It has often been said that truth is the first casualty of war. And nowhere more so than in countries that style themselves “liberal democracies” and pay lip service to the “rule of law”, which therefore cannot openly wage wars of conquest as did the empires of old, but like Shakespeare’s King Richard III must instead clothe their naked villainy with odd old ends, stolen forth of Holy Writ—the modern, secular version of which usually includes some combination of defending democracy and human rights, fighting terrorism, and doling out retribution for atrocities. Our governments and mainstream media have lied about every other war, coup d’état and regime-change operation they have initiated, joined or supported since the end of World War II;¹ so it will likely not shock our readers to be informed that they have told some lies about events in Israel and Palestine, as well. But what if you were told that none of the bloodcurdling atrocities attributed to Palestinian paramilitary group Hamas on 7 October 2023, and trumpeted by governments and media around the world ever since, ever actually happened—but rather, that they were invented as part of a calculated propaganda campaign by the Israeli government and its supporters to dehumanise the Palestinian people, to manufacture consent for a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign against them?

In a documentary released last week to coincide with the anniversary of October 7, titled Atrocity Inc.: How Israel sells its destruction of Gaza, Jewish American independent journalist and broadcaster Max Blumenthal proves beyond doubt that that is exactly what has happened. And were that not bad enough, the documentary also reveals, as its producers state in a written introduction, “how Israel’s army has consciously engaged in the same hideous atrocities which it falsely accused Palestinians of committing”. Simply put, no-one who watches this confronting film, regardless of their religious or political persuasion, will be able any longer to accept that Israel’s actions in Gaza are somehow justified by its “right to defend itself”. Nor will they take the government’s or mainstream media’s word for anything, ever again.

‘Atrocity porn’

“On October 7, as news of the Hamas military attack on Israel started to emerge”, Blumenthal narrates, “the Israeli PR machine went into overdrive. Its propaganda blitz was predictable, and its objective was clear: Shock the Western public into supporting Israel’s plan to carry out the wholesale destruction of the besieged Gaza Strip. In its campaign to manufacture consent for mass death, the Israeli government found no greater ally than the unquestioning marionettes that serve as the faces and voices of US mainstream media.” Whose hysterical reports were, of course, just as unquestioningly parroted by their counterparts in Australia and throughout the Western world. The film opens with a montage of reports, from US and international media, many of which the reader doubtless recalls. Fourteen hundred Israelis had been “slaughtered” in a “terrorist attack”, we were told, in what was “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”. A crowd of youthful innocents at a music festival, massacred indiscriminately Peaceful villages razed. And so on.

And then, roughly 72 hours after the initial assault, as Hamas retreated into Gaza and areas it had briefly captured were re-taken by Israeli forces, the barrage of what Blumenthal calls “atrocity porn” began, “when claims that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies in Kibbutz Be’eri were first broadcast on the Israeli television channel i24 News” by American-born reporter Nicole Zedek. Despite Zedek’s onair admission that her report was based solely on the testimony of Israeli soldiers, and that she had not actually seen (much less filmed) the alleged victims herself, her story was soon repeated as confirmed fact by US network CNN on 10 October, and by other US and international networks, and government officials, immediately thereafter. Self-described “Zionist” US President Joe Biden even claimed during a press conference that he had seen photographs of the victims.

Ms Zedek’s source, Blumenthal reports, “was, in fact, a single soldier, named David Zion” (also rendered “Davidi ben-Zion” in some reports). “As we revealed at [investigative reporting website] The Grayzone”, Blumenthal continues, “when he’s not in an Israeli Army uniform, Zion serves as a political leader of the Shomron Council, a group that represents 35 illegal settlements in the northern West Bank”, another Palestinian territory. “Just prior to October 7, Zion incited deadly riots against Palestinian citizens in the town of Huwara, declaring, ‘The village of Huwara should be wiped out, this place is a nest of terror and the punishment should be for everyone.’

“So is this violent fanatic a credible source? Mainstream media outlets didn’t even bother to ask. And of course, neither did the Israeli government”, whose officials from Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu down repeated Zion’s claims in their own propaganda broadcasts. But it was all a lie—and the Israeli government, at least, must have known it. Because as Blumenthal recounts, its own official data show that in fact “only one baby, 11-month-old Mila Cohen, was killed on October 7—just one. And she was tragically shot by accident, through a door. Not decapitated.” Of course, after this inconvenient fact came to light, “The Israeli Army and government press office, as well as the Biden White House, eventually walked back and retracted these claims altogether. But once it was plastered all across the front page of papers all over the US and Europe, the damage was already done.… Israel then had all the political space it needed to carry out one sadistic act after another in the Gaza Strip—a live-streamed slaughter, made possible by Washington, Berlin, Brussels, and the mainstream press that functioned as these governments’ megaphone.”

Rinse and repeat

Yet even as the first hoax atrocity was debunked, Israeli officials, settler movement spokesmen and the heads of ostensible volunteer emergency response groups simply kept making up new ones. And once again—despite the fact that the aforementioned official Israeli government casualty figures pre-emptively proved that they could not be true—Western governments and media repeated them verbatim.

The story of a family of four at Kibbutz Be’eri who were bound, tortured and executed at their kitchen table, for example, which US Secretary of State Antony Blinken would later repeat in graphic detail during testimony to Congress, was one of many invented by a man named Yossi Landau, leader of a civilian “rescue agency” called Zaka. Blumenthal recounts how despite having no forensic or paramedic training, Landau and his crew—reminiscent of those other atrocity hoaxsters extraordinaire, the al-Qaeda-adjunct Syrian White Helmets of “Assad gases his own people” infamy—somehow managed to be first on the scene of multiple alleged atrocities, and Landau himself the first to give all the lurid details to the TV cameras. He also started the story about a pregnant woman and her unborn child who were “butchered” by Hamas, of whose remains he claimed to have photos. As Blumenthal reports, however, “There was just one problem for Landau and those who amplified his questionable claims: no bodies found at Kibbutz Be’eri match the descriptions he made.” Nor, of course, did the purported photographs ever materialise. Not that anyone ought to have been surprised, given Landau himself had admitted live on camera that his accounts of torture, execution and so on were in fact the product of his own “imagination”, which he “used … to tell the stories” of the bodies he found.

