I am a specialist in ideologies, culture and values. I have written 5 books including several on how certain ideological agendas have contaminated journalism and higher education - so that truth is no longer the foundation of justice.
In my first book, The Second Catastrophe: A Novel About a Book and its Author, a Canadian professor learns the hard way how Leftist and Islamist values conflict with traditional norms of Canadian fairness,
My second book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed, argued that it is dangerous to replace notions of Good versus Evil with Tolerance of Evil.
My next book, The Ideological Path to Submission: and what we can do about it, studied how western civilization is submitting to evil ideologies in the face of terrorism and the ascendence of such ideological positions as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Postmodernism, pacifism, Islamophilia, masochism, empathy, socialism, denialism, Trumpophobia, progressivism, and what I call Tolerism.
And so my emphasis on ideologies, values and culture caused me to view the sad reemergence of antisemitism as a house of cards built on lies and propaganda. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Islamist war against western civilization, and, in particular, the advocacy of another genocide against the Jews, which in my novel I call a “Second Holocaust”.
Western media have full rein to criticize, and do criticize, every perceived failure of Israeli attempts to maintain a peaceful existence in the midst of hostile Arab regimes which use terrorism as a matter of course.
But when it comes to the Arab world, where there is no free press, and no free access by Western media to either government officials or the general population, our Western media has acted like a public relations firm for corrupt Arab governments or terrorist organizations.
The New York Times once printed a picture of what they captioned as an Israeli soldier standing over what was said to be an injured Palestinian Arab youth; the only problem was that he was a Yeshiva student from Chicago, injured by Arabs. Then, there was the poignant picture of Muhammad al-Dura, the 12 year old Palestinian Arab boy who seemingly died in his father’s arms due to Israeli gunfire. He became the centrepiece of a Palestinian Authority propaganda campaign urging children to emulate the “beauty of the martyr”. Finally an in-depth documentary prepared for German television, many months after the fact, discovered why there was no autopsy on him: He was killed by Palestinian Arabs - and a study of the angles between Israelis soldiers and the al-Duras showed it impossible for the boy to have been killed by an Israeli bullet, if he was killed at all. (In 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commissioned another investigation. In 2013, that report concluded that not only was Muhammad not hit by IDF fire, Muhammad was perhaps never shot nor killed.)
In the present war in Gaza, there is no end to the lies released by Hamas, or its mouthpiece, the Gaza Health Ministry whose lies about the number of civilian and terrorist dead are accepted as truth by western media. The most outlandish lie happened just a few weeks after the barbaric massacre of civilian Jews which started the war. It was alleged, and accepted immediately by most western news services, that the Israelis had bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of people - the New York Times in a headline said “at least 500 dead”. This focused attention on Palestinian Arab dead and away from the October 7th Israeli dead and the hostages.
Protests from university students including paid protestors swept across the world, and we witnessed the first of many synagogue burnings, this one in Tunisia. BUT THE STORY WAS FAKE, AS THE TRUTH WAS THAT IT HAD BEEN A MISFIRED PALESTINIAN ROCKET THAT LANDED IN A PARKING LOT.
The Israelis, heirs to an actual genocide by the Nazis, began to have to fend off allegations of genocide. The truth is that a genocide is an attempt to kill off a substantial portion of a group that offends the perpetrators due to religious or ethnic differences - the Nazis wanted to kill every single Jew and the Islamists, especially Hamas and the Iranians, want to eradicate Jews, starting with Israeli Jews.
It is never made clear how Israelis are committing genocide when it was they who were attacked and they who fight an ethical war, being one of the very few militaries who actually warn civilians about vacating areas which are coming under fire. The Israelis are fighting a moral war in that they are unlike other parties to war as they give food and other aid to enemies who seek to kill them and who in fact are torturing hostages. The worst that should be said is that Israel has been less successful than it hoped in its food distribution network and its Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, connected to both America and Israel. The chaotic scenes have prompted the Israelis to increase air drops.
One must acknowledge that because the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a threat to Hamas’ control of food and money generated from selling the food supposed to be immediately delivered to hungry Gazans, Hamas has created unrest and violence - and thereby again turn Israeli and American attempts to aid into something else. But Americans who are working in the food distribution have stated that more than 100 million meals have gone directly to Gazans, no matter that the Hamas controlled Health Ministry will not cooperate.
