The Monday edition of taxpayer-funded National Public Radio’s flagship news program All Things Considered bizarrely refused to tell the truth about last Tuesday’s blast at a hospital in Gaza that purportedly killed many Palestinians, saying it was a “complex matter.”
NPR’s publicly funded anchors and reporters apparently hadn’t yet gotten the news that the blast came not from an Israeli airstrike -- as Hamas propagandists succeeded in making the media believe for a while -- but from an errant rocket from the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
While other Israel-hostile media outlets have acknowledged what is surely an inconvenient truth, NPR stubbornly continued to pretend the truth was still out there, under the headline “What new analysis shows about the Gaza hospital explosion.”
During the show, host Mary Louise Kelly falsely proclaimed: "There is still a lot we don't know about the blast that killed hundreds of people last week at a hospital in Gaza. Experts and online sleuths have been debating how it happened and who is responsible."
Speaking to NPR's Geoff Brumfiel, She wondered, "What do we know about what happened at this hospital?" Brumfiel spread a conspiratorial-sounding theory that conveniently gave Hamas terrorists a lifeline:
BRUMFIEL: Actually, you know, the publicly available evidence is problematic for both versions of this story. So let's start with the Hamas claim of an airstrike. Pretty much everyone agrees -- all the experts I've spoken to so far -- that the visual evidence doesn't support a standard airstrike. There's no big crater. There's not a lot of shrapnel or structural damage to the hospital, and there's no pieces of shrapnel found at the site. That would be pretty unusual. But, you know, the Israeli claim that it was a failed rocket -- there's a problem there, too. Israel says rockets came from the West, and independent video supports that. But the video closest to the blast -- you can hear the sound of something whizzing by. That's called a Doppler shift. It's that rise and fall and pitch of something passing you like a car that goes vroom. An NGO called Earshot analyzed that sound and found whatever fell likely came from the east, not the west. Here's their director, Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
ABU HAMDAN: We're saying that it reduces the probability that this is coming from the West. It's rocket science, after all, so we can't completely rule it out.
(Abu Hamdan was an interesting choice for subject matter expert. Earshot was described on artnet.com as an “artist-founded audio investigation group" and works for Palestinian groups in the “occupied West Bank of Palestine,” a phrasing which showed Hamdan wasn’t exactly sympathetic to the plight of Israel. Abu Hamdan won the Turner Prize, given to a British visual artist, in 2019. How this makes him a qualified or objective researcher of alleged war crimes is left unexplained.
The duo continued to suggest Israel bared the burden of proving their innocence:
BRUMFIEL: And what he means is a misfired rocket could have changed direction and come back and hit the hospital. But the Israeli army needs to explain why this sound seems to point to the opposite direction of the initial rocket fire.
KELLY: So will we ever know? Will we ever know what happened here?
BRUMFIEL: You know, the truth is this was a very complex situation….
Every other news outlet had seemingly, eventually found the truth of the “very complex situation.”
In April 2020 Brumfiel filed a report headlined by NPR online as "Scientists Debunk Lab Accident Theory of Pandemic Emergence." Of course, the theory that the coronavirus emerged from a “lab accident” or “lab leak” in China, far from being “debunked,” was now supported by several government agencies.
