https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/shoot-them-all-god-will-sort-out-the-innocent.html
Shoot Them All, God Will Sort Out the Innocent
- IAN WILLIAMS
- REGIONS
- ISRAEL-PALESTINE
- POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2025
This screen grab taken from AFPTV on Aug. 11, 2025, shows Al Jazeera’s Anas Al-Sharif speaking during an AFP interview in Gaza City on Aug. 1, 2024. He and three Al Jazeera colleagues, as well as two freelance journalists, were killed by a targeted Israeli strike on their tent outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, on Aug. 10. Israel’s brutal policies reflect the fanatical approach to warfare used by the Crusaders who believed they were justified in killing everyone, regardless of their innocence, in 1209. (AFP/AFPTV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2025, pp. 34-35, 37
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
AS THE COMMITTEE to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had warned, the “most moral army in world” murdered a whole Al Jazeera Television team in Gaza—a manifest war crime. Israel claimed that Anas Al-Sharif was a “member” of Hamas, and they genuinely seemed to expect international applause for killing him, puzzled that so many in the rest of the world questioned their right to kill reporters the Israeli army had alleged to be “terrorists.” It begs more questions than a season of “Jeopardy.”
The assumption, largely unquestioned by Western media and politicians, is that it is perfectly acceptable to impose the death penalty on a “terrorist,” even though after decades of wrangling by international lawmakers, the definition has yet to achieve the precision of “heresy” or “witchcraft.” Additionally, it is presumably acceptable to kill the whole team in the vicinity of “the terrorist” even if your hasbara operatives couldn’t even be bothered concocting spurious cases against them, and even though your courts have officially abandoned the death penalty since inflicting it on Adolf Eichmann for, coincidentally, genocide. Almost subliminally hasbara has made execution without due process the norm for “terrorism.”
Even more disturbingly, Western and Israeli governments that welcomed Nazi Party members and KGB operatives, like Konrad Adenauer and Vladimir Putin, with open arms now accept that anyone connected with the political party that won the last (and only) free elections in Gaza is ipso facto a terrorist—liable to arbitrary execution.
Israel had reasons for thinking it could get away with killing the Al Jazeera team, as I discovered when I went on international television to talk about Al-Sharif’s murder. “But Israel says he was in Hamas,” the CNN anchor interjected, allowing me to point out that Israel’s “evidence” was unconvincing, not least because its representatives have been exposed as recidivist liars, over and over again, and that Israel had already killed 270 journalists in the Gaza Strip, or above all that it should not matter whether he was, as they claimed, a “member” of Hamas, any more than if he were a registered Republican.
In fact, even a street sweeper employed by the Hamas-controlled municipality is thus a “member” of Hamas—and a terrorist—and by extension, if employed by UNRWA, that makes the U.N. agency a “terrorist” organization. In fact, the killing of avowed card-carrying Hamas members would also still be illegal if they were engaged in civilian and not combat activities at the time of their killing.
Al-Sharif was posthumously “lucky,” in that the CPJ, to which all the major media and journalists’ associations pay lip service, had made these points and the U.N. and other organizations had already reiterated that the military targeting of journalists (let alone dismembering them with aimed rockets) was a war crime. Personally gratifying but publicly disturbing were the many people on social media who thanked me for being a rare Western journalist “speaking out.” There are of course many others—but the commentators suggested that few made it to CNN and predicted a short career for the producer who had allowed me on!
All these media bosses go the annual awards dinners of the CPJ, which deserves accolades for speaking truth to the Israel lobby. But while they excoriate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murder of journalists, they avoid actual criticism of Israel, even if they have qualms about actually condoning it. Such reticence is not just about reporters who are relatively privileged in their martyrdom. Media commentators aspire to “Benefit of Clergy” that in medieval times allowed priests to avoid the punitive torture, death and indignity inflicted on laity. While I have a personal and professional interest in forbidding the targeting of journalists, I think that slaying mothers, kids, babies and health workers merits indignation. Indeed, killing even adult male civilians is not good.
