Perhaps more out of habit than anything else, I still read the print edition of the New York Times every morning, something I’ve done for well over forty years, though given its sharp decline in quality that may not long continue. But while it does, the editorial selection of the front-page stories provides some important insight into the thinking of the individuals who shape the coverage of America’s national newspaper of record.
Last Thursday, most of the world was still reeling from the televised devastation in Gaza, as a densely-populated portion of one of its largest refugee camps was demolished by multiple 2,000-pound Israeli bombs, apparently killing hundreds of helpless Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.
Soon afterward on CNN, pro-Israel former AIPAC staffer Wolf Blitzer questioned an Israeli military spokesman about the horrific loss of human life and was told that the massive attack had been completely justified because the Israelis believed that a Hamas commander was in the vicinity.
These are blatant war crimes, probably the worst ever televised in the history of the world, or at least I can’t recall anything comparable. Admittedly there have been far larger modern massacres, such as in 1994 Rwanda where according to Wikipedia the Hutus butchered many hundreds of thousands of their Tutsi neighbors with machetes; but both the Hutu killers and their Tutsi victims were mostly primitive African villagers, so none of those dark deeds were ever broadcast live on global television.
In sharp contrast, the grim events of the last four weeks have been widely watched around the world on electronic and social media. In just one month some 10,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza, a total larger than the combined losses on both sides in the past twenty months of the Ukraine war. Despite the fulminations of Western media outlets, since early 2022 only about 550 children have been killed in Ukraine, while after just a few weeks the total in Gaza has passed 4,000. Moreover, while the Ukraine war was fought between powerful, well-equipped modern armies on both sides, the defenseless civilians of Gaza are being relentlessly pounded by one of the world’s most lavishly-armed military forces.
This is merely the tiniest sliver of the horrifying Gaza video footage being constantly broadcast all around the world but only very rarely shown on American television.
Yet despite all this terrible carnage, the front page of Thursday’s Times instead chose to focus upon a somewhat-related but rather different topic, running an article describing the “climate of fear” now gripping the Jews of Europe:
Apparently, the enormous ongoing massacre of innocent men, women, and children by the Jews of Israel has led to a sharp rise in hostility and public anger directed toward the Jews of Europe, especially those among them who are enthusiastic supporters of Israel and its current policies. The lead author was Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Cohen, a longtime European correspondent of the Times, and his effort was backed by the work of nine additional Times staffers, underscoring the tremendous importance assigned to that project. According to these writers, numerous top European political leaders regarded this sudden rise of anti-Semitism as a huge social crisis, which they promised to stamp out by all possible means.
Given the alarmist title and opening of that long article produced by ten Times journalists, I naturally expected to find numerous examples of European Jews having recently been killed or severely injured in violent assaults, but no such cases were mentioned. Indeed, after carefully reading the piece twice, I couldn’t find a single instance of a physical attack against Jews anywhere in the entire continent of Europe. Nonetheless, the upsurge of anti-Semitism was characterized as massive and rampant—with total recorded incidents numbering in the many hundreds. But all of these apparently involved merely verbal abuse or threats, graffiti, and petty vandalism, with many of these narrowly focused on the Jewish State and its supporters.
For example, publications in Britain have been horrified that British Muslims have torn down or defaced pro-Israel propaganda posters. The Jewish President of the French National Assembly, that country’s parliament, said she was terrified by the hostility she had encountered in her own country; perhaps as a consequence, fourteen French senators have proposed new legislation criminalizing “anti-Zionist” activity, which would now be explicitly considered “anti-Semitic,” including five-year prison sentences for inciting hatred of Israel.
In all fairness, the Times has also run articles on the massive ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza, deeds being committed by Israeli Jews. But there seems a strangely suspicious even-handedness between the extreme concern of the Times and various European government over verbal insults towards Jews and Israelis as against the brutal killing of so many thousands of defenseless Palestinian women and children.
