Palestine notes: How Israel is using atrocity propaganda in the service of its genocide in Gaza
A quick chat designed to tell you something you need to know about the politics surrounding Palestine.
Palestine notes is inspired by the Pass notes in the British imperialist propaganda rag, also known as the Guardian.
I like the format of the Pass notes and feel that it can be a good vehicle to inform the uninitiated about the various aspects of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the politics surrounding Palestine, and the Palestinian fight for freedom from the settler colonial apartheid colony of Israel.
Name: Atrocity propaganda.
Age: It's hard to put a date to it, but atrocity propaganda has been around for at least a thousand years. “It is with the Crusades that the study of atrocity propaganda in wartime began,” according to the book Propaganda and Mass Persuasion. “Pope Urban II (c. 1035–1099), in a sermon given at Clermont in 1095, justified the war against Islam by claiming that the enemy had ravaged the churches of God in the Eastern provinces, circumcised Christian men, violated women, and carried out the most unspeakable torture before killing them. Urban’s sermon succeeded in mobilising popular enthusiasm for the People’s Crusade.”
Over the last century, there have been many (in)famous atrocity propaganda, such as babies on bayonets, the Nayirah testimony, and the viagra-fuelled mass-raping Libyan soldiers, which was then repurposed to viagra-fuelled mass-raping Russian soldiers.
Appearance: Fake.
What is it? Atrocity propaganda is when an entity makes slanderous allegations against its enemy. It comes typically in the form of made-up atrocities labelled against the enemy and then using the said atrocities as pretexts to go to war.
Interesting. Tell me more. Okay, let’s start with the Israelis. They accused Hamas of beheading 40 Israeli babies and cooking one baby in an oven on October 7. They employed the canard extensively as they launched their genocidal campaign in Gaza. The Western mass media broadcast the lie ad nauseam; US President Joe Biden repeated the lie multiple times without ever producing a shred of evidence.
And now they have really gone all in on another bare-faced lie. They have accused the Hamas fighters of mass-raping Israeli women during their October 7 operation. As is the wont of the Israelis, they are yet to produce any evidence whatsoever of even one woman, let alone multiple women, being raped.
In a story perpetuating the Israeli lie, the BBC reported:
“One man we spoke to from the festival site said he heard the ‘noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated.’”
Before going on to add:
“To our question about how he could be sure —without seeing it — that the screams he heard indicated sexual assault rather than other kinds of violence, he said he believed while listening at the time that it could only have been rape.” [Emphasis added.]
So the BBC quoted a man as a witness to an event that he wasn’t a witness to.
There are more egregious lines in the BBC story.
“Police say they have ‘multiple’ eye-witness accounts of sexual assault, but wouldn't give any more clarification on how many. When we spoke to them, they hadn't yet interviewed any surviving victims.” [Emphasis added.]
If there’s an award for journalistic malpractice, beating the BBC on this story would be hard.
And there’s still more.
“Israel's Women's Empowerment Minister, May Golan, told the BBC that a few victims of rape or sexual assault had survived the attacks, and that they were all currently receiving psychiatric treatment.”
The BBC fails to mention that Golan once said: “I’m proud to be a racist.” More recently, she made her stance on Gaza crystal clear: “I want to tell the world what they have long known about me in Israel: I don’t care about Gaza. I literally don’t care about Gaza. They can go swimming in the sea. All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza.” [Source.]
After quoting another evidence-free story of a pregnant woman’s belly being ripped open and the foetus inside her stabbed, the BBC wrote:
“The BBC has not been able to independently verify this account, and Israeli media reports have questioned some testimony from volunteers working in the traumatic aftermath of the Hamas attacks.” [Emphasis added.]
Bravo! Journalist Malpractice 101.
The British taxpayers should expect better from an outlet that runs on their money.
Wait, what is that BBC line about Israeli media reports? What is the Israeli media reporting? I am sure they have better access. Who do you think is the font of all this atrocity propaganda overflowing since October 7? Of course, it’s the Israeli media. It was an Israeli reporter who started the “beheaded babies” lie.
The Israelis have been at the forefront of the mass-rapes lie as well.
An article published in Haaretz, titled “The Scope of Hamas' Campaign of Rape Against Israeli Women Is Revealed, Testimony After Testimony,” is notoriously bereft of even a single piece of testimony. It bears repeating: the story doesn’t contain even one testimony. The BBC has some competition in the journalistic malpractice stakes.
