, The Age’s Chief Reporter, Chip Le Grand, emailed, called and sent a text message to my phone, posing a series of bad faith, disingenuous accusations and loaded questions which cast me as a “holocaust denier” and anti-semite. “October 7 denial, like holocaust denial,” Le Grand wrote to me, “has taken many forms, including quibbling over the number of Israeli civilians killed, shifting blame for atrocities away from the perpetrators and on to Israel, greeting survivor stories with scepticism or demand for proof, or otherwise seeking to minimise, justify or qualify the nature of the atrocities carried by Hamas and other militant Palestinian groups.”

Le Grand took exception with my article ‘A Critical Look at The New York Times’ Weaponisation of Rape in Service of Israeli Propaganda’ published with the Institute of Palestine Studies on 14 January 2024. Demanding proof, he argued, “perpetuates the same, ancient anti-semitic trope that Jews are liars who should not be believed.”

I did not respond to Le Grand.

Le Grand’s ‘exclusive report’, “The denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors”, was published on 7 July 2024 in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.

The article casts me as an ‘October 7 denier’ which, according to Le Grand’s overarching argument, is equivalent to being a ‘Holocaust denier’ and a rape apologist and denier. I wrote to the editors of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald with an exhaustive breakdown of the misleading claims and factual inaccuracies in Le Grand’s article and demanded a retraction. I was ignored. I followed up for a response. I was ignored. I therefore lodged a complaint with the Australian Press Council, appending the detailed letter I had sent to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. I alleged a breach of the Council’s principles of ‘accuracy and clarity’ and ‘fairness and balance.’ My complaint was rejected. The Council found Le Grand’s article did not breach the Council’s Standards of Practice.

My complaint — a detailed catalogue over 7 pages— received a response of 13 lines. Not a single allegation is substantively addressed by the Council, nor did the Council furnish any argument or substantiation of its findings.

Le Grand’s article remains online on the websites of both The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. It is astounding that the Australian Press Council has vindicated an article that is riddled with inaccuracies, is misleading in its omission of key factual material and relies on discredited witnesses and news sources. These can be distilled in seven key points of concern.

1. Rape Claims

Le Grand writes: “This flat denial of murder, rape, and mutilation of Jewish and Arab Israelis, a daylight carnage captured on hundreds of security cameras, dash cameras, mobile phones and body cameras worn by the killers left the MP flummoxed.”

Le Grand’s inclusion of “rape” in this line creates the impression that rapes were filmed on “hundreds” of “security cameras, dash cameras, mobile phones and body cameras”. This is false and misleading. Between 29 January 29 and 14 February 2024, the Office of the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC) made an official visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank. In its mission report (“the Patten report”) it confirmed there is no video or photo evidence of any rape or sexual assault/violence. Paragraphs 34 and 74 of the Patten report states:

34. The mission team, specifically the forensic pathologist and the digital analyst, reviewed over 5,000 photos, around 50 hours and several audio files of footage of the attacks, provided partly by various state agencies and through an independent online review of various open sources, to identify potential instances and indications of conflict-related sexual violence. The content encompassed the actual attacks and their immediate aftermath, captured through militants’ bodycams and dashcams, individual cellphones, CCTV, and traffic surveillance cameras. Additionally, the materials included photos and videos documenting the process of recovering and identifying the deceased.

74. In the medico-legal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reported: “Beyond this, from inquiries put to three bodies in the defence establishment by Haaretz, it emerges that the intelligence material collected by the police and the intelligence bodies, including footage from terrorists’ body cameras, does not contain visual documentation of any acts of rape themselves.”

The Times of London, hardly a pro-Palestinian publication, added: “In all the Hamas video footage Patten’s team had watched and all the photographs they had seen, there were no depictions of rape. We hired a leading Israeli dark-web researcher to look for evidence of those images, including footage deleted from public sources. None could be found.”