Moreover, although almost entirely ignored by the mainstream news media, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had regularly been killed for many years prior to last month’s Hamas attack, as was discussed in a long recent interview with film-maker Abby Martin, who had produced a widely-praised 2019 documentary on Gaza:
Naive Americans have sometimes suggested that the Palestinians should embrace the strategy of non-violence. But as she explained, several years ago the Palestinians of Gaza had begun staging a long series of completely unarmed protest marches, during which many thousands were killed or wounded by Israeli army snipers. Just yesterday I discovered that her full documentary had become available on Youtube a few months ago, and after watching it, I can highly recommend the work as providing the crucial background information to the current conflict.
Martin noted that the Israeli snipers had deliberately targeted the journalists and medics who were present during those large, unarmed protest marches, an obvious war crime. But these events were scarcely acknowledged by the global media let alone prosecuted by international courts, so perhaps the ultimate failure of this sustained non-violent effort finally convinced the militants of Hamas that more forceful measures were required to attract world attention.
Moreover, such Israeli attempts to suppress contrary media coverage using lethal means have continued over time. A few months ago, one of the world’s most prominent Arab broadcast journalists, a Palestinian-American named Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot and killed by an Israeli army sniper while reporting from the West Bank; and although the Israel’s government first denied responsibility then claimed the killing was accidental, the circumstances leave little doubt that she was deliberately targeted for death, with the single precisely-aimed round striking her in the back of the head just above her flak-jacket marked “Press.”
Similarly, the Israelis last week repeatedly complained about what they regarded as the harshly negative tone of the ongoing Al Jazeera broadcasts from devastated Gaza, coverage led by its Palestinian bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh. But these complaints were disregarded, so a couple of days later an Israeli missile strike hit his home in supposedly safe South Gaza while he was reporting on-air, annihilating his entire family, including wife, son, daughter, and grandson.
This sort of Israeli behavior really seems quite extraordinary in the modern world, especially when juxtaposed with the related coverage in the Times and in most of the rest of the Western media. Indeed, taken together, these facts suggest that a mere Jewish fingernail is generally considered more valuable than multiple Palestinian lives.
I suspect that it is more than mere coincidence that such controversial notions have been central tenets of traditional Judaism for the last thousand or two thousand years. As I explained back in 2018:
If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.
Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.
As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.
Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principal of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.
Most conservative American Christians and Christian Zionists in particular are fiercely supportive of Israel, so some of them may have been a bit surprised by the recent Israeli airstrikes against Gaza’s Christian hospitals and churches, which killed hundreds of civilians sheltering there. Indeed, the American-supplied munitions that struck the 1,600-year-old Saint Porphyrius Church, one of the oldest in the world, killed seventeen Palestinians, including several relatives of a former U.S. Congressman. But for reasons that I had explained in my 2018 article, all of this was only to be expected, given the increasingly religious character of Israel’s political leadership class:
And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.
Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians.
Over the years prominent Israeli rabbis have sometimes publicly debated whether Jewish power has now become sufficiently great that all the Christian churches of Jerusalem, Bethleham, and other nearby areas can finally be destroyed, and the entire Holy Land completely cleansed of all traces of its Christian contamination. Some have taken this position, but most have urged prudence, arguing that Jews needed to gain some additional strength before they should take such a risky step. These days, many tens of millions of zealous Christians and especially Christian Zionists are enthusiastic advocates for Jews, Judaism, and Israel, and I strongly suspect that at least some of that enthusiasm is based upon ignorance.
The Internet was abuzz a few days ago when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explicitly identified the Palestinians with the tribe of Amalek, which the Israelites of the Old Testament were ordered by divine mandate to completely exterminate, down to the last newborn baby. Netanyahu himself is quite secular but his political base is zealously religious, so this explicit call for a total Palestinian genocide naturally alarmed many observers.
Indeed, sharp critics of Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza have been regularly condemning it as “genocide.” However, I’ve always been very leery of using that term, which in recent years has become so grossly inflated and misused in the political rhetoric of Western governments and their media allies.
