The Fast Lie . The Big Lie
The Fast Lie
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
Genocidal jihadists, the illiberal left, and a cynical and biased international community and media are fast travelers indeed, especially working in concert. The Israelis, for all their stunning talents and capability, are very slow dressers. We see it again and again. Hamas or another enemy of the Jewish state accuses the IDF or extremist settlers of bombing a hospital, or wantonly killing hungry civilians trying to access aid, or raping Palestinian women in Gaza, or firebombing a Catholic church in the West Bank. The press, grateful for a story that so neatly fits its narrative, readily reports it as fact. International organizations and political leaders either accept Hamas reports and statistics directly, or wait to regurgitate the media’s distorted reporting, having gained further license to condemn the pariah government of Bibi Netanyahu and further signal the virtue of their elevated humanism.
By the time Israeli officials investigate the incident, determine the facts, and then ineffectively try to correct the record, the damage is long done. The received wisdom of Israel’s evil is further solidified, the weak corrections may or may not be printed in the press and are largely ignored, and the world is on to the next alleged Israeli outrage.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was founded with the cooperation of the United States and Israel to deliver humanitarian aid to the citizens of Gaza by bypassing UN agencies in a way that precludes Hamas from stealing it and then selling it to its intended recipients at exhorbitant prices to finance the war it started with Israel and for which its citizens are, in satisfaction of Hamas’ strategic objective, dying by the thousands. To date, Hamas has profited over $1B by this scheme of theft and extortion. Indeed, the reported sticking point on the hostage/ceasefire deal is Hamas’ insistence that GHF and its distribution mechanism be eliminated and aid distribution be controlled by the UN and the Palestinian Red Crescent. The US has offered to have those organizations involved in the process but not control it. That’s not good enough for Hamas. I’ll let you do the math on why.
Though imperfectly designed as this Wall Street Journal article unsparingly (and possibly a little unfairly) reports, GHF has undertaken a herculean effort to feed over 2 million Gazans inside the most complex urban war zone in modern history. It has distributed over 87 million meals from four distribution centers in its two months of operation. But, there have also been numerous incidents of mayhem, violence, and death. Invariably, Israel or GHF or both are initially identified as the culprits, with all the accompanying media hysteria and international condemnation. Tragic mishandling of dangerous crowd control situations and poorly designed processes are responsible in some cases, but in many more, the incidents were either wholly fabricated by Hamas, instigated by it, or the product of direct assault by Hamas on Palestinian civilians and aid workers.
In this interview with Foundation for the Defense of Democracies executive director, Jonathan Schanzer (thank you, David Sterling, in Long Island), Reverand Johnny Moore, chairman of GHF and a multi-decade humanitarian aid facilitator, shines a light on the cynicism, hypocrisy, and bias of the UN-affiliated humanitarian organizations who delivered aid via the old Hamas-empowering mechanism and who, deeply resentful of GHF’s implementation of a new, IDF-protected and US-supported mechanism, are boycotting the organization despite its eagerness to work with them, and discrediting it with a slander campaign. Regarding the press, Moore cites a Rutgers report showing that of the 52 most viral reports about GHF, 80% of them used Hamas-supplied information and disclosed that fact only 50% of the time.
The international and media onslaught has presented a major obstacle to GHF scaling its operations further to meet the needs of Palestinian civilians. As for the vaunted UN-affiliated aid organizations:
“They still deny they have a problem. They are addicts of the money of the world. They go to their 5-star hotels and their constant conferences and they live high and mighty on the backs of the poor and impoverished and the starving masses around the world….And it is not just that the system is broken, it is that is causes more suffering every day and prolongs every single conflict it touches.”
The interview took place, as Moore references, on a very difficult day, July 16, on which 20 civilians were killed near a GHF distribution facility. Hamas, of course, blamed IDF gunfire and the GHF, and the AP, in its reporting of the deaths, implied Israeli responsibility and stated directly, “hundreds have been killed by Israeli forces on the roads leading to them, according to witnesses and health officials.” These “health officials,” at least, are Hamas. Our State Department instead quoted GHF, which stated, “We have credible reason to believe that elements within the crowd – armed and affiliated with Hamas – deliberately fomented the unrest.”