I do not want to minimize the fact that some Gazans may be hungry and that it certainly helps if families have young, fit, strong young men who can successfully fight for the food packages in all the chaos around the food distribution sites.
But poorly organized distribution processes do not a genocide make, especially when young Israeli soldiers are facing masked killers, the majority of whom have been shown by polls to be pro-Hamas and in favour of driving Israeli Jews out of the Jewish State. In view of that fact, the moderation of most IDF soldiers is remarkable, but the fact is that the journalists are not interested in reporting that.
They would rather run fake stories and fake photos demonizing the Israelis. Recently, disturbing photos of Gazan child Muhammad al-Matouq appeared as part of a story that cruel Israel was starving children. This appeared on the front page of Britain’s Daily Express, the New York Times and elsewhere. After the photo of the very weak sick child was seen around the world, it became clear that he was not starved but suffered from cerebral palsy or a similar degenerative medical condition. See the excellent article by Matti Friedman in the Free Press - “Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the Truth in an Information War”. He writes: “The suffering child ended up being less the intended symbol of Israeli evil than of how genuine misery can be put to use by practitioners of narrative war." Exploiting sick children gets no criticism from the world of journalism, with only the NYT apoligizing weakly for its error.
Friedman notes that Israel’s actions are lied about almost daily by people describing themselves as journalists, analysts and representatives of the United Nations, often using statistics that are themselves untrue. He concludes: “For people here in Israel, the constant barrage of libel - like the more literal barrages of rockets - is simply a fact of life.”
German newspaper BILD has shown that many of the photographic images from Gaza. especially of starving children, have been “staged” by a photographer tied to Hamas. His name is Anas Zayed Fteiha and his specialty is photos of sad women and children in orchestrated scenes. He tries to avoid fit looking men even though they get most of the aid.
His propaganda is popular with mainstream media who do not disclose his pro-Hamas bias.
Blogger Johnny Daniels writes that this is more than biased coverage and is a deliberate information war: “Hamas is exploiting the self-inflicted suffering of its people to wage a propaganda campaign against Israel using staged imagery as a weapon.”
Friedman, who used to work for Associated Press, writes: “During my years as a reporter and editor for Associated Press, I saw coverage altered by Hamas threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from our readers. I know firsthand that nearly no information coming from Gaza can be taken at face value.”
When the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Daily Express and many others remove truth-telling from their pages in favour of a place in the Information War, we must be sophisticated enough to know that juggling truth and lies is central to modern war-making - and a failure to understand this means that all of us are complicit.
Then there is the issue of Israeli killing of persons who the Gazans claim to be journalists but Israel provides evidence to the contrary. Israel’s evidence is usually ignored so that the Gazans can further their propaganda that Israel dares to kill journalists (usually from Al Jazeera, the Qatari supporter of terrorism.) My local newspaper, which takes all its foreign affairs news from Associated Press, has lately run headlines shouting about Israel targeting journalists, as well as other civilians.
An Israeli military spokesperson has stated that the prominent Al Jazeera journalist it killed a day earlier was an active Hamas member who received a salary from the terror group, as the international outcry mounted over the Gaza City strike that also took the lives of five other reporters.
"Prior to the strike, we obtained current intelligence indicating that [Anas] al-Sharif was an active Hamas military wing operative at the time of his elimination. In addition, he received a salary from the Hamas terror group and terrorist supporters, Al-Jazeera, at the same time,” IDF international spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said on X.
The IDF said that Sharif was “the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and IDF troops.
“Intelligence and documents from Gaza, including rosters, terrorist training lists and salary records, prove he was a Hamas operative integrated into Al Jazeera,” it said, alongside a screenshot of relevant documents.
The documents, published by the IDF, showed that Sharif joined Hamas’s military wing on December 3, 2013, where he served as a commander of a rocket-launching squad in northern Gaza. He was certified as the team commander on January 1, 2019, the documents show.
In addition to posing as journalists, Hamas members pose as members of NGOs. Terror operatives in the central Gaza Strip posed as members of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) humanitarian organization, the Israel Defense Forces said this week, publishing footage of the incident.
Given how often Hamas integrates itself into every aspect of Gaza administration, why do the enemies of Israel think we are so naïve as to accept all of their allegations? Israel has perhaps underestimated the creativity with respect to truth and lies that Hamas has shown.
Howard Rotberg has written 52 essays for Israel National News, 40 essays for New English Review and numerous podcasts and YouTube lectures, in addition to his five books, (all available on Amazon),