Still, fair is fair, and less than three years ago both the Trump and the Biden Administrations had officially declared that China was committing “genocide” against the Uighurs of its Xinjiang province, a charge widely echoed in the Times and across the rest of our media. Yet oddly enough, none of those horrific accusations ever pointed to the killing of a single Uighur by the Chinese government, and there is also a very notable contrast between the shining Uighur cities, with their modern, unblemished office buildings and residential towers, and the current ruins of devastated Gaza. So if the West could claim that China was committing a Uighur “genocide,” the Israelis certainly stand massively convicted of that monstrous charge, even made explicit by Netanyahu’s public statements.
Scenes from the Uighur “Genocide” Compared to Those of the Palestinian “Genocide”
Consider also the far more appropriate accusation of “war crimes.” Soon after the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the Russians took the very reasonable step of evacuating several hundred ethnic Russian children from the combat zone, allowing them to be temporarily educated in Russian schools until the fighting ended and they could safely return to their homes.
Indicted War Criminal Maria Lvova-Belova
But as a result of this sensible humanitarian policy, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, were indicted as war criminals by Europe’s International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, which issued international arrest warrants against them, an act of total lunacy.
Naturally, no such action will ever be taken against Netanyahu and his Israeli government, who instead of safeguarding children are slaughtering them in the many thousands. This unspeakable hypocrisy led one of the ethnic Russian commenters on our website to angrily suggest that all the ICC justices themselves should be sent to the gallows, a penalty that seems quite appropriate to me.
The obvious reason for this unprecedented Israeli slaughter of the helpless Palestinian civilians of Gaza is as retaliation for the stunning defeat Israel had suffered a few weeks earlier at the hands of lightly-armed Hamas militants, a national humiliation perhaps greater than anything in the country’s entire history.
For decades, Israeli boastfulness had led most observers to regard its Mossad intelligence service as one of the world’s best, matched by the combat effectiveness of its vaunted military.
During this same period, Gaza’s two million residents had become inmates of what was widely described as the world’s largest open-air prison, with their personal movements and imports under tight Israeli control, and even their food supplies reduced to the bare minimum necessary for survival. The Israeli government spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the walls and fences surrounding Gaza, fortifications featuring extensive banks of advanced sensors and automatically-firing machine-guns, so both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and all of his military commanders arrogantly regarded any successful Hamas raid as totally impossible.
Given such over-confidence, when Hamas circumvented these formidable defenses using cheap drones and innovative tactics, the nearby Israeli garrison bases were caught completely unprepared, with their sentries asleep or away from their posts, and they were quickly overrun by the 1,500 Hamas fighters that attacked.
As a result, Israel suffered enormous military casualties, by some estimates losing up to 600 soldiers killed within the first 24 hours, probably more single-day fatalities than in any of Israel’s previous wars and greater than the combined total of all the wars fought during nearly the last half-century. According to an early partial listing, these dead included many of Israel’s most elite officers, including dozens of colonels and majors, while many other soldiers were captured alive and taken as prisoners back to Gaza.
Scott Ritter is a former Military Intelligence officer, who had served as UN Chief Weapons Inspector and subsequently became a leading opponent of the Iraq War. In a portion of a recent interview, he explained that even after the Hamas fighters had lost the initial advantage of surprise, they still performed very well on the battlefield, severely mauling a couple of Israel’s most elite infantry battalions and inflicting considerable additional Israeli casualties.
Many of the Hamas militants then safely returned to Gaza with the hundreds of Israelis they had captured, hoping to exchange them for the many thousands of Palestinians held captive for years in Israeli prisons, usually without charges and often under brutal conditions. Back in 2011, the Israelis had released more than 1,000 such Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single captured Israeli soldier.
But rapidly arriving Israeli forces successfully surrounded other Hamas fighters and their prisoners at the bases and kibbutzim captured in the initial assault. Attempting to storm the buildings held by Hamas would have been very difficult, resulting in heavy additional IDF casualties, so the Israeli leadership eventually concluded that rescuing the prisoners was impossible. Therefore, under the notorious Hannibal Directive of 1986, they used the massive firepower of their tanks and attack-helicopters to destroy the structures, killing both the Hamas fighters and the Israelis they held captive.