GHF has offered to provide security to UN and other international organizations to protect their distribution convoys against looting by Hamas, noting “essential aid stuck sitting in warehouses, including rice that has been sitting for more than 90 days, flour about to expire, and critical medical supplies already expired.” According to GHF chair, Rev. Johnnie Moore, “the United Nations sent a directive to all of their agencies telling them to not work with us.” While the UN and others accuse Israel of being responsible for famine in Gaza, there are 950 truckloads of aid waiting for these organizations to distribute them. Click below for drone’s eye view of what that looks like:
On Monday, 28 Western allies, including Great Britain, Australia, Canada, France, and Italy, issued a joint statement calling for the immediate end of the Gaza war, fundamentally blaming the “new depths” of suffering that includes the deaths of “over 800 Palestinians...while seeking aid.” Notwithstanding the UN’s refusal of repeated requests by GHF to work with it, contending that doing so would somehow violate humanitarian principles instead of serving them, the statement accused the Israeli government of denying essential assistance and called on Israel to “immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life-saving work safely and effectively.” The communique condemned “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”
Israel rejected the statement as “disconnected from reality” and for sending “the wrong message to Hamas,” which refuses the latest ceasefire proposal, is “running a campaign to spread lies about Israel,” and is “deliberately acting to increase friction and harm to civilians who come to receive humanitarian aid.” Our ambassador to Israel, former governor and presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, made pretty clear where our administration stands in his post on X:
“Disgusting! 25 nations put pressure on Israel instead of savages of Hamas! Gaza suffers for 1 reason: Hamas rejects EVERY proposal. Blaming Israel is irrational.”
As for the burning down of a historic Catholic church in the West Bank, it elicited an angry statement from the Council of Patriarchs and Heads of Churches of Jerusalem accusing “radical Israelis from a nearby settlement,” and an even angrier condemnation, careful not to name the perpetrators as Israeli, from none other than Mike Huckabee and the strongly Pro-Israel senator from South Carolina, Lindsay Graham. One problem, it never happened. While there was a fire in a nearby field, the church was untouched.
Israel is far from perfect. It is a country forced to fight existential foes and a grueling, awful war. Mistakes are made and excesses committed. Before you accept initial reports about them, wait for the truth to put on its shoes.
The Big Lie
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
Vladimir Lenin
“The broad masses of a nation…more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.”
Adolf Hitler
The barrage of misrepresentations about Israeli actions on this day or that is incessant. It is often borne of malice, bias, or agenda, but also ignorance. These are the daily little lies which are both fed by and themselves feed the bigger lies of crimes against humanity, intentional starvation as a weapon, ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate bombing, and even targeting civilians. These in turn are fed by and themselves feed The Big Lie.
I rarely write about it as to argue against the accusation of genocide is to legitimize it infinitely beyond its merits, because there are none. It is instead an obscene libel leveled against the Jewish state because it is the ultimate demonization of Israel and thus the perfect weapon of delegitimization.
The promoters of The Big Lie know this, and that “a lie told often enough becomes the truth.” They also know what the most destructive and malicious figure of modern times observed almost 100 years ago, that “masses of a nation... more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.” Hitler proved his thesis, leaving an indelible scar on history by perpetrating a crime so uniquely evil that a new word was created to describe it: genocide.
The Big Liers have learned the lesson well. Their relentless fantastical insistence that Israelis are committing the worst crime man can commit has succeeded in convincing far too many that it’s true. While fringe elements of the antisemitic right hurl the term about in online rants, a significant contingent of the left, and not necessarily the far left, understands Israel’s commission of genocide as almost received truth, even a sort of mantra.
This was stunningly demonstrated in the 12-point Democratic primary victory for the mayorship of our country’s most important city by a man who vows to arrest Israel’s democratically elected leader as a war criminal, endorses boycotting the Jewish State, defends a blatant call for violence against Zionists, meaning Jews, and insists Israel is committing genocide. At their recent national convention, the Young Democrats of America added the accusation of genocide to their platform. And the absence of blunt public rejection by moderate national political leaders of The Big Lie as the malicious libel that it is has left a tacitly acquiescent silence.
The only response I’ll offer to the malevolent charge is this derision: You would know if Israel committed genocide because it would have committed genocide. Instead of possibly 30,000 civilian deaths in the war Hamas started, as horrific a figure as that is, there would be many hundreds of thousands, indeed, one would expect over 1 million. Instead of the CIA World Factbook reporting a 2% population increase in Gaza in 2024, you would report a population falling off a cliff. And instead of a civilian to combatant casualty ratio in Gaza that is among, if not the lowest in modern urban warfare, despite Hamas’ conscious efforts to maximize civilian deaths, you would see a non-combattant death toll that would make the number of Hamas fighters killed look trivial and beside the point, instead of Israel’s sole objective.
For a more complete (and better) version of my response, read Bret Stephens’ in yesterday’s New York Times here. About 10 people sent it to me, but Grand Rapids’ Hal Ostrow was first, so thanks, Hal. And for those who had the stomach to read far-left “genocide scholar” Omer Bartov’s NYT opinion section endorsement of The Big Lie, I suggest you read urban warfare studies chair at the Modern War Institute in West Point, John Spencer’s point-by-point rebuttal. I suggest you also recall the public celebration of October 7 by myriad other far-left “scholars.” Thanks to Gil Borman for sending this one.