Israel has become an unsuspecting victim of their own integrity
And this is why
We are living in a new age. Global access to social media, AI and digital editing have catapulted us, whether we like it or not, into a terrifying new era of post-truth, in which not just particular facts but entire histories can be erased, altered or faked.
A look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, yet we previously had institutions that we could more or less trust; academia, reputable news agencies, tried and tested reporters, that were answerable to teams of fact-checkers and the law.
Short attention spans, combined with more and more people using social media as their main media source is creating a truth vortex. We have access to more information than any previous generation, yet we are becoming dumber, not smarter.
The biggest casualty of the Israel / Gaza war has been the truth. And Israel has significantly underestimated the power of the information warfare that their enemy has waged relentlessly against them for the past 12 months and longer. Israel has become an unsuspecting victim of their own integrity.
In the global propaganda war, the terrorists’ narrative is winning. A continual barrage of images showing the destruction in Gaza, and the dead and the injured, published by the Hamas controlled Health Ministry, then reposted by the usual sympathetic idiots times infinity has without a doubt dramatically impacted public perception across the West. Yet almost nobody knows that over the past year close to 100,000 Israelis have been displaced, and that the country has continued to face a barrage of terrorist threats, resulting in many civilian deaths. Not to mention the obvious fact that 101 hostages have still yet to be returned.
In the words of author and historian Yuval Noah Harari1, ‘the truth costs money, lies are cheap’. It costs nothing for the Gazan Health Ministry (Hamas) to rip out a fantasy number of ‘innocent women and children’ casualty numbers. And it takes no time at all to conclude what that number should be. What does take time is identification of bodies, names, addresses, affiliations and DNA samples. It took months for Israel to identify their dead and compile witness testimony, with technology that trumps the Palestinians by decades. Yet the Gaza Health Ministry report them within days, sometimes hours.
You cannot deny the success of the propaganda campaign against Israel. When you have a group of terror allies — with zero integrity or even a shred of empathy for their own people — pouring millions of dollars into bots, influencers, academic institutions and arming paid collaborators with ‘press’ vests, who take glee from the viral brainwashing and indoctrination of a generation, you will always come off second best if you stick to the rules. It has become crystal clear that a vast amount of people lack the skills to critically analyse the information put in front of them.
When a region doesn’t have freedom of the press, it naturally follows that the information that they spit out will be nothing more than a tribute to the power that controls it — the Islamist terror regime of Hamas.
I had a teacher in high school called Miss Murphy. She had a profound effect on my learning and my life. She told me something that I have never forgotten. She said that if you walked up to the top of the highest mountain, and ripped up a piece of paper into a million pieces then threw those pieces out into the wind, it would be easier to put those pieces of paper back together again than it is to restore someones reputation once it has been stained.
And we are seeing exactly this scenario play out. In October last year, the carpark of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza was blasted during the back and forth war. The New York Times, followed by the rest of the worlds media, repeatedly and prominently published Hamas’s claim that the blast was caused by an Israeli airstrike, without any fact checking. On further investigation it turned out the explosion was most likely caused by a Hamas projectile that fell short inside Gaza. Yet millions of people have repeated that lie. Repeat a lie enough times, and the masses will accept it as truth.
Accurate reporting in Gaza is near impossible as Hamas control the media inside Gaza. Not only do they have no fear of reprisal for perpetuating lies, it is a part of their warfare strategy to twist every death, every hungry child, every corrupt UNRWA / Hamas operative casualty, into a tool to discredit Israel.
Democracies such as Israel have numerous levels of fact checking and self-checking. They report the truth, regardless of whether it makes them appear in a good light. This level of transparency and honest reporting, can appear to the moronic like only errors are made by Israel, simply for the fact that Hamas will never admit to anything that damages their public perception. The ludicrous statement by Hamas that no sexual violence or targeting of civilians took place on October 7 is just one of many blatant lies that have been disproven through their own video footage. Yet the lie lives on. Because lets face it, there is no court of law in Gaza, or any media outlet in Gaza, or barely any Gazan civilians that will challenge the Hamas narrative — it’s a sure fire way to become a ‘martyr’.
In 2023, 46 per cent of 18–24-year-olds nominated social media as their main source of news. Anyone who has ever tried to report a lie or hate speech on social media will know that there is zero regulation or accountability on these platforms. So its not surprising, nor a coincidence that a recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found continuing support for Israel in its campaign against Hamas among every age demographic except for 18 to 24 year-olds, of whom 60 per cent think the October 7 attacks were justified by Palestinian grievances, indicating that they believe that genocide of Israelis is justified.
We are not only fighting a war against terror, we are fighting a war of truth. Conspiracy theories, trolls, cancel culture, information warfare and disinformation are an attack on reality, and the potential consequences are dire. We are seeing the use of powerful psychological manipulations intended to divide, distract, and disorient our society as never before.
In short, the bad guys are using our freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and our unlimited access to information and social media — against us. They are grooming our children with lies and disinformation, in our own homes, via their computers, phones and tablets.
The pursuit of truth is the backbone of a functioning, civil society. A healthy society will self-correct through the voice of the people, which is why western societies have worked to abolish inhumanities such as slavery, gender discrimination, racial discrimination and LGBTQI rights. Islamists have no desire to self correct or take any accountability for the betterment of the people.
The truth matters. We need to become better at teaching our children how to distinguish facts from the fake. I can only hope that just like the propaganda campaign waged against the Jews in the 1930s and 40s — resulting in ‘good’ people staying silent while 6 million Jews were exterminated — that in time the truth will rise to the top, and those perpetuating the information warfare against Israel will be held in the same contempt as the Nazi collaborators.
https://www.ynharari.com/
The saying goes that truth is the first casualty of war. If it's any comfort, in my opinion most people are so set in their beliefs that no information would make any difference to them anyway.
The disseminators of anti-Israel propaganda and social media bots (Hamas, Iran, China, etc.) were trained in Russian psy-op techniques, the same techniques that have divided the US, the UK and the EU and sent most of its populace to one of two psychotic extremes. We have been conquered by the Axis through Goebbels-style repeating of absurd lies until they become truths. When I was a teenager, I had a vision that society would break down within my lifetime, but I never dreamed it would go this way. Hearts and minds. When we hear the adage, "the pen is mightier than the sword," we assume the pen is telling the truth. And now we're up to our necks in what happens when the deadly pen is only peddling evil.