And yet, in response to the above, the Australian Press Council simply concluded that the article did not “unfairly or misleading [sic] suggest that the ‘rapes’ were “filmed on ‘hundreds’ of ‘security cameras, mobile phones and body cameras”.

1. Discredited Witness

Le Grand cites Nimrod Palmach as a key witness in the article. Describing Palmach as “a staunch Israel Defence Forces reservist” he writes that Palmach “saw things that day he will never forget. People shot in the head. Bodies of dead women, stripped half naked. Burnt corpses”. He quotes Palmach’s lament that, “we are the only country in the world that has to go through a massacre like this, an act of barbarism like this, and people will not believe us, will want to see proof, will blame us for manipulating the truth”.

This is not Palmach’s first appearance in the Australian press, as an interview with him by Sharri Markson on Sky News was written up by The Weekend Australian in December of last year. On that occasion, Palmach claimed to have seen two shot babies on a highway near Kibbutz Alumim.

As confirmed by Haaretz, citing Israeli Government sources, one baby, 10-month-old Mila Cohen, was tragically shot dead on 7 October, in a different location, Kibbutz Be’eri, and under a different set of circumstances to those described in Palmach’s “testimony” (she was shot and killed through a safe room door from the back as she was held by her mother, who survived, during crossfire between militants and Israeli military forces).

In further coverage by The Weekend Australian in December, Palmach claimed that in Kibbutz Be’eri he had seen women with organs cut out of them, genital mutilation of women’s bodies, raped women. He claimed to have found orders and manuals, with instructions to rape and take captives, on the bodies of militants, and claimed to have witnessed a scene of Hamas preparing meals as they cut off body parts from children in front of their parents.

All these claims have been proven lies by, among others, the Patten report (see sections 65 and 67, and footnote 14 in particular), Haaretz, AP, The Times of London and The Intercept, which trace them back to their origin in accounts by workers for the religious body retrieval organisation ZAKA. 

The Australian Press Council, completely ignoring all the above points as to the credibility of the primary witness in the article, deals with Palmach in one line: “In relation to your concerns with Nimrod Palmach, we note the article is quoting the comments of a witness to the events of 7 October.” 

1. Mischaracterising findings regarding Palestinian victims

Le Grand cites the report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council. He writes: “…in its first detailed findings on the conflict published last month, [the report] 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.”

When Le Grand cites this second UN report, instead of quoting the report’s finding of “systematic sexual and gender-based violence” against Palestinians, he refers simply to “sexual humiliation of women”. This is misleading and obscures the commission of inquiry’s damning findings. The report does not just say women were “humiliated”, it says children, girls, boys, women and men were subjected to sexualised torture, beatings, mutilation, desecration of bodies, as well as rape. The report says all of these acts were systematic, intentional and deliberate, and extend not just to the period they investigated after 7 October, but also to the occupation itself, going back decades.

Le Grand also qualifies the inquiry’s findings with the clause “if proven by a court”, whilst presenting as objective and proven fact whatever the report says about Palestinian militants’ alleged crimes on 7 October. He treats the accusations against Palestinians in graphic detail while skating over similarly detailed accounts of the actions of the Israeli military.

Readers are thus led to believe that the findings of crimes by Palestinians are established fact beyond a reasonable doubt, despite the report’s admitted lack of an evidentiary foundation as the Israelis refused all cooperation with the inquiry and its investigators, blocking access to them, refusing to share any evidentiary materials, and preventing them from doing any investigative work on the ground. 

1. Torture and genital mutilation

Le Grand also mischaracterises the contents of the inquiry’s report in relation to claims of torture and genital mutilation. He writes: “The killers included members of Hamas’ military brigades and other armed Palestinian groups. According to the 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.”

