Condemn first, ask questions never? Israeli propaganda and the crimes the West chooses to believe
Since October 7, Israel has consistently made unsubstantiated claims of atrocities committed by Hamas fighters. Uncritically repeated by the White House and western media outlets, these claims have worked to manufacture consent for Israel’s ongoing genocide in GazaDecember 06, 2023 by Tanupriya Singh
President Joe Biden and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ahead of a daily press meeting. Photo: Wikimedia
On December 4, Josh Paul, a former US State Department official who resigned in October in protest against Washington’s “expanded and expedited” provision of lethal arms to Israel, appeared on CNN.
Host Christiane Amanpour brought up the “savage” and “barbaric” events of October 7. “We’ve heard the stories of rape and gang rape…how does a nation [Israel]…get to feel that it is being supported and that it then doesn’t have to do what is going in Gaza right now?”
These comments echo a set of stories that have come to dominate the news cycle in the west in recent days as Israel has escalated its bombardment of Gaza.
As part of his response to these allegations, Paul brought up the “atrocities that happen everyday to Palestinians in the West Bank.” On the issue of sexual violence in particular, he referred to an instance where, during the human rights vetting process for arms transfers to Israel, Defense for Children International Palestine (DCI-P) had drawn the US’ attention to the rape of a Palestinian child in an Israeli prison.
According to the DCI-P, this is a reference to a February 2021 report that the organization had published, detailing the severe physical and sexual assault of a 15-year-old child by an Israeli interrogator at a detention facility in Jerusalem.
“We examined these allegations, we believe they were credible, we put them to the government of Israel. Do you know what happened the next day? The IDF went into the DCI-P offices and removed all their computers and declared them a terrorist entity,” Paul told CNN.
In an interview with PBS News Hour in October, Paul had also noted that the vetting process for Israel had “never found an Israeli unit to be guilty of a gross human rights violation,” adding that though many violations had been identified, no conclusion was reached because it required “senior-level sign off” within the State Department.
CNN’s sole follow-up question to Paul towards the end of the interview was if he believed “that in order to have some kind of peaceful resolution…Hamas has to be removed from power?”
Manufacturing consent
As unsurprising as this line of questioning from corporate-controlled western media has now become, Amanpour’s reference to the “stories of rape and gang rape” requires scrutiny amid a litany of news reports of alleged “mass rapes” perpetrated by Hamas’ armed fighters during the Al-Aqsa Flood operation launched on October 7.
During a press briefing on December 4, when asked about the US’ response to reports of sexual violence, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller—while noting that the US had not made an independent assessment— said, “We’ve obviously seen the reports that Hamas has committed sexual violence. They’ve committed rape. We have no reason at all to doubt those reports.”
“[t]he fact that it seems one of the reasons they don’t want to turn women over that they’ve been holding hostage and the reason this pause fell apart is they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody…”
When pressed on his use of the phrase “the fact that it seems” and asked if he had any evidence to believe that Hamas was deliberately holding female hostages, Miller simply backtracked and said “not fact seems is a better way to say it,” then adding that Hamas had broken the ceasefire deal.
This is despite the fact on December 2, senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, had told news organizations including Associated Press that a list of 10 female hostages proposed by Israel had been rejected because they were soldiers who had been detained from military posts.
Meanwhile, Israeli journalist Neria Kraus also shared a video of former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton in which she repeated the allegations that “many women and girls were attacked brutally by Hamas on October 7th.”
Miller’s comments are instructive in understanding the callousness with which Israel’s allegations of atrocities have been unquestioningly accepted and parroted by the US government and media over the past two months to justify the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
On December 3, Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, published a report which once again refuted some of the most horrific claims coming from Israel of what happened on October 7. These allegations include: 40 beheaded babies, a baby being burned in an oven, babies being hung from a clothesline, and of the killing of a pregnant woman who was found with her stomach split open with the fetus still attached via the umbilical cord.
However, the damage had already been done. What price did President Joe Biden pay for repeating Zionist lies while rushing weapons to Israel? What price did any of the “journalists” in the west pay for not practicing the basic principles of their profession?
By the time that a temporary pause came into place on November 24, Israel had already massacred over 14,800 Palestinians in Gaza.
Read more: The US political establishment has remained complicit in Israel’s crimes every step of the way
Lies to fuel an unpopular genocide
As Israel resumed its genocide in Gaza, successive news reports emerged alleging that rapes had been systematically used as a “weapon of war” against Israeli civilians on October 7. On November 18, CNN aired one such video report.
Citing Israeli police superintendent Dude Katz, CNN reported that Israeli officers had collected “more than 1,000 statements and more than 60,000 video clips related to the attacks that include accounts from people who reported seeing women raped,” adding that “investigators do not have firsthand testimony, and it is not clear whether any rape victims survived.”
On December 1, Mondoweiss published a detailed analysis of CNN’s November 18 report.
