Accusations against Israel are more addictive than hardcore drugs. No matter how many times the accusations are proven to be false, malicious lies, the mainstream media, the UN, left-wing politicians, and antisemites everywhere lap up the next one, believing those lies without question, despite having been wrong so many times before.
The latest lie to be disproven is the claim is former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation contractor Anthony Aguila’s claim that IDF troops shot dead an eight-year-old boy who was collecting food in May. Aguila’s claim was spread on social media, by MSNBC, and in Congress. He appeared on the BBC and on Tucker Carlson’s show to spread his fake propaganda.
The only problem is that the story turned out to be nothing but lies.
Thanks to the excellent reporting of The Daily Wire’s Kassy Akiva and a heroic rescue mission carried out by the GHF, it is now known that the boy in question, Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamden, is alive and well and is now in a safe location with his mother. This is wonderful news, as all children deserve to live in safety and security, which is why ending Hamas’s control over the lives of Gaza’s children is so vital.
But it is yet another lie that is readily believed by millions who need their anti-Zionist or antisemitic fix.
I was a child when I learned not to trust media reports about alleged Israeli crimes thanks to the false reporting that Tuvia Grossman, an American Jew, was an Arab youth who was beaten by Israeli police when in reality he was saved by the police from a beating by Arab thugs. Another event that let to mistrust was thanks to the false reports of a nonexistent “massacre” in Jenin. Sadly, too many people, and the media themselves, have never learned to treat accusations made against Israel with even a modicum of scepticism.
The explosion outside the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City in the early days of the war should have been a wakeup call for the mainstream media that Hamas propaganda could never be believed. Hamas’s claim that hundred of people were killed in an Israeli airstrike was widely reported as fact, and then quickly proven to be a lie when it was revealed that the explosion was caused by an errant Islamic Jihad rocket, that Hamas knew this even when it claimed that the cause was an Israeli airstrike, and that the death toll was far, far lower than had been claimed.
But like a junkie unable to quit drugs, or perhaps not willing to do so, media outlets were incapable of any soul-searching and continued to treat the word of Hamas as the gospel truth, uncritically publishing false report after false report and spreading the mendacious casualty reports made by Hamas to create a false picture of the war.
More recently, mainstream media outlets published at least a dozen photographs of what appeared to be starving Gazan children as evidence of a famine, but failed to do their due diligence. The result was that all 12 of those photographs were subsequently debunked as the children had preexisting medical conditions and their parents and siblings appeared healthy and well-fed in many of the very photographs that were used for propaganda purposes against Israel.
Time after time, accusations made against Israel bite the dust, only for new lies to take their place. An addicted media and antisemitic crowd continue to swallow their anti-Zionist drug, oblivious to the irreparable damage they do to their credibility and their souls.
Now that the fairy tale of the boy who was killed at a GHF site has bitten the dust, there will again be no soul-searching and no realization that Israel’s enemies lie all the time and their lies should not be believed. The next lie is right around the corner, and a media and the world’s population of antisemites, desperate for their next fix of anti-Zionist propaganda, will lap it up as they always do. And when that lie is disproven as well, they will lap up the next lie, and the next lie after that.
But the truth will always come out, as it did in 2002 when there was no massacre in Jenin, as it did in 2023 when there was no Israeli airstrike on the Al Ahli hospital, and as it did last week, when the lies about the killing of a child at the GHF bit the dust.
Gary Willigis a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.