Bella Hadid

Instagram activists have turned false narratives into deadly fantasies [...] Take supermodel Bella Hadid, who, as Daniella Greenbaum Davis has pointed out, has almost four-times as many Instagram followers as there are Jews in the entire world. In response to the conflict, she joined a pro-Palestinian protest in Brooklyn, chanting: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — an anti-Semitic slogan coined by the Palestine Liberation Organization to call for the elimination of Israel.

Until recently, it was a chant frequently associated with the likes of Hamas, a terrorist organisation whose 1988 charter explicitly called for genocide of the Jewish people. But in today’s hysterical climate, one of the West’s most famous celebrities can use it and expect applause. Indeed, when the Israeli government accused Hadid of advocating for the elimination of the Jewish state, many of her fans attempted a semantic defence, claiming that Hadid was innocently advocating for a free Palestine, without any harm to the Jews.

But this is where the role of false narratives becomes increasingly alarming. It is my opinion that Ms. Hadid was unaware of the context and history of the chant; I do not believe she understood she was calling for the elimination of Israel, or the expulsion or genocide of the Jewish people. Similarly, I do not believe that she, nor her niece’s father, singer Zayn Malik, understood the implications of describing Israel as a “colonizer”.

Yet we must not ignore the fact that such descriptions have a pernicious impact on society at large. For whether they realise it or not, sinister actors and adversaries — look no further than China — have started to capitalise on the ignorance of our progressive elites, using their narratives to harness and spread more anti-Semitism.

Supermodel sisters Bella and Gigi Hadid have sparked a firestorm over an Instagram post that said Israel was not a country, but rather a land settled by colonizers. 

Bella, who has nearly 42 million followers on the platform, published the series of cartoons Wednesday that called Israel ‘occupiers’ and called Palestinians ‘oppressed.’

Her sister Gigi then liked the post, amplifying the cartoons riddled with historic inaccuracies and anti-Semitic tropes to her 66.2 million followers.

The post comes as Israel on Thursday pressed ahead with a fierce military offensive in the Gaza Strip, killing as many as 11 senior Hamas terrorist military figures in retaliation for artillery and mortar that had been lobbed into Israel from Palestinian areas.  

Bella, 24, and Gigi, 26, are vocal in their support for the Palestinian cause, and have attended marches and demonstrations.  

Their father Mohamed Hadid, 72, is a Palestinian born in Nazareth in November 1948, four months after his city was captured by Israeli forces. The family fled to Syria, and ultimately to Washington DC. He has Jordanian and American citizenship.

This week the people of London mark the anniversary of the 7/7 suicide bombings, which claimed the lives of 52 people. This might be as good a time as any to look at the challenges journalists face in covering intentional, ideologically based lethal attacks on civilians, which is to say, terrorism.

Journalists are right to fear calling a terrorist a terrorist. The word is often misused, its power exploited, its capacity for bias unbounded, its application all too often judgmental, inflammatory, grossly inexact, even racist.

Sometimes, though, terrorism actually is terrorism.

Last week, a Palestinian drove a bulldozer past a building which houses a number of major world and Israeli news media outlets, ramming the earth mover over and into a succession of cars in an incident which shocked and perplexed a public and a journalist corps which, until that moment, believed that they had seen it all...

... Terrorism is many things, but justifiable is not among them. The person who justifies terror in any form, is declaring that it is legitimate in certain cases to kill innocent people. If justifying the murder of innocents because they belong to a certain hated group is not abject racism, I'd like to know what is.

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In the last two years, the Hadid sisters have turned the concept of Fake News into art. Their incredible ability to take authentic materials, take things out of context and tell a one-sided story that is largely based on lies ...

... This was done to prove that an independent Palestinian entity existed even before the establishment of the state. It is a regular matter of the Hadid family, to show that Palestine existed in a real and complete way, culturally and nationally, long before 1948. But the actors in the picture were Jews, who belonged to a Zionist-oriented organization.

I sent the photo to Hadids, explained the mistake and wrote that I was very disappointed. Within seconds, Father Muhammad, a millionaire real estate agent and arrowhead of the gang, returned to me. He responded at length and in what appeared to be a restrained rage. My wishes or did not answer the matter, and in other messages he recited about the Palestinian past that he claimed was here...

The conduct between us reminded me of previous discussions I had with Arab righteous and MKs, who asked us to recognize the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, even though they themselves in no way wanted to accept the fact that there is and will be a Jewish state here.

Despite the opacity, I felt, perhaps childishly, better about myself after explaining to the man that he and his family were spreading lies, half-truths and fueling hatred and terrorism...

The American model who is known for her hatred of Israel is spreading fake news against Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

The American model Bella Hadid, the daughter of a Muslim father who was born in Nazareth and moved to the USA, continues to spread fake news, this time with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in the spotlight.