CNN had interviewed Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, the Chair of a “civil commission on Hamas’ October 7 crimes against women.” However, what CNN did not acknowledge, and what Mondoweiss pointed out, was her previous roles in Israel’s Attorney General’s Office and as founder and director of the “Dvora Institute” which is a “close advisory body” to the Israeli Prime Minister’s National Security Council.
The commission headed by Elkayam-Levy has not taken direct testimony from “relevant witnesses,” as per a November 30 report in Haaretz. She went on to say that when asked by a foreign journalist if the estimated number of victims was in the “Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?,” she responded “I’m sorry. No. It would be irresponsible of me to cite a number.”
It further notes inconsistencies in the statements provided to CNN by an Israeli soldier, identified as “G” and allegedly a paramedic from an Israeli special forces unit “669,” who had claimed to have found the bodies of two girls who had been killed in the Kibbutz Be’eri.
Importantly, the CNN report also included information about a police press conference during which “one witness said she saw a gang rape,” following which a typed quote is presented on the screen.
Again, what was not included, and what Mondoweiss pointed out, was that the woman in question was not in fact present at the briefing and the police had instead played a recording, that the witness had described what she saw while she was in hiding, and she had been accompanied by a paramedic who said he did not see what she saw.
Over the past few days, news publications including the BBC have published their own reports detailing similar testimonies of alleged mass rapes, often repeating what has already been published or even found to be false.
The BBC stated it spoke to one man who was reportedly at the festival site and had said in a statement “made through a support organization” that he had heard “noises and screams of people being murdered, raped, decapitated.”
“To our question about how he could be sure — without seeing it — that the screams he heard indicated sexual assault rather than other kinds of violence, he said he believed while listening at the time that it could only have been rape,” the BBC notes.
Further down, the publication adds that Israeli police “say they have multiple eye-witness accounts of sexual assault, but wouldn’t give any more clarification on how many. When we spoke to them, they hadn’t yet interviewed any surviving victims.”
Once again, the BBC repeats testimony from “one of the body-collectors volunteering with the religious organization Zaka” describing a “pregnant woman whose womb had been ripped open before she was killed and her fetus stabbed while it was inside her,” then adding that some Israeli media reports have raised questions about some of the accounts.
It further states that Israeli investigators had admitted that opportunities to document the crime scene and collect forensic evidence were “limited or missed.”
Analysis of such reports, including by independent online news publication The Electronic Intifada, has pointed to a lack of forensic evidence and first hand testimonies from survivors of the alleged acts of sexual violence. Moreover, certain reports have cited alleged confessions made in interrogation videos obtained from Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence agency notorious for its use of torture, or sources from within the Israeli military— “the accuser here is the army committing genocide,” stated Electronic Intifada’s director Ali Abunimah.
The independent outlet has also pointed to the contents of the 47-minute video compilation assembled by the Israeli Occupation forces of the October 7 attack, which Israel has screened for selective audiences.
British journalist Owen Jones was among those who attended the screening. He stated in a video posted on November 28 that “if there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see this on the footage…a clip of an Israeli women inspecting a badly burned woman’s corpse to see if she was a relative and she had no underwear, this has been offered as evidence of rape.”
On November 30, a three-member independent UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) — which was established in 2021 to “investigate in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem and in Israel all alleged violations of international humanitarian laws and all alleged abuses of international human rights law leading up to and since 13 April 2021” — announced last week that it would investigate alleged sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7.
Israel has declared that it will not cooperate with the commission. Hamas has repeatedly denied all allegations of sexual assault. Taher al-Nono, media advisor to the organization’s polit bureau has also called for a “serious and impartial international investigation into the matter.”
Since October 7, claims made by Israel have been reproduced and published without question, the most egregiously false of which are then retracted quietly. Meanwhile, questions are raised on whether or not the Palestinian civilian casualty figures are accurate, or “Hamas-run” is added as a prefix to the Palestinian Health Ministry when talking of death tolls to somehow still raise doubts about the scale of the carnage unfolding in Gaza.
There is a denial of dignity to the Palestinian people— in life, in death, and even in grief as family members in Gaza have been forced to hold up the bodies of killed children up to news cameras. They are either “crisis actors” or “human shields.”
Moreover, the readiness with which Israeli claims of alleged atrocities by Hamas are accepted, no matter how outrageous, speaks to the blatant racism against Palestinian, and broadly Arab people, and the specific way this is used against boys and men to portray them as inherently criminal or “savage.”
Little attention has been paid to the systematic abuse and torture of Palestinians political prisoners held in Occupation prisons, even as Israel has escalated its mass abduction campaigns and violent raids in the West Bank. Palestinian human rights organizations have also filed urgent appeals to UN human rights mechanisms and the COI including affidavits submitted by Palestinians detailing horrific physical and sexual abuse by Israeli settlers.