Ritter noted that although Israeli government spokesmen claimed that the resulting destruction and deaths had been due to Hamas, the destroyed ruins displayed the unmistakable signs of high-explosive tank rounds and Hellfire missiles. Max Blumenthal’s detailed analysis came to the same conclusion, and this also matched the testimony of several Israeli eye-witnesses who were lucky enough to survive the attacks. In an interview late last week, Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst with extensive military experience, described much the same thing:
Blumenthal explained that in the first few hours of confusion following the Hamas attack, Israeli forces had extreme difficulty distinguishing friend from foe, and the attack-helicopters and tanks blasted anything that moved, sometimes firing on Israeli civilians or even their own troops; he noted that many of the charred corpses of Israelis pulled from cars bore the unmistakable signs of Hellfire missiles. An Israeli general commanding one of the bases seized by Hamas described how he quickly hid in a blast-proof bomb-shelter, then called in massive air strikes on his own base, killing any of his own surviving troops as well as the Hamas militants guarding them.
Meanwhile, surviving Israeli hostages have uniformly reported the excellent treatment they had received from their Hamas captors.
Given all of these facts, it seems quite possible that a majority even a large majority of all the slain Israeli civilians had died at the hands of their own military forces, either from deliberate or accidental friendly-fire, and even many Israeli soldiers may have suffered that same fate.
The total number of Israeli deaths remains uncertain. The government has claimed around 1,400 fatalities, a figure universally reported across the entire global media, but nearly a month after the fighting ending, fewer than 1,100 names have been published, raising large doubts about the reality of the larger total. Indeed, Blumenthal noted that when Israel’s UN Ambassador distributed horrifying images of the corpses of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas, many of them turned out to be the bodies of Hamas fighters killed by the Israelis. So it seems quite possible that several hundred dead Hamas militants were originally included in that 1,400 total, with the Israeli government being too embarrassed to admit its original mistake.
A couple of days ago, Blumenthal Tweeted out a chart showing the contrasting age distribution of Israeli and Palestinian casualties. It’s rather notable that there were scarcely any Israeli deaths either among children or the elderly, hardly consistent with the government claims of random, brutal Hamas terrorism, and extremely different from the age-distribution of Palestinian victims:
Israeli and Palestinian death counts from Oct 7 - 30 are very revealing.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 2, 2023
Most Israelis killed on Oct 7 were of military age. By my last count, nearly 50% were uniformed soldiers on base and/or actively engaged in maintaining the siege of Gaza. That does not include those who… pic.twitter.com/7Uiilqqj80
A week or two ago I’d given a long podcast interview in which I discussed various aspects of the surprisingly successful Hamas attack, the roots of the conflict, and its broader implications for the future of the region.
Given these facts, the Israeli government was faced with a challenging dilemma in the initial aftermath of the Hamas attack. The national humiliation of the successful surprise assault and the heavy military losses suffered seemingly required a massive retaliatory campaign against Gaza, both to reestablish Israel’s deterrent credibility and to satisfy the outrage of its citizens. However, since such a large fraction of the civilian deaths had actually been at the hands of the trigger-happy Israeli military, any real justification for such an overwhelming response was lacking.
But although both the Israeli military and the Israeli Mossad had demonstrated their ineffectiveness, one of Israel’s greatest strategic assets has been the stranglehold that it and its pro-Israel allies enjoy over the entire Western media landscape. So a vast wave of powerful propaganda was unleashed, intended to distract attention from the military debacle while demonizing the victorious Hamas fighters as brutal terrorists and killers.