Anas Al-Sharif set high standards. Despite threats from the Israeli military, he continued showing what was happening inside this modern equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto. But many media have been brainwashed to applaud summary execution for “terrorism.”
In fact, when the media mention “terrorism,” there should be a presumption that they are not carrying out reporting, but rather pejorative stenography, parroting government allegations.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council set up a counterterrorism committee which invited member states to respond on the definition of terrorism and to detail their responses to it. The Chinese ambassador used to annoy British representative Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the committee’s first chair, with attempts to shoehorn “separatist activities” into the remit. From another point of view, the Iraqi Baathist report on its activities in the global war on “terrorists” was quite illuminating: It reported that the state executed them. The closest the U.N. committee came to reaching a conclusion or to codifying the terrorism offense reflects the confusion of the debate.
In the light of “human rights lawyer” Keir Starmer criminalizing Palestine Action as a terrorist plot for splashing paint on the planes that he was using to support genocide, one cautionary paragraph in the 2024 brief issued by the committee warns against exactly what Starmer has done: “This could then see the offense used, for example, to prosecute those who have spray-painted slogans on buildings during protest actions.” One could be forgiven for asking if this is where Starmer got the idea to proscribe even verbal support for Palestine Action.
Thirty years later, the still sitting committee has not yet come to any definitive conclusions on what “terrorism” is. Clearly reflecting its state-sponsored origins, it concentrates on violence “with the intention of intimidating the public, or a segment of the public, with regard to its security, or compelling a person, a government or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act.” Sheer nihilistic revenge is not included. Driving up to a building with a truck bomb is terrorism; crushing it with a tank or bombing it from the air is an exercise in self-defense.
Presumably using the current Israeli definition, derived from Humpty Dumpty, the accusation means just what they wanted it to mean, neither more nor less, particularly when summed up by Mr. Hasbara Dumpty’s sign-off. “The question is, which is to be master—that's all.” Blatant threats to political and media careers for anyone who steps beyond the linguistic demarcation lines show who are the masters.
I used to quip that it would take World War III to reform the U.N. since it took World War II to reinvent the League of Nations as the United Nations Organization. The international security system built around the U.N. was an (albeit highly) qualified success until the U.S. began bending the rules—mostly but not exclusively on behalf of Israel. The core principle was that the Charter had not declared boundaries to be immutable, but it did forbid unilateral attempts to change them. Indeed, still literally nursing the wounds of World War II, it enjoined member states to take military action to counter any aggressions. Hence the push to recognize a Palestinian state.
Arguments about legal technicalities are often diversionary. People get bogged down in debates about whether Israel’s (or Serbia’s or Russia’s) actions meet the technical definitions that would trigger the Genocide Convention—or whether Palestine constitutes a state. Of course these issues should be addressed, not least because Israel and its supporters are so obsessed with such Talmudic or Jesuitical small print appendices. But that should not sideline the most salient point, which in this case is that Israel is committing mass murder. The rest is commentary. The obvious response to a war crime is to prosecute the criminals, and U.N. members labored hard and long to build institutions that would replace the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. But the prosecutor and staff are under sanctions by the United States.
Apart from the laudable aim of irking the Israelis, the purpose of demanding recognition of a Palestinian state is to provide legal tools under the U.N. Charter for economic or even military action against Israel. In the complex reflexive world of politics, such resolutions give leverage to persuade governments to do the right thing, and of course we support that. But in almost all countries, the population is now demanding that their governments act more strongly. However, too many nations now belatedly turning to recognition of a Palestinian state see it as a means of getting popular pressure off their back—or even a means of keeping the Zombie of Oslo and the two-state solution shambling on well past its half-life.
It is useful to exploit the Uniting for Peace resolutions in the absence of a hard-to-secure Security Council resolution, but in the end these governments would have more effect if they unite to apply Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Global revulsion and isolation signaled the end of apartheid in South Africa, and that regime never went as far as Israel has. Imagine if it had attacked Bantustans the way that Israel attacks the Palestinian version of them, for example with the nuclear weapons they collaborated on? A Sharpeville a day surely calls for a stronger response from the rest of the world.
U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is president of the Foreign Press Association of the U.S. He is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).