The one fact Landau did prove, says Blumenthal, “was that the business of fabricating atrocity porn is extremely lucrative. Before October 7, his Zaka organisation was nearly broke. But in the aftermath of the propaganda bonanza they fuelled, they raked in over US$30 million in donations in just a short amount of time.” As for the bodies whose “stories” Landau dreamed up, “The Israeli paper Haaretz reported that Zaka volunteers were so desperate to cash in on October 7, that they actually rearranged corpses discovered in the kibbutzim—literally playing with dead bodies—in order to exaggerate the sense of horror, before sending the images to potential donors.” And as for the widely circulated “baby baked in an oven” story, it was the brainchild of one Eli Beer, head of rival “rescue group” United Hatzalah—delivered during a plaintive pitch to a fundraising event hosted by the US Republican Party, whose credibility was diminished somewhat (albeit apparently not among those present) by his frequent glances down at his notes to make sure he had “remembered” everything.

So what really happened?

Blumenthal also takes aim at the mantra recited by Western media and governments to this day, that October 7 was the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” as a result of a “terrorist attack”. For starters, of the initial death toll of 1,400, it soon emerged that at least 200 Palestinians had been included; some of them Hamas and allied militiamen, the rest ordinary civilians who had wandered through the breached border into Israel and been incinerated by Israeli helicopter gunships—and whose charred corpses and burned-out cars the Israelis had then circulated as “evidence” of Hamas’s “savagery” against Israeli civilians! Of the remainder, Blumenthal cites official figures showing that “at least 380 of the dead were actually uniformed Israeli soldiers, engaged in maintaining the siege of Gaza. After several weeks the official death toll was reduced to 1,200, of whom 695 were Israeli civilians.”

But the story doesn’t end there—Haaretz has since confirmed what it had earlier attacked Blumenthal for being the first journalist to suggest: that the Israeli military had in fact killed many (perhaps most) of the actual civilians itself.

The question Israel and its supporters don’t want asked, Blumenthal explains, is “How did the Israeli helicopter and drone pilots differentiate between Palestinians and Israelis, in the chaos around the kibbutzim?” Because the short answer is, they didn’t. “Relying on interviews in Israeli media with helicopter pilots, who said they had no way of distinguishing between Israelis and Palestinians on the ground as they emptied their payloads”, he says, “I speculated that the Israeli military had initiated something called the Hannibal Directive. This once-secret procedure authorises the army to kill not only the would-be foreign [sic] captors, but their own soldiers and civilians, in order to deny Israel’s adversaries the leverage they could gain by grabbing Israeli hostages. … Multiple mainstream Israeli and Western papers, as well as Israeli military officials themselves, have since admitted that Tel Aviv enacted a ‘mass Hannibal’ on October 7 … in at least three separate locations inside southern Israel.” Yet pro-Israel governments and media outlets keep refusing to address the implications, because it “just doesn’t fit the preferred narrative of Hamas savagery”.

The fake atrocity claims enabled Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant to declare Palestinians “human animals” to justify the brutality of Israel’s reprisal. Photo: Screenshot

Because that, after all, is the whole point. To the leaders of the “democratic”, “human rights”-loving West, truth is irrelevant. All that matters, as Blumenthal explains, is maintaining “the narrative that Israel is confronting ‘human animals’, as its Defence Minister Yoav Gallant put it; and is therefore entitled to do anything, absolutely anything, to prevent another October 7.”

“Look”, he adds, “there’s no denying that atrocities took place when Hamas attacked…. But Israel wasn’t content to capitalise on the atrocities that had been clearly documented on camera. They just weren’t sufficient to give Israel the political latitude it needed to mount a full-scale ethnic-cleansing campaign. Netanyahu himself outlined the cynical logic directly when he addressed Zaka volunteers, and told them that their mission was to grant him the ‘manoeuvring room’ he needed to totally destroy Gaza. So the image of Hamas as a band of psychotic, ISIS-like, irrational Muslim fanatics—rather than a resistance group representing a popular constituency, rebelling against being eternally confined to a de facto internment camp—had to be reinforced over and over again.” Meanwhile, the same Western governments and media simply ignore the hundreds of videos posted on social media by Israeli soldiers, showing themselves laughing and dancing as they shell, bomb and machine-gun Palestinian civilian homes, schools, hospitals, bakeries, and other clearly non-military targets.

So there you have it. Iraqi soldiers did not dump Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators to die in 1990, and Saddam Hussein possessed neither weapons of mass destruction nor a “human shredding machine” in 2002. There were no “Viagra rape squads” in Libya, no poison gas attacks (other than by US-backed “rebels”) in Syria, no “Novichok” nerve-toxin attacks by Russia in England or anywhere else. China is not committing genocide against Uyghur Muslims. And Hamas did not massacre 1,200 innocent Israelis, much less behead babies, on 7 October 2023—and even if it had, it still would not justify the genocide that Israel is openly committing against the Palestinian people today. It is past time the collective Western public stopped accepting such lies, and tolerating the governments that peddle them, before they lie their way right into a third world war. The future of humanity depends upon it.

Footnotes:

By Richard Bardon, Australian Alert Service, 16 October 2024