Hadid uploaded to her Instagram account, which is followed by over 43 million people, a quote Bennett allegedly said in the past. "I have killed a lot of (Hadid lied) Arabs in my life, and there is no problem with that," he is quoted as saying.

But, this is a false quote that was never said by him. When this statement was attributed to him in 2013 in the Haaretz newspaper, he responded: "For the avoidance of doubt, the words were not said. At the cabinet meeting, I suggested that we stop endangering our soldiers and go out of our way to capture terrorists alive, because then the state releases them anyway. A terrorist who endangers the lives of our soldiers during its operation, it must be eliminated."

Yesterday it was published in Haaretz newspaper... - Naftali Bennett - Naftali Bennett | Facebook

Yesterday it was published in Haaretz newspaper that I said: "I have killed a lot (as it were) of Arabs in my life, and there is no problem with that" and also "If you catch terrorists, you should just kill them."

For the avoidance of doubt: the things were not said. At the government meeting, I suggested that we stop endangering our soldiers and go out of our way to capture terrorists alive, because then the state releases them anyway. A terrorist who endangers the lives of our soldiers during his actions should be eliminated.

Haaretz is allowed to think differently.

I will live with it...

Aug 8, 2013.

New York, NY, November 9, 2015 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today condemned Israel Member of Knesset Hanin Zoabi of the Arab Joint List Party for comparing the current situation in Israel to the period of Kristallnacht, the mass pogrom against Jews and Jewish businesses in Germany and Austria in November 1938.

Naftali Bennett is under fire as misquoted comments about the Prime Ministers' intentions to kill Palestinians have been shared by Bella Hadid and Al Jazeera publication, AJ+.

Bennett, in a Knesset briefing in 2015, clarified that he was inaccurately quoted by former Joint List party member Haneen Zoabi as saying that "I killed a lot of Arabs in my life" when what he actually said was that he had killed many terrorists in the context of his army service. 

Bennett added at the time that "this is good – and it is a shame we didn't kill more terrorists."

Balenciaga and Adidas, the latter of which was founded by members of the Nazi party, have partnered with vocally anti-Israel supermodel Bella Hadid to front their latest collaboration, prompting accusations of hypocrisy only weeks after both companies parted ways with Kanye West over his antisemitism. Balenciaga announced last month that it was severing ties with West over his antisemitic remarks, which included saying he will go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” and slamming the “Jewish underground media mafia,” but Adidas held back from making a move. In the ensuing days, West bragged he can “say antisemitic s*** and they cannot drop me.” The following week, the sportswear firm finally terminated its partnership with the rapper, saying his remarks were “unacceptable, hateful and dangerous.” Balenciaga and Adidas have come under fire for hiring Hadid as the face of its new collaboration, the second of its kind. Arsen Ostrovsky, human rights attorney and CEO of The International Legal Forum, a global coalition of lawyers which spearheaded a campaign demanding that Adidas end its partnership with Kanye, said hiring Hadid immediately after dropping Kanye was only “motivated by money.” “That they simply just replaced one antisemite for another, only underscores that these brands were never motivated by doing the right thing and showing leadership in tackling racial hatred, but rather only care about their profits,” Ostrovsky told Breitbart News.

“Kanye and Hadid are no different, both engage in antisemitism and need to be called out, not given a global platform by international brands,” he went on…

...Of course, if they actually lived in Gaza, their Instagram feeds would have, God forbid, had them imprisoned or even killed by Hamas long ago for the feeds’ explicit nature. Hamas does not blush at pictures of Palestinian women in bikinis posted to Instagram. It takes more devilish action. Luckily, Bella and Gigi are writing from Western countries that uphold Israel’s standards of human rights and women’s rights, standards that guarantee them all the protections that they would deny Palestinian women whom they purport to protect.

But March 6, 2022, was a new low for Gigi. She posted on Instagram, “I am pledging to donate my earnings... to aid those suffering from the war in Ukraine, as well as continuing to support those experiencing the same in Palestine.”

Here you had the most violent invasion in Europe since the Second World War, where a totalitarian monster, Vladimir Putin, was destroying an entire country, and Gigi Hadid said “the same” was happening to the Palestinians. Here you have a world-famous celebrity who sees in the unspeakable suffering of the Ukrainian nothing but an opportunity to attack the Jews.

Antisemites like the Hadid sisters traffic in putting us Jews on the defensive, and on this occasion, I regret I have to take the bait. Sadly, so many people are so utterly ignorant of Israel’s defensive struggles that we need to say why the two situations are not comparable in any way.

Unlike Putin, who invades his neighbors out of a desire to recreate Great Russia and have Ukraine bend its knee, Israel does not ever attack its neighbors except in an attempt to stop them from sending terrorists to murder its citizens or raining rockets on its cities. And unlike Putin, who terrorizes whole populations by reducing their cities to rubble, Israel risks the lives of its soldiers by undertaking only precise military surgical strikes to reduce civilian casualties as much as humanly possible, as they seek to neutralize genocidal maniacs like Hamas.