Most of this was rather typical wartime atrocity propaganda, with Israeli spokesmen claiming that the Hamas fighters had committed numerous massacres and rapes, charges that were widely reported in uncritical fashion by our media echo chamber. But while it was certainly true that the Hamas militants had killed many Israeli civilians in their initial attack, I had already seen the eyewitness accounts by several surviving captives stating that they were treated very well and even respectfully, leading me to be quite skeptical of these grave Israeli charges. However, since I had made little effort to seek out atrocity-videos on the Internet, I couldn’t really be sure.
Our very lightly-moderated website represents one of the relatively few venues on the Internet where anti-Israel sentiments can flourish so it naturally attracts its share of energetic pro-Israel activists, who often present themselves as something else. One of these declared that there were numerous Hamas webcam videos showing their rape, torture, and massacre of Israeli civilians. When I challenged those claims, he provided links to a half-dozen such videos, which I watched, but none of them contained the scenes that he had claimed. Indeed, the bloodiest ones seemed to show the bodies of numerous dead Israeli soldiers, images that would certainly be horrifying to pro-Israel partisans, but hardly constitute evidence of any Hamas war crimes. Considering that pro-Israel activists apparently can’t locate any such atrocity-videos, they probably don’t exist, and the media is merely repeating dishonest propaganda disseminated by Israeli government spokesmen.
But far more effective than these mundane accusations have been the claims of exceptionally outrageous atrocities, deeds that established the Hamas fighters as the greatest monsters since Adolf Hitler’s Nazis had made lampshades out of Jewish skin and rendered Jewish bodies into soap.
One early story that quickly swept across the world was that the Hamas militants had beheaded forty Israeli babies, a grisly atrocity that even reached the lips of President Joseph Biden.
That ridiculous story had come from a fanatic Jewish settler and even Israeli military spokesmen refused to damage their credibility by endorsing the hoax, which was quickly debunked and vanished from pro-Israel media outlets, especially since almost no Israeli babies had actually died in the Hamas attack. But even so, the grotesque and gripping image apparently embedded itself in many Western minds.
For example, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has a strong military background, and he has been an important voice sharply critical of Israel’s actions, helping to confirm that it was indeed an Israeli missile that killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians sheltering at Gaza’s largest Christian hospital. I regularly visit his independent blogsite for his astute commentary on the current conflict.
But last week, I was absolutely shocked to discover that some of Johnson’s military friends apparently believed in the “beheaded babies” hoax, forcing Johnson to still defensively insist that there was no evidence for it.
Although that particular atrocity-hoax has disappeared from the media, just a couple of days ago an equally outrageous story emerged, as an Israeli activist suddenly declared—four weeks after the alleged event—that the Hamas fighters had roasted Israeli babies in an oven, with his account quickly reaching the tabloid headlines and easily eclipsing coverage of the enormous Palestinian death-toll at a bombed refugee camp.
By his appearance, the originator of this bizarre tale once again seemed to be a fanatic Jewish settler, perhaps even a friend of the one who had launched the previous beheading hoax. But in this particular case, there might actually be a nugget of truth behind the claim. As mentioned above, the Israelis had blasted the homes occupied by Hamas militants and their Israeli hostages with Hellfire missiles, reducing all the occupants to charred corpses, and perhaps one of these had been a baby. But if so, Israeli missiles rather than a kitchen oven had been responsible for the roasting.
Given the rapid collapse of the previous beheaded-babies hoax, I had assumed that the media would dismiss and ignore this new one, especially since it had suddenly been “remembered” so many weeks after the fighting had ended; but I was mistaken. My local Palo Alto newspaper is as mainstream and respectable as can be imagined, but relies upon wire services for all of its foreign news, and it headlined the story, treating it with complete credibility. As a consequence, many of America’s top technologists and billionaire venture capitalists—who may normally pay little attention to foreign policy issues—are probably now convinced that Hamas has been roasting babies, an entirely imaginary atrocity, while scarcely being aware that so many thousands of Gazan children and infants have been killed—sometimes even being roasted alive—by Israeli bombs and missiles.