This paragraph mischaracterises the contents of the inquiry’s report. It does not make any conclusive finding regarding allegations of genital mutilation (with accelerants or by any other means). It says they received these claims from one witness: “One witness told the Commission that many bodies of men and women received at Shura were burnt in the genital area. In some cases, there were indications that gasoline had been used to set genitals on fire.” It then refers to one video they obtained showing a body burned from the waist down.

However, directly after, in section 138, which Le Grand ignores entirely, the inquiry’s report concludes that they could not verify any allegations of “sexualised torture and genital mutilation”.

Furthermore, other reporting as well as the Patten report have questioned the veracity of claims of targeted genital mutilation, including through burning with accelerants, which Le Grand states as fact in his piece. Patten’s report which, unlike the commission of inquiry’s, had access to all Israeli intelligence, police and government records, photos, videos, and materials as well as witnesses and therefore was not hampered in its ability to draw conclusions, also concluded that it could find no evidence of targeted genital mutilation, including no evidence of any burning of genitals with accelerant. In fact, the report repeatedly states that claims of targeted genital mutilation were made falsely by non-experts, such as in sections 16, 47, 65, 70 and 76, the relevant parts of which are cited here.

Haaretz also reported that claims of genital mutilation and sexual violence on bodies taken to the Shura Base were false:

However, at Shura Base, to which most of the bodies were taken for purposes of identification, there were five forensic pathologists at work. In that capacity, they also examined bodies that arrived completely or partially naked in order to examine the possibility of rape. According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia. (my emphasis)

And with respect to the police forensic teams investigation of bodies at the Nova festival:

 According to a source who is knowledgeable about the investigation, on the night between 7 October and 8 October, six police forensic investigation teams — 12 police officers, all told — worked at the site of the party, alongside volunteers of ZAKA Search and Rescue. The police worked in the dark of night, in an area where hostilities were still underway, with air force helicopters above them firing volleys. In the course of their work, which included photographing faces only and covering the victims ahead of their evacuation, more than 200 bodies were documented. These teams did not document a single case of sexual assault or cases of genital mutilation. (my emphasis)

Despite me presenting the above detailed catalogue of evidence to the Australian Press Council, the Council concluded that it did “not consider the article’s comments concerning the findings of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry by the United Nations Human Rights Council, to be an unfair or misleading interpretation of the report”.

1. Sexual Assault

Le Grand asserts: “The commission concluded that women were sexually assaulted at multiple sites.” The phrase “sexual assault” does not occur once in the entire commission of inquiry report on Israel. By “sexual assault”, Le Grand cannot be referring to “rape”, “sexualised torture” or “genital mutilation”, which the commission of inquiry’s report explicitly says they could not verify.

Instead, he must be referring to the report’s broad definition of “sexual violence”, which includes non-physical acts such as verbal degradation, isolation of victims, any use of coercion against women, filming partially dressed bodies with bodycams, taking hostages, and any kind of violence against women more generally. The report uses the standard definition of “sexual and gender-based violence” and shortens it to “sexual violence” in descriptions of the aforementioned type of acts.

This is clarified in footnote 52: “The Commission considers the term ‘sexual violence’ to cover a range of physical and nonphysical acts of a sexual nature against a person or causing a person to engage in such an act, by force, or by threat of force or coercion.”

At a minimum, Le Grand should have specified that he was referring to “sexual violence” as specifically defined in the report and added that the report concluded it could not verify a single claim of rape, sexualised torture or genital mutilation. Other outlets who reported on the commission of inquiry’s report and its findings, such as The New York Times, included this crucial information as well as the fact that “Israel blocked its access to witnesses, crime scenes and unedited versions of recorded testimonies”.

The Australian Press Council again responded to my detailed response by stating that it “does not consider it to be unfair or misleading” to describe the reported crimes as “sexual humiliation of woman” and “sexual assault”, instead of saying, for example, that “systemic sexual and gender-based violence” or “sexual violence” occurred.

