The national broadcaster has not had a good war in Israel but on Tuesday, managing director David Anderson emerged defiant from his foxhole to defend his troops.

Anderson appeared before a Senate Estimates hearing and confirmed that the ABC had finally launched an investigation into the conduct of Tom Joyner, its Middle East correspondent who created an international media scandal when he callously dismissed eyewitness reports that Israeli babies had been beheaded in a text to hundreds of journalists in Israel. He claimed ‘the story about the babies is bullsh-t’.

Anderson told Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes that Joyner was just ‘trying to do what journalists were doing… trying to verify what sources could back up’ and he was ‘quite remorseful and apologetic for the words that he used’.

No, that’s not what Joyner did. He falsely claimed, with zero evidence, that Israeli first responders were lying about the murder of Israeli babies and equally erroneously claimed there had been no confirmation of their accounts. In fact, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office had confirmed the numerous eyewitness testimonies.

If Joyner wanted more evidence he could have contacted Dr Chen Kugel, the head of Israel’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, which is painstakingly identifying the victims. Dr Kugel has confirmed that numerous victims, including babies, were decapitated. Rather than establish the facts, Joyner assumed Israeli eyewitnesses were lying even though Hamas had just assaulted, butchered, or abducted thousands of Israelis and other civilians in the most brutal act of terror in the history of the Jewish state.

As one journalist asked Joyner, ‘Why are you picking this hill to be humiliated on?’ Why indeed?

Perhaps because the whole ABC is so steeped in anti-Semitism that it seemed natural to him to assume Israeli eyewitnesses to a national tragedy were ‘bullsh-ttng’.

You would think that having demonstrated an appalling lack of professionalism in such a senior role, Joyner would be sacked or at least sent home. But no, he was given a holiday and continues as a Middle East correspondent.

Why not? The ABC seems to have no problem with political reporter Nour Haydar retweeting a post complaining about Palestinians in Australia ‘being policed for their language, protests’ after Hamas supporters chanted ‘Gas the Jews’, and claiming that the Australian Jewish Association calling for the destruction of Hamas was openly calling for ‘genocide’. Who does she work for asked one dismayed Australian whose taxes pay her salary – the ABC or Al Jazeera?

Anderson also stood by the decision to give a national platform in prime time on 7.30 to Hamas’s head of international relations Dr Basem Naim even though Hamas is a listed terrorist organisation that had just engaged in an appalling act of terror.

Naim used the opportunity to lie through his teeth claiming that Hamas never intended to target civilians or take them hostage. He expects us to assume that the killing of at least 1,400 Israelis and other civilians, the injuring of 5,431 and the seizure of more than 200 hostages was unintentional but the terrorists were so proud of their accidental atrocities that they they posted them on Facebook.

Incredibly, Anderson claimed that it was ‘editorially justified’ to interview Naim ‘to challenge’ Hamas’s claims. Yet the article on the ABC website that reports the interview doesn’t challenge the Hamas narrative, it reads like an apologia.

According to Naim, ‘the chief commander of the Al Qassem Brigade, who initiated the operation… gave clear instructions not to target… (or) harm civilians’ and as if by accident, ‘in the middle of the confrontation, there was some civilians’. Naim claims, ‘We haven’t planned at any moment to take any civilian hostages. The plan was to take on the fight against soldiers and to take some soldiers as hostages’. He says Hamas is taking care of the civilian hostages, ‘based on our moral obligations’ and will release them ‘the moment the aggression is stopped’. He defends Hamas’s ‘instruction to civilians’ to remain in the conflict zone in Northern Gaza despite Israel warning them to go, claiming it is ‘too dangerous for civilians to leave and that for Palestinians, quitting their homes now would be a repeat of the “catastrophe” of 1948’.

Finally, he claims Hamas’s atrocities are ‘an act of defence’ and blames them on Israel claiming, ‘We are occupied people, we are defending our existence’.

This is a pack of obscene lies. Hamas filmed terrorists using hang-gliders to land in the middle of a dance party where they slaughtered hundreds of young people and took dozens hostage. Terrorists filmed themselves rampaging through kibbutzes, burning whole families alive, shooting children as they cowered under tables and posted the evidence on social media.

None of this is in the ABC article. Nor the fact that the Hamas charter commits not just to destroying the state of Israel but to murdering every Jew on the planet. Not once does it mention that Gaza is not occupied but self-governing and that Hamas came to power in a bloody coup in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed and political rivals were thrown off the tops of the tallest buildings. There is no mention of the thousands of rockets that have been launched from Gaza into Israel year after year targeting civilian areas.

Anderson said in Senate Estimates that he does not think that the article is ‘legitimising terrorism’ or that ‘the ABC is anti-Semitic in any way’. It’s presumably fair and balanced that the ABC reports that Hamas is taking good care of civilian hostages that they captured by chance while the Israelis are lying about beheaded babies.

It’s all part of Western media bias in which once respectable papers such as the New York Times rushed to believe Hamas’s version of events which blamed Israel for catastrophic damage to the al-Ahli hospital in northern Gaza when in fact the damage was done by a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad which crashed into the car park of the hospital.

Even a features writer for New York Magazine Intelligencer who is critical of the Left’s failure to condemn Hamas was so keen not to exaggerate Hamas’s barbarism that he criticised his own article writing it was an ‘overstatement’ to say that ‘babies were beheaded’ and he ‘should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them’.

This is what the West has come to: its scribes parse the fate of headless Jewish babies, while the barbarians rally in the streets and clamour at the gates.