Perhaps partly as a result of that horrifying front-page story in our local newspaper, the following day Palo Alto witnessed one of its largest political demonstrations in decades. Hundreds staged a pro-Israel rally just outside City Hall, waving a sea of Israeli flags and demanding the release of the Israeli captives, sentiments endorsed by numerous speakers, including the Mayor. For generations, famously liberal Palo Alto has been in the forefront of every progressive cause, and just a couple of years ago a huge Black Lives Matter street-mural glorifying a convicted cop-killer had spent weeks blocking downtown traffic near that same location. Perhaps a few of the residents have begun feeling a little uneasy about the ongoing slaughter of so many children in Gaza by American-supplied bombs and missiles. But if so, the massive display of pro-Israel sentiment will probably suppress any such public concerns in this small city of 60,000.
Although sensible people might expect that the promotion of outrageous atrocity-hoaxes would backfire, this seems not to be the case. Indeed, the surprising effectiveness of this shameless propaganda technique was noted nearly a century ago by Hitler in Mein Kampf, in which he fiercely denounced Jews for their regular use of the “Big Lie” technique. The future German dictator shrewdly explained that while most ordinary people may occasionally tell ordinary lies, they cannot conceive of anyone ever telling a lie so monstrously gigantic, and therefore they tend to assume that stories of “beheaded babies” or “babies roasted in ovens” must probably be true.
In a 2016 article focused upon the scholarly research of Prof. Albert S. Lindemann, a distinguished intellectual historian, I had noted that this pattern of remarkable Jewish dishonesty had been widespread across numerous different countries and time periods:
As Lindemann candidly describes the tension between Russia’s very rapidly growing Jewish population and its governing authorities, he cannot avoid mentioning the notorious Jewish reputation for bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous figures of all political backgrounds noting that the remarkable Jewish propensity to commit perjury in the courtroom led to severe problems in the effective administration of justice. The eminent American sociologist E.A. Ross, writing in 1913, characterized the regular behavior of Eastern European Jews in very similar terms.
Religion obviously constitutes an important unifying factor in human social groups and we cannot ignore the role of Judaism in this regard. Traditional Jewish religious doctrine seems to consider Jews as being in a state of permanent hostility with all non-Jews, and the use of dishonest propaganda is an almost inevitable aspect of such conflict. Furthermore, since Jews have invariably been a small political minority, maintaining such controversial tenets required the employment of a massive framework of subterfuge and dissimulation in order to conceal their nature from the larger society surrounding them. It has often been said that truth is the first casualty in war, and surely the cultural influences of over a thousand years of such intense religious hostility may continue to quietly influence the thinking of many modern Jews, even those who have largely abandoned their religious beliefs.
Unfortunately, the widespread public acceptance of such outrageous atrocity-hoaxes as beheaded or roasted Israeli babies has now provided the Israeli government with the political cover it requires for its ongoing massacre of Gaza’s Palestinians, including many babies and infants. And sadly enough, such extreme atrocity propaganda had probably also played an important role in past generations as well.
Henry Morgenthau Jr. was a wealthy Jewish dilettante, who never graduated high school nor college, and instead set himself up as a gentleman-farmer in Upstate New York. Although lacking any knowledge of economics or finance, as the friend and neighbor of Franklin Roosevelt, he was appointed Treasury Secretary in early 1934, then allowed the actual operations of his very important department to be run by his trusted subordinate, Harry Dexter White, a notorious Communist spy.
And as I explained in 2016, Morgenthau’s ignorance and gullibility led to other tragic developments.
The notorious Jewish tendency to shamelessly lie or wildly exaggerate has sometimes had horrifying human consequences. I very recently discovered a fascinating passage in Peter Moreira’s 2014 book The Jew Who Defeated Hitler: Henry Morgenthau Jr., FDR, and How We Won the War, focused on the important political role of that powerful Secretary of the Treasury.A turning point in Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s relationship with the Jewish community came in November 1942, when Rabbi Stephen Wise came to the corner office to tell the secretary what was happening in Europe. Morgenthau knew of the millions of deaths and the lampshades made from victims’ skin, and he asked Wise not to go into excessive details. But Wise went on to tell of the barbarity of the Nazis, how they were making soap out of Jewish flesh. Morgenthau, turning paler, implored him, “Please, Stephen, don’t give me the gory details.” Wise went on with his list of horrors and Morgenthau repeated his plea over and over again. Henrietta Klotz was afraid her boss would keel over. Morgenthau later said the meeting changed his life.
