The Lies, Damned Lies, Told About Israel

Israeli journalist Gary Willig continues to be amazed at the tsunami of lies about Israel — a veritable Hokusai wave — spread by the Palestinians and by their willing collaborators in the international media. More of his musings can be found here: “To an antisemite, nothing is more painful than the truth,” by Gary Willig, Israel National News, July 2, 2024:

By the time of my Bar Mitzva, I had known for years not to trust the mainstream media’s reporting on Israel and that when Israel was accused of a crime, the accusation was likely a lie.

In 2000, at the beginning of the Second Intifada, the New York Times published a photograph the Associated Press captioned as depicting an Israeli police officer standing over a beaten and bloodied Palestinian Arab. In reality, the photograph depicted Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish American citizen who had been beaten by a mob of Arabs and rescued by the police officer standing over him.

In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, British media such as the Guardian and the BBC published false reports of a massacre allegedly committed by IDF forces in Jenin. So-called human rights NGOs like Human Rights Watch enthusiastically echoed and spread these lies about a nonexistent massacre. In fact, 12 Israeli soldiers were killed in Jenin because the IAF did not bomb it before they entered the refugee camp.

This was the so-called “massacre at Jenin,” where the IDF was accused of “murdering 500 civilians.” It later came out that there had been no massacre; that not 500, but 52 Palestinians had been killed, and that at least 45 of them turned out to be members of Hamas. And the IDF, in order to minimize civilian casualties, had refrained from airstrikes on the Jenin camp, which, had they been carried out, would have saved the lives of Israeli soldiers.

These two incidents taught me as a child to have a very healthy skepticism for reports of Israeli wrongdoing, a skepticism that continued to be justified in my teenage years and into adulthood. That makes it all the more frustrating that there are so many who are incapable of seeing what is obvious to a small child, no matter how many times this skepticism is proven correct.

Hardly a day seems to go by in this war without some new lie about Israeli crimes. In October, it was claimed that Israel bombed the Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, killing 500 people. Nearly every detail about this incident was a lie designed to tarnish Israel’s reputation, and yet it was eaten up by a media that never learned or wanted to learn to treat anti-Israel accusations with the skepticism they deserve. It was quickly proven that Israel had not bombed the hospital, that the blast was caused by a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that struck the parking lot, and that the death toll was a small fraction of what had been claimed….

We were told by Hamas that 500 civilians had been killed by an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital. Investigation showed that: primo, not 500, but about 50 people had been killed; secundo, there had been no Israeli airstrike, but instead, a rocket fired toward Israel by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that misfired, landing in Gaza; terzo, the misfired rocket landed not on the hospital itself, but in a parking lot next to the hospital.

More lies were told about the IDF’s March operation at the al-Shifa Hospital, where it was claimed without evidence that soldiers raped Palestinian Arabs. This lie was designed to distract from the horrific sexual crimes committed against Jews on October 7 and against the hostages held in Gaza, and from the extraordinary IDF accomplishments at al-Shifa, where hundreds of terrorists were killed or arrested and not a single civilian was killed.

Not a single Israeli soldier, in all the wars that Israel has been forced to fight, has been convicted of raping a Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, or Lebanese Arab girl or woman. In fact, some Arabs have hilariously accused the Israelis of “racism” for not wanting to rape those women. This charge — that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian Arab women at Al-Shifa Hospital, for which there is not the slightest evidence — is merely the latest example of the Palestinians’ Rape Libel, meant to take the world’s attention away from the real mass rapes, tortures, mutilations, and murders of Israeli girls and women by Hamas operatives on October 7.

The most recent lie is the claim that Israel is training dogs to rape Palestinian Arabs. This follows a long line of claims of Israel using animals for various nefarious purposes, from using sharks to attack Egyptian divers, dolphins and birds as spies, and pigs to destroy crops, among others. Wikipedia, a site that has become more and more likely to publish antisemitic lies about Israel as if they are true as its recent decisions on who is considered a reliable source on Israel demonstrate, has an article dedicated to conspiracy theories involving Israel and animals….

No charge, apparently, is too absurd not to be made about those satanic Israelis. Wikipedia does not laugh to scorn those stories about the Jewish state using animals to harm its Arab enemies; instead, it treats those tall tales respectfully, rather than as what they are: examples of anti-Israel sheer nuttiness. I can add my own exposure to such craziness. At a dinner party some years ago, a Lebanese lady informed me, in all seriousness, that the Israelis had trained “their bees” to cross the border into Lebanon and then to kill “our Lebanese bees,” so that Israeli honey producers could get rid of their Lebanese competitors.

Make up the craziest, most bizarre charge against Israel you can think of, and chances are, if you wait long enough, some semi-demented drooling imam or Arab journalist or Palestinian-American professor of Middle East Studies will eventually come out with that very charge, and then Roger Waters or Francesca Albanese or some campus encampment nitwit will gravely demand that the charge be investigated. A mad world, my masters!