1. Allegations of Rape Denial 

Le Grand states that: “As the conflict escalated and civilian deaths in Gaza climbed, pro-Palestinian activists dismissed evidence of rape and other sexual abuses by Hamas militants.” Le Grand misrepresents my position on rape. I have never and do not in the article I published with the Institute of Palestine Studies, dismiss “evidence of rape and other sexual abuses”. My analysis and critique have always focused on the allegations of systematic and mass rape. In the article I published with the Institute of Palestine Studies, I specifically say: “The challenge to these allegations of systematic rape is not about claiming Israeli Jewish women cannot be victims of sexual violence.” Throughout the piece I am meticulous and deliberate in referring to the “mass rape claims” and “allegations of mass rape”.

Le Grand also refers to my Instagram post of 1 January 2024 and offers a partial quote: “Posting on Instagram, Abdel-Fattah demanded ‘a healthy cynicism of the allegations made by genocide-cheering propagandists’.” He conveniently omits slide 4, which states:

“Demanding due diligence, evidentiary rigour and some basic critical race literacy when your genocidal coloniser raises mass rape allegations does not negate our patently obvious position that mass rape is a heinous war crime and any such allegations should be investigated and perpetrators held accountable.”

Le Grand adds: “In the blog, Abdel-Fattah argues that anyone who accepts that Hamas militants raped Israeli women is promoting ‘rape atrocity propaganda’ and consenting to the genocide of Palestinian people.”

My article in fact states: “The fact is that Israeli mass rape claims are so emblematic of wartime atrocity propaganda that you have to be deeply committed to and affirmed by the racist tropes of Palestinian men to suspend all critical thinking and, in doing so, consent to the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza.” 

In relation to “rape atrocity propaganda” I state, again clearly tethering my argument to the mass rape claims:

“It is emphatically not anti-woman, anti-feminist, or antisemitic to name the political context in which the systematic rape allegations are being made. It is urgent that we call out rape atrocity propaganda and remind that this stratagem has historically been one of the most potent weapons used by White power to discredit, demonise, diabolise, and destroy Black and Brown men and to deflect sympathy from those resisting oppression to the actual oppressors, and finally to justify lethal responses.

“Race-critical feminists have filled libraries with books and writings on the historical and contemporary iterations of rape atrocity propaganda in the service of war, imperialism, and maintaining racial hierarchies.

“Mainstream liberal feminists, academics sitting in gender studies departments, women’s advocacy groups, and gender-based violence campaigners who have accepted and shared Israel’s mass rape claims, or remained silent, or who have not spoken out against the cynical use of rape atrocity propaganda to justify Israel’s genocidal campaign, have not only completely abandoned Palestinians in Gaza to the forces of militarised violence, they have exposed their own deep-seated racism and double standards.”

Framing me as a “rape denier” when I have explicitly and specifically only questioned allegations of systematic Hamas mass rape is a defamatory lie. According to the Australian Press Council, however, Le Grand “accurately reports your comments posted on Instagram and your comments made in response to The New York Times investigative report. In this context, we do not consider the article unfairly omitted any key facts from your comments. For example, we do not consider it is unfair to report your comments concerning ‘rape atrocity propaganda’ when you assert that your comments were about claims of mass rape.”

The Australian Press Council then goes on to “note that the publication contacted [me] for comment and included [my] following response: Abdel-Fattah dismissed this story as “yet another example of how mainstream media perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism and launders Israeli propaganda and lies”. This is incorrect. I never responded directly to Le Grand’s questions. The quote the Press Council is referring to was sourced by Le Grand from a thread I posted on social media.

1. New York Times article: Screams Without Words

Le Grand portrays my criticism of the New York Times report ‘Screams Without Words’ piece as being solely shared by what he frames as fringe and unreliable media outlets and that I base my claims “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-based website The Electronic Intifada, and Mena, an Egyptian feminist initiative that rejected the New York Times report two days after it was published.”