While I was growing up, I’d sometimes heard those media stories of Nazis making soap and lampshades from Jewish bodies and skin, and had vaguely assumed that they were probably true. But in recent decades, all mainstream Holocaust scholars have admitted they had no reality, merely being grotesque examples of dishonest wartime propaganda, much like Israeli babies beheaded or roasted in ovens.
But although those particular Nazi atrocities had never occurred, they did have deadly real-world consequences. Morgenthau believed they were true and that led him to lend his name and support to the notorious Morgenthau Plan, which was intended to exterminate half of Germany’s surviving population after the end of the war. Although that extreme proposal was later officially repudiated by the American government, it was still substantially implemented in practice, and according to reasonable estimates, perhaps ten million or more German civilians died of hunger or privation during the first few years after the close of hostilities, suffering a fate not entirely dissimilar from what might soon befall the blockaded and embargoed inhabitants of miserable Gaza.
Gripping accounts of horrific atrocities can easily become embedded in established public narratives even if there exist undeniable facts that seem to completely challenge their reality.
Thus, although there are several eyewitness accounts by surviving Israeli hostages describing their very good and respectful treatment at the hands of their Hamas captors, nevertheless all our mainstream outlets portray those militants as unspeakably brutal terrorists, who may even have beheaded or roasted Israeli babies. And few in the media seem to even recognize this strange discordance.
Meanwhile, Anne Frank surely ranks as the most famous victim of the Nazi Holocaust. That latter historical event was a central theme in Roger Cohen’s Times story on the desperate current fears of Europe’s Jews, so naturally the fate of that iconic young girl was mentioned in his piece.
Cohen and his nine Times co-authors must obviously have put a great deal of effort and care into producing their lengthy front-page article, which surely was also thoroughly reviewed and vetted by several Times editors. Yet when I read the piece in my morning print edition, one particular sentence immediately jumped out at me. Anne Frank was described as:
the Jewish girl murdered at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during World War II.
Yet as all historians know and accept, she actually died of Typhus after suffering perhaps six months of serious illness and spending most of that time in German-run hospitals, a rather strange element of the traditional Holocaust narrative.
Apparently, someone contacted the Times and informed them of their mistake, so the online version of the article now describes her as:
the young Jewish girl who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany during World War II.
And although the bottom of the Times article acknowledges that a correction was made in the text, it misstates the nature of that correction, perhaps to avoid drawing too much attention to that rather puzzling historical detail.
The unfortunate current events in Gaza as well as others that took place generations ago in Europe brought to mind my 2016 description of the enormous distortions of reality produced by our American media.
We naively tend to assume that our media accurately reflects the events of our world and its history, but instead what we all too often see are only the tremendously distorted images of a circus fun-house mirror, with small items sometimes transformed into large ones, and large ones into small. The contours of historical reality may be warped into almost unrecognizable shapes, with some important elements completely disappearing from the record and others appearing out of nowhere. I’ve often suggested that the media creates our reality, but given such glaring omissions and distortions, the reality produced is often largely fictional. Our standard histories have always criticized the ludicrous Soviet propaganda during the height of Stalin’s purges or the Ukrainian famine, but in its own way, our own media organs sometimes seem just as dishonest and absurd in their own reporting. And until the availability of the Internet, it was difficult for most of us to ever recognize the enormity of this problem.
Based upon the available evidence, I think that our American media is portraying the realities of the current conflict in Gaza upside-down and backwards. Earlier this year I had argued that much the same had been the case for previous conflicts of vastly greater magnitude: