Lyin' Ryan's greenwashing of Hamas
A journo with a long pedigree of dishonest and conflicted reporting serves up a new gem of disgrace.
There are a lot of journalists, news outlets or content creators that I dislike or loathe, but some have distinguished themselves over the years to the point where I feel a personal aversion for them. I won’t list all of them, some have made appearances in this newsletter over the years, but one person I would put at the top of the list is Ryan Grim who currently runs an outlet called DropSite News, which he founded with fellow The Intercept alumnus Jeremy Scahill. Today Grim attempted to whitewash Hamas’s role in the killing of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons Kfir and Ariel, by “revealing” the already known fact that they had been kidnapped by a different Gaza faction, the Mujahideen Brigades led by the now deceases As’ad Abu Sharaiya. I will address this new pathologically dishonest “story” after a recap of some of Grim’s lowlights. If you’re not interested, just skip to below the bullet points:
In 2018, before writing for any well-known outlet, I discovered Grim had been part of a journalistic hoax from the previous year in which a Hillary Clinton SuperPAC mole named John Mattes claimed to have discovered Russian bots manipulating the Bernie Sanders campaign through Facebook groups. As I wrote and reported back then, the people Mattes slandered with Grim’s help were real American voters from San Diego who knew him personally and that Grim did not bother to ask. (Source archived)
Also in 2018 Grim and fellow Intercept ideologue journo Briahna Joy Gray helped to present the image of a popular upsurge for the astroturfed climate change youth group Sunrise Movement. This was Grim’s earlier form of “greenwashing”, which had to do with pretending there was an organic upsurge in climate change activism connected to the Green New Deal. In 2019 he accompanied them as a correspondent for The Young Turks’ “Rebel Headquarters” news channel while they occupied the office of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in protest at his decision to mockingly bring up the GND for a vote in order to see which Democrats would go on the record supporting it.
Grim’s anger at McConnell’s theatrics is ironic given that in the coming years other progressive commentators would demand that Medicare for All be brought up for a vote as a condition for choosing the Democrats’ next Speaker of the House, which Grim opposed. Later when Republicans took control of the House some members used similar maneuvers as a means to topple Speaker Kevin McCarthy, showing that Grim’s strategic instincts had been completely wrong and that progressive Democrats definitely could have done the same to Nancy Pelosi.
As he would probably would deny today, Grim was a supporter of mask mandates and chided fellow progressive fruitcake Glenn Greenwald for opposing them.
OK, now with all of those flashbacks out of the way, what exactly is wrong with Grim’s story about the Bibas family? On its face he’s correct, the Mujahideen Brigades were the ones who kidnapped the Bibas family and then held them in captivity, presumably murdering the mother and sons.
Firstly, he is maintaining the farcical illusion that the Mujahideen merely “took advantage” of the operation otherwise carried out by Hamas. The reality is that such an organisation would not have been able to exist, function, or act on Oct. 7, 2023 nor at any other point in the conflict without the approval of Hamas. It is an oversimplification to say that the only armed group in Gaza is Hamas, because there are others like the Mujahideen or the more well-known Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Popular Resistance Committees. Western progressives tend to romanticise another one, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which with its offshoot the DFLP frames the Palestinian struggle in a Marxist-Leninist context. However when it comes to operational reality none of this organisations have the resources or administrative power to do anything without Hamas’s approval.
Beyond that, even before the war in Gaza after Oct. 7 there were media sources extremely close to terror groups such as the PIJ and PFLP oriented Palestine Chronicle that reported on the existence of a Joint Operations Room between the military wings of the different movements. The source cited for this was an interview by Al Jazeera of Ayman Nofal, a now deceased major commander of Hamas’s Izz ad-Deen al-Qassam Brigades. Among the factions mentioned was the Mujahideen Brigades. Perhaps they didn’t have as high level a role as the Qassam Brigades, or the second larger PIJ affiliated Al-Quds Brigades, but the notion that the Mujahideen Brigades were just opportunistic amateurs is belied by the available information on them.
But most importantly it must be noted that throughout the war up until their bodies were rendered back to the Israelis on February 20, Shiri Bibas and her children were being treated as hostages to the same degree as any other person abducted on Oct. 7. Which is to say that if Hamas disapproved of anything about this specific abduction then there was no indication to that effect based on their conduct of negotiations or how the handover occurred. Which brings us to the most obvious exhibit of proof that the Mujahideen were not a rogue faction. During the garish ceremony to hand over the Bibas family coffins on Feb. 20, Four factions were represented during the hand over to the Red Cross. They are all represented in the photo below:
The role of the faction in the Bibas abductions is not news in any way shape or form, and in April the Lebanese pro-Hezbollah outlet Al-Mayadeen published yet another claim by the group that the family had been killed in an airstrike rather than at their behest. It is notable that any confusion about the true circumstances of their deaths was magnified by the fact that Hamas (and friends) handed over the wrong body in place of the mother, Shiri Bibas which is quite a remarkable error to make if one is to believe that she and the children were held captive together. The question of how a still anonymous Palestinian woman’s remains were somehow handed over to Israel only for them to somehow find Shiri Bibas’ remains within the next day is one that perhaps Ryan Grim and Jeremy Scahill should be more curious about if this is an issue that pricks at their journalistic consciences.
But for those out there asking why this matters, it’s very simple: No, not all of Gaza is Hamas because there are some minor armed groups that Hamas tolerates as cutouts to commit violence when they find it inconvenient to show their fingerprints. So there’s one group (PIJ) that is more closely coordinated with Iran. There’s another that is putatively still a faction of the rival Fatah Party (Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades) and there are those that are communists who have entered a Faustian bargain with their Islamist countrymen to unite for the same goal of destroying Israel. Whatever one’s views on the conflict this was not a big reveal or exoneration of Hamas. If they had any objection to anything the Mujahideen Brigades had done, they would have been the ones to kill Abu Sharaiyah and not Israel. Just watch below the footage of the proceedings of how Hamas mete out justice in Gaza. Please comment if you see any form of identification, evidence, or defense attorney present for the deceased like one might demand anywhere else.