It is astonishing that Le Grand, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Press Council are all committed to legitimating the New York Times report when the report has been widely discredited by reputable mainstream sources, such as The Times of London and the Patten report, and has been proven to include falsehoods, something acknowledged by the New York Times itself, which had to add a correction to it and fire one of the article’s co-authors, Anat Schwartz, over her retweeting of viciously anti-Palestinian comments.

 An article by news website The Intercept led to the NYT correcting a key claim in its own original piece, namely that of a rape in Kibbutz Be’eri. In their “update” and in a separate piece, it acknowledged that the rape account in the “Screams Without Words” piece was disproven by video evidence and witness testimony from kibbutz leaders and relatives and friends of the alleged victims. 

Instead of reporting these facts, Le Grand frames criticism of the NYT piece republished by The Age as the work of fringe conspiracists.

The NYT also cited testimonies of two volunteers at the Shura Base, Shari Mendes and Captain Maayan (who refused to provide reporters with her surname). Both handled bodies from 7 October and subsequently claimed they saw evidence of rape and sexual violence on bodies taken to the base. Mendes, a key source for claims of “undressed bodies” and “bodies with signs of sexual violence” at the Shura Base, claimed to have seen a non-existent fetus cut from a non-existent beheaded woman’s womb. In addition, Haaretz reported that:

At Shura Base, to which most of the bodies were taken for purposes of identification, there were five forensic pathologists at work. In that capacity, they also examined bodies that arrived completely or partially naked in order to examine the possibility of rape. According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia. (my emphasis)

The NYT piece, which came out before the Patten report, is littered with claims of targeted genital mutilation, including nails in groins and shooting in vaginas, which the Patten report was unable to verify. The relevant sections are cited here. 

Reiterating this finding, UN official Pramila Patten said at a press conference that allegations of objects such as nails and knives stuck in genitalia could not be verified in any of the materials they reviewed, which includes the photos the NYT claimed they saw and verified as showing this.

Two key claimed witnesses in the NYT piece are Sapir and Raz Cohen, whose testimonies, the former of which includes claims of “breasts cut off” and “a terrorist holding the severed heads of three more women”, were not just questioned by the Grayzone and the Electronic Intifada, but also The Times of London, the latter citing Israeli police sources. Furthermore, over 59 renowned journalism professors have criticised the NYT piece for its lack of adherence to basic journalistic standards and norms.

Each of these points of concern would raise serious doubts over Le Grand’s motives and journalistic practice. Combined as they are in a single piece, their effect is to demonise valid criticism of accounts of the 7 October attacks, to defame those outlining such criticisms as rape apologists and on a par with Holocaust deniers, and to add to the very disinformation and misinformation Le Grand’s piece purports to combat. 

But it is the lazy, dismissive response by the Australian Press Council that deserves the most attention. The Council’s dismissive 13-line response exposes the contempt with which Palestinians are treated by the media establishment. Palestinians are almost universally shut out of mainstream media platforms, our pitches and submissions routinely rejected. When we push back against brazenly misleading, defamatory and false reporting and commentary, we are stone-walled or treated with contempt, our complaints not even worthy of proper engagement. There is only one silver lining in all this. Media studies and journalism students can turn to Le Grand’s article and the Press Council’s response as a textbook case study on how mainstream media launders Israeli propaganda on the one hand, and the abysmal failure of media institutions to hold publications and their journalistic practices to account, on the other.

And so we continue to record, bear witness, write back. Because this is much is certain: one day there will be a reckoning and we will have amassed our evidence despite attempts to silence and censor us.

P&I contacted Chip Le Grand, provided him with a copy of Dr Abdel-Fattah’s letter to The Age editor and gave him 48 hours to provide a response, if any. He did not respond.

 

Letter

 

For more on this topic, P&I recommends:

The Age hits a low pursuing discredited narratives about Oct. 7 attack

The Age hits a low pursuing discredited narratives about Oct. 7 attack