The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, citing anonymous “sources” in Hamas and Hezbollah in addition to “a European official and an adviser to the Syrian government,” claimed Iran helped plot Hamas’ attack on Israel but the only Hamas official they cite on the record denied anyone else was involved in the attack.
From WSJ, “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks”:
Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas’s Saturday surprise attack on Israel and gave the green light for the assault at a meeting in Beirut last Monday, according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.
Officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had worked with Hamas since August to devise the air, land and sea incursions–the most significant breach of Israel’s borders since the 1973 Yom Kippur War–those people said.
Details of the operation were refined during several meetings in Beirut attended by IRGC officers and representatives of four Iran-backed militant groups, including Hamas, which holds power in Gaza, and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant group and political faction in Lebanon, they said.
U.S. officials say they haven’t seen evidence of Tehran’s involvement. In an interview with CNN that aired Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
“We don’t have any information at this time to corroborate this account,” said a U.S. official of the meetings.
A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government, however, gave the same account of Iran’s involvement in the lead-up to the attack as the senior Hamas and Hezbollah members.
Asked about the meetings, Mahmoud Mirdawi, a senior Hamas official, said the group planned the attacks on its own. “This is a Palestinian and Hamas decision,” he said.
There was a mea culpa after the media lied America into the war in Iraq with most agreeing that anonymous sources should not be used in such crucial matters but all those rules are now being broken two decades later to expand this war to Iran.
Why can’t these anonymous sources go on the record?
“Senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah” will brag about working with Iran but only anonymously to the WSJ?
“A European official and an adviser to the Syrian government” could be one or two people — a European official who is also an adviser to the Syrian government or a European official as well as an adviser to the Syrian government. Why would they know the ins and outs of Hamas’ strategic plans which caught the Mossad and Western intelligence completely off guard?
This report is total garbage and should be thrown in the trash but instead it could be used to set policy the same way Judith Miller’s lies about WMDs in the NY Times were used to justify the war in Iraq.
Miller was rewarded for her lies when she was hired by Fox News in 2008 (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp along with the WSJ) and the WSJ actually ran a column from Miller 2015 where she made all manners of excuses for lying us into war.
This post was originally published at Information Liberation