The Haaretz story extensively cites Cochav Elkayam-Levy (she is also cited in the aforementioned BBC article), who founded the non-governmental commission named The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children and says:
“Thus far, the commission has not taken testimony directly.”
Incredible.
And it gets worse. Here are some astounding quotes by Elkayam-Levy:
“Questions are asked like: Is there or isn’t there semen? Was there or wasn’t there a rape kit? Those same female jurists with international reputations who are conducting this discussion apparently do not have a basic understanding of international law. International law does not talk the language of the individual case. My call to them is to look beyond those denial mechanisms. You are facing a bunch of respected women and telling them that shocking crimes were committed here. Am I the one who needs to provide the evidence for the terrorists’ deeds? What kind of travesty is it that they are imposing the burden of proof on me?
“In the case of October 7, we will never know the extent of the damage,” she continues. “We know that the vast majority of those who were harmed were also murdered. If there are survivors among those who were harmed, decades could go by before they gather the courage to talk about it. In the few cases in which someone else witnessed their suffering, I assume that then too questions will arise as to exactly what he saw and whether he is a reliable witness. I don’t intend to participate in that game.”
“The question of the evidence that has been collected by the police, or not, is completely secondary. We aren’t at all in a discussion of whether there were horrors here, or not.”
Elkayam-Levy — who previously served in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit — is essentially admonishing the scpetics for asking the most basic questions about her fantastical claims about mass rapes on October 7.
To use an analogy, Elkayam-Levy would be aghast if someone claiming robbery were asked what was stolen and how he could claim robbery if everything in his home were intact.
It defies all logic and puts into question the mass-rape Israeli narrative, but logic and honesty have never been Israeli strong suits.
There are even more memorable lines from the head of the commission. Sample this:
“There are innumerable videos that have already been released.”
Okay, so where are those videos? I am sure for allegations as serious as the ones Elkayam-Levy is making, she would have very solid proof. But she has none. What she has instead is this rhetoric:
“[J]ust go into the Hamas Telegram groups. You are journalists, do your work. Don’t ask me what happened and how it happened.”
Furthermore, Elkayam-Levy, in a story that literally says “testimony after testimony” in its headline, on the question of the number of women assaulted, says:
“Even with requests for numbers, I don’t cooperate. They ask me: How many? How many? How many? There was one journalist here, a woman from a foreign news network, who drove me crazy. ‘Are we talking about tens? Hundreds? Thousands?’ I’m sorry. No. It would be irresponsible of me to cite a number.”
This story is a textbook case of the mass media wanting you to deny the evidence of your eyes, ears, and common sense and forcing you to believe what it tells you.
If this is not mass manipulation, nothing is.
But surely, the Israelis must have produced at least one piece of evidence? Just one? They have produced exactly zero evidence. They tried hard to manufacture evidence, but it was quickly debunked as it was from 2022 and not even from Israel.
This is wild. I didn’t know that the narrative setting to justify the events since October 7 has been so extensive. The Israelis are committing genocide in the full glare of the watching world. And they have absolutely no qualms about it. The fact that they are even making these pathetic attempts to justify their criminality is, I would argue, rather unnecessary.
What do you mean unnecessary? They surely need a story to justify their actions, no? Their criminality since October 7 has been well documented. There are hundreds of thousands of hours of video recording from the victims in Gaza, nearly 20,000 dead Palestinians, about 70 percent of them women and children, and a vast majority of the houses in Gaza have been destroyed. I could go on and on.
The Leaders of the Free World™ have given the Israelis a free pass for genocide. Joe Biden lies on their behalf; the White House gives them the green light, weapons, and money to carry out their genocide. Why are they bothering about producing atrocity propaganda now?
You are right. I don’t feel any pleasure in being right about this painful truth.
Do say: “Where’s the evidence, Israel? Where’s the evidence?”
Don’t say: “The scope of Hamas' campaign of rape against Israeli women is revealed, testimony after testimony.”
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Israel is WAY ahead of the Palestinian people when it comes to effective propaganda. Netanyahoo speaks with a perfect US accent and the Israeli spokespeople on the TV channel I glance at while at my gym are clean shaven and easy to identify with by the ignorant US populace. Israel, just like the outlaw US empire, is ALL facade and toxic at its core. Unfortunately the narrative control has been working here in the US, so far. But things are changing fast. Most of the civilized world see Israel for what it is: A terrorist state that only knows the language of 'might makes right'.