Don’t believe their doctored videos. They’re just advertising war.
Image: Mohammed al-Bardawi on Unsplash
“If wars can be started with lies, peace can be started with truth.” Julian Assange
They say truth is the first casualty of war, but in reality truth must die before a war can even start. As Nazi leader Hermann Goering wrote, “Of course, the people don’t want war… but it is always a simple matter to drag the people along… All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
In other words, those who love and profit from war have to dupe people into going along. This is why governments that fight a lot of wars lie a lot of the time. And the two governments constantly at war, Israel and the US, literally lie all the time.
Unfortunately, the war makers have gotten very good at lying to us. I see hundreds of posts on social media from people who believe fantasies spun by intelligence agencies like the CIA or Mossad, or by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and are scared or outraged by them. You might believe some too, like these from the ongoing massacre of Gaza.
● Hamas uses hospitals as command centers. According to former CIA analyst Gareth Porter, Israel has been making this claim for 15 years without ever providing evidence, despite the testimony of European doctors and nurses that they have never seen Hamas leaders there.
Porter details how “Israeli Defense Force (IDF) specialists created a video aimed at defending the destruction of Wafa hospital. But they had resorted to multiple levels of trickery to make their political point.”
“The IDF propagandists had spliced together videos from five years earlier and from different times of day so as to suggest that firing from an unused building more than 100 yards away from the hospital was a recent Hamas rocket attack on IDF forces. Then they spliced in an audio clip from an entirely different incident in which the IDF returned fire to try to show that the IDF bombing of Wafa hospital was justified.”
IDF keeps making these videos and claiming they prove things. Kim Iversen has reported on an IDF video showing “tunnels” under the recently destroyed al-Shifa Hospital, tunnels that turned out on inspection to be elevator shafts. IDF also released a heartfelt message from a “nurse” at al-Shifa crying over how Hamas had derailed the care of wounded patients.
The “nurse” turned out to be an Israeli actress.
On another video of a ‘Hamas control center,’ an IDF spokesman pointed to a wall calendar with a list of names he said were schedules of planned terror activities. They were actually the days of the week in Arabic. If truth were on their side, they wouldn’t need to produce these shabby lies.
They don’t have to be good liars, because corporate media parrot them uncritically. Journalist Chris Hedges, who has covered the Middle East for decades, said, “The Israeli military and government lie like they breathe.”
In this, they closely resemble their American allies. Look at the history of lies starting America’s wars. The Tonkin Gulf incident in Viet Nam, the sinking of the battleship Maine in Cuba, Iraq’s WMD, ‘prevention of genocide’ in Libya, and on and on. All lies. I won’t go into the mother of all lies, the 9/11 attacks that set off the War on Terror.
Lying about October 7
The current war on Gaza is largely based on lies. There certainly was a Hamas attack, but while Israel claimed 1500 civilian casualties, their official documents list just over 1100, nearly half military. Kibbutzim destroyed by IDF tanks and missiles were blamed on Hamas fighters. Hamas apparently did shoot many Israelis but could not have destroyed buildings and incinerated them as claimed.
● Israel has been showing videos of melted cars with charred corpses, blaming them on Hamas. Mark Regev, assistant to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told MSNBC’s Mehdi Hassan they had had difficulty sorting about 400 dead Hamas fighter from dead Israelis because they were “too badly charred to identify.”
But Hamas attackers had no weapons capable of such destruction. Israeli helicopters do. Israeli helicopter gunship pilots have testified they were told to bomb and shoot everything in sight, because they couldn’t tell who was an Israeli concert goer and who was Hamas. So, at least 200 of the Israeli civilian dead were killed by the IDF. Probably far more, as other Israeli officials have admitted to shelling homes where hostages were being held.
● They say they’re attacking Gaza to get hostages back, but refuse to negotiate hostage releases. They don’t want them back, since they provide a pretext for war. Their military policy is to kill their own people rather than allow them to be taken prisoner [the ‘Hannibal Directive.’]
● When one group of lies gets exposed, they quietly retract them and post new ones, finding ever-more-lurid images and stories to share. Beheaded babies, mass rapes, babies in ovens are among their since-discredited stories. Actual data from Israeli sources say a total of one child under 5 was killed on October 7, although many teenagers were. No babies. No ovens.
Thousands of children have been killed in Gaza, but they don’t show up in media, while the nonexistent beheaded babies of Israel will live forever on social media
● Longer-term lies -They bomb apartment building and hospitals and call it “self-defense.” They say Hamas denies their “right to exist,” but the same 1947 UN resolution 181 that gave Israel existence, called for a Palestinian state, whose right to exist Israel itself has never accepted.
So, I find it very hard to believe all the stories from this war. How many of those snuff videos were created by IDF? Why should we believe Israel is “attacking Hamas” when nearly all the visible targets are civilians?
Never forget, the media are part of the military industrial complex. They make money from war like arms corporations do, so they will gladly repeat lies that promote wars. Much media is owned by extremely wealthy men who are strongly invested in Israel, like the Sulzberger family who own the New York Times,
Israel and the US aren’t unique in lying. All governments lie. Hamas lies. But because US/Israel are constantly at war, and because people justly hate war, their lies are more numerous and more extreme. I’m sure Israel-identified Jews will be saying I love Hamas — I don’t like them at all — or that I hate Jews — I don’t, and I am one. But I do believe in what Julian Assange said about war and lies. All war makers are liars; all wars are bad, and the people of the world need to learn the truth.
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