Tom Gross looks at the unseemly rush to blame Israel for the killing of Hamas operative Mahmoud Mabhouh earlier this month:
Yesterday, without any actual evidence, the media in some European countries — notably Britain — went much further than even the media in Dubai, and blamed Israel unreservedly for Mabhouh’s death.
Headlines included:
* Britons had passport details stolen by ‘Mossad death squad’ (Times of London)
* Terror of innocent Britons named as assassins: Why choose us, ask Britons whose identities were stolen by Mossad hit squad (Daily Mail, page 1). Another story on page 4 of the Daily Mail was headlined: “Dragged into a Mossad murder plot” and photo captions in the paper described those involved as “Mossad agents” and “Mossad killers”.
* And today the lead editorial in The Guardian is titled “Israeli assassinations: passports to kill”.
* And BBC Radio 4’s PM show yesterday broadcast the following at 17:35 minutes: 1 million Jews on hand to assist local Mossad executions.Other papers mixed fact with pure nonsense about the supposed past exploits and misdeeds of Israeli intelligence.
Prominent international TV stations have also paid enormous attention to this story, blaming Israel without any concrete evidence. For example, the first four stories on the 8 am World News broadcast on CNN International yesterday concerned Mabhouh’s death (even though it occurred four weeks earlier). Only after those items did CNN report on the capture of the most senior Taliban commander since 2001, which many would argue is a far more important news story, both strategically in terms of international politics and specifically for the United States.
It’s quite possible that Israel’s secret service (Mossad) was behind the killing, but it’s also possible that this was the result of inter-factional disputes among Palestinian groups. The evidence of Israeli involvement so far is circumstantial, but the British media have often been willing to believe the worst of Israel.
There’s also this: “It would be uncharacteristically stupid of Mossad operatives if they had in fact so easily allowed themselves to be filmed, and Mossad operatives are not stupid.” That’s not to say that an operation couldn’t be an exception to the general rule, and reputations are lost even faster than they are built in the espionage/counter-espionage world.
Update: Interestingly, Fatah and Hamas are now accusing one another of complicity in the killing.
