https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-westerners-helping-hamas-win-the-propaganda-war/
After
two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield, Hamas
can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now. The terror group has
survived and is once again exerting control in the areas of Gaza under its
authority. Public executions, whippings, stonings and kneecappings have
returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas executed at least 100
Gazans.
Hamas’s
survival was achieved not only through its remaining fighters and its holding
of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of western apologists. A coalition of
so-called progressives and professional activists has excused, rationalised and
defended the group’s actions across universities and in newspaper editorials.
The BBC, Sky, the Guardian, the FT and the New York Times have all parroted
Hamas talking points.
Tales
of impending famine in Gaza, for instance, were broadcast as fact, sourced from
UN bureaucrats and ‘aid agencies’ with long records of anti-Israel bias and, in
some cases, open sympathy for Hamas. This isn’t journalism: it’s agenda-driven
activism disguised as news. What the BBC and others failed to grasp is that,
for Hamas, the western media is the battlefields.
From
the outset, even before Israeli troops had entered Gaza, Hamas’s operatives and
sympathisers in the West were shouting about ‘genocide’ and ‘famine’. It was a
propaganda trap – and the western media walked right into it.
Consider,
for example, these headlines from the early weeks of the conflict in 2023:
11,15,30
October, 6 November: “Fuel in Gaza will run out in 48 hours”
The
pattern speaks for itself. It’s been the same story with Gaza being ‘on the
brink of famine’ for the past two years. This is how it works:
Step
one: The Hamas ‘health ministry’ makes up a casualty number which could be
debunked by the most cursory statistical analysis.
Step
two: Aid organisations repeat the number without independent confirmation.
Step
three: UN agencies in Gaza (some staffed by Hamas members) cite the aid
organisations.
Step
four: Media outlets quote the UN agencies.
Step
five: Hamas’s supporters in the West claim the numbers are ‘UN verified’.
UN
officials have also contributed to the fiction directly. In May, Tom Fletcher,
a humanitarian coordinator for the organisation, told BBC Radio 4: ‘There are
14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.’
Almost no babies died as a result of the war in the following days. But that
didn’t stop the BBC running the claim in bulletins and news outlets around the
world repeating it, citing the BBC as a reliable source.
The
Hamas narrative has been amplified, too, by disinformation campaigns driven by
Iranian, Russian and Chinese state-linked bots on social media, which have
exploited Gaza as a means of destabilising western societies. These regimes
understood how easily such narratives could tap into a pre-existing willingness
among many in the West to believe anti-Semitic libels.
Today,
falsehoods are disseminated by journalists, academics and UN officials –
cloaked in the language of human rights but echoing ancient prejudices.
Why
were Hamas’s inflated casualty figures reported as facts? Why were incorrect
claims of Israel bombing hospitals repeated without scrutiny – while confirmed
cases of Hamas rockets hitting Israeli hospitals in Ashkelon and Beersheba were
ignored? In part, this was down to journalistic complacency. The facts were
accessible.
Independent
researchers discovered that some of the most widely shared images of
‘starvation in Gaza’ were from Yemen. One prominent photo showing a skeletal
child was highlighted by the media as evidence of famine. In reality, the child
wasn’t malnourished due to famine. He had cerebral palsy, hypoxemia and other
genetic conditions. That didn’t prevent the Guardian, Times and New York Times
running it on their front pages, inflaming the emotions of millions of readers.
Despite its resources, the much-touted BBC Verify unit missed these falsehoods.
The
good news? Large swaths of the British public aren’t buying it. Scroll through
the reader comments under articles about Israel, and you’ll find thousands of
ordinary people who haven’t lost their critical faculties. They know casualty
figures from terrorist regimes aren’t a sacred truth. They can spot propaganda
when they see it.
Unlike
some intellectuals, they don’t lose all logic the moment the word ‘Israel’ is
uttered. As George Orwell once quipped: ‘You must be an intellectual. Only an
intellectual could believe something quite so stupid.’ Today, he might have
aimed that line at Guardian readers or BBC news staff.
In
this war, it is not Israel or even Hamas that has lost its purpose, but the
media.
