The art of lying about Israel

OPINION:

In the first quarter of the last century, a soon-to-be-influential communications strategist wrote that “the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact that all expert liars in this world and all who conspire together in the art of lying know only too well, and for this reason they stop at nothing to achieve this end.”

For centuries, Jews have been the targets of such lies. I’ll mention just three.

Beginning in the 12th century, Jews were accused of kidnapping and killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzo for Passover.

During the plague of the 14th century, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and rivers.

In the early 20th century, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” fabricated by the Russian secret police, claimed Jews were secretly plotting world domination.

These lies sparked massacres, pogroms and, even after they were debunked, enduring Jew hatred.

Today, one tiny nation-state has a Jewish majority. I’ll mention just three lies now being told about Israel.

Despite the incontrovertible fact that the roughly 2 million Arab citizens of Israel enjoy freedoms and rights unavailable to Arab citizens of Arab countries, Israel is slandered as an apartheid state.

Despite the incontrovertible fact that no nation in history has ever supplied so much food to an enemy population during wartime, a war initiated by Hamas, the Israelis are accused of engineering famine in the Gaza Strip.

Despite the incontrovertible fact that the population of Gaza is tenfold what it was in 1948, Israelis are accused of committing genocide. “Genocide,” a word coined in the early 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, implies the intentional and systematic destruction of a “genos” — a race, tribe or people.

He obviously had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews of Europe.

Hamas, in its charter, vows: “Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it.”

Accusing Israelis of genocide is a particular kind of lie known as an “inversion.” Hamas and its supporters accuse Israelis of the crime they have long pledged to commit and were committing on Oct. 7, 2023. They know that vilifying the victim as the victimizer will invariably deceive sizable audiences.

NPR, the BBC, CNN, Sky News, The Guardian and Piers Morgan are among the media outlets that have participated in this inversion by citing the International Association of Genocide Scholars and its “resolution,” passed on Aug. 31, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

As they could easily have discovered, the International Association of Genocide Scholars is a bogus organization.

It conducts no research. It produces no journals or original reports. Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that, until last week, anyone, using any name, could become a member of the association for just a $30 contribution.

One such member: Mo Cookie, the Cookie Monster wearing a Hamas headscarf.

What’s more, 80 of the 500 members appear to be based in Iraq, a country that, as The Free Press editorialized, is “not known for universities with robust genocide scholarship.”

Members of the International Association of Genocide Scholars did not debate the “definitive statement,” and only a minority — 2 out of 10 — voted for it.

However, the trace of this lie persists and spreads.

Perhaps not just coincidentally, it followed a report endorsed by the United Nations claiming that famine had broken out in Gaza, with the implication that Israel was responsible.

Meanwhile, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American/Israeli project, was delivering millions of meals to Gaza residents, 152 million as of Sept. 3, and Israeli authorities were calculating that 4,400 calories per person per day have entered Gaza since the beginning of August.

Nevertheless, The New York Times on Aug. 22 told its readers: “Israel has blocked most food and other aid from entering the enclave since the war began nearly two years ago.”

Hundreds of aid trucks have indeed been blocked, but by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. He has been insisting that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency oversee distribution, and UNRWA has demanded that the trucks be protected by the Blue Police, a division of Hamas.

There’s more: In July, The New York Times featured a photograph of what appeared to be a severely malnourished Gaza child. A Free Press investigation uncovered that the child, 18-month-old Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, suffers from cerebral palsy.

The investigation found that at least a dozen other “viral images of starvation in Gaza” also were of children with inherited genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.

How do we know that publishing these pictures was not an honest mistake? For one, the front-page Times photo had been cropped to remove the baby’s brother, who was of normal weight.

Had there been an actual famine, finding children with visible symptoms of starvation would not have been difficult.

I know because in the early 1980s, as a correspondent for The New York Times, I covered the Ethiopian famine that inspired Michael Jackson to write the international hit song “We Are the World.” Starving children have a specific look, one you don’t easily forget.

To be clear: Gaza residents are suffering terribly.

However, that’s because Hamas terrorists began this conflict and refuse to end it. They refuse even to release the last surviving hostages they have been torturing, including by starvation, for almost two years.

Hamas has been decimated militarily, but its propaganda campaign has been a smashing success, thanks largely to the United Nations, a slew of nongovernmental organizations and much of the media.

By the way: Were you wondering about the communications strategist I quoted at the beginning of this column? His name was Adolf Hitler. The quote is from his 1925 autobiography, “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”).

It holds up rather well, don’t you think?

• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.