The Western media has pushed some lies about Palestinian resistance fighters, which is highly misleading. The people fighting a legitimate resistance against the occupying forces that displaced them from their land have been conveniently characterised as terrorists, murderers and anti-semitic savages. This categorisation of Palestinian fighters as terrorists has desensitised many victims of Western liberal ideology spreading falsehoods at an industrial global scale.
Without proof, the mainstream Western media recently said that Palestinian freedom fighters had beheaded 40 Israeli babies on October 7 as part of their fight against the 75-year-old occupation of their land. The false claim was made by pro-Israeli journalist Nicole Zedeck, who later confessed that she had not seen the bodies of beheaded children but was told by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) members who believed something of that nature had occurred.
Among other false claims have been suggestions that Palestinian freedom fighters raped Israeli women and killed 250 people at a concert. No evidence and images have been shown to support those claims. Building on this disinformation campaign, the mainstream media in Western Europe and the USA generated through Artificial Intelligence (AI) images purporting to be of burnt and beheaded babies.
However, Israeli citizens claimed the contrary in media interviews, saying the Palestinian resistance fighters had been kind to them and had never shown any signs of intending to harm them. The IDF’s lies are known as atrocity propaganda to incite emotions, hatred and violence. Israel is spreading disinformation to mask its violent atrocities against innocent civilians. To divert attention from ethnic cleansing, the Israelis desperately paint the Palestinians as “barbaric animals” that rape, torture, and behead babies.
To better understand this strategy, you must closely scrutinise the statements made by various Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks. After announcing the siege of Gaza, Gallant told the media Israel was “fighting human animals”, a label rejected by the Palestinians. For his part, Netanyahu promised to crush Hamas’ “wild animals”.
From here, Israel went on to pound the Gaza Strip, killing more than 5 000 Palestinians, most of whom are women and children. Considering that Hamas killed just over 1 400 Israelis, including 366 soldiers, Netanyahu’s disproportionate response shows his government wants to wipe out all Palestinians rather than Hamas as claimed.
How else do they justify shelling hospitals and killing 500 innocent civilians sheltering in there? How do they justify denying Palestinians food, electricity and fuel if the intention is not to commit ethnic cleansing? However, they must lie and dupe the world about their real motives to achieve this goal. That’s where the claim that Hamas beheaded children come in. It’s meant to gain sympathy for Israel and justify genocide.
One of the key enablers in this web of lies is none other than US President Joe Biden. In a televised White House address after visiting Israel on October 12, Biden said he “never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children.” He added that Hamas’ unprecedented attack on Israel was “an act of sheer evil” and the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”.
Biden drew parallels between Hamas and ISIS, the notorious terror group that killed and beheaded innocent civilians in the Middle East in 2015. White House officials later walked back Biden’s claims, saying the US president did not actually see evidence of mutilated Israeli children, but was merely referencing “reports from Israel”. This explains why White House official John Kirby was theatrical on CNN later that day when he shed tears on camera while speaking about the “atrocities” by Palestinian resistance fighters.
Another Western leader, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, parroted the Israeli talking points. He claimed intelligence reports showed a failed Hamas rocket bombed the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. As if this was not enough, the Biden Administration vetoed a Brazilian-sponsored UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for a cease-fire and a humanitarian corridor in Gaza. The EU threw its weight behind Israel, saying it had the right to defend itself.
This morally repugnant posture by Biden and his Western “allies”, who are nothing more than U.S vassals, has sought to justify the Israeli blockade and the cutting of fuel, food, water and electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip. By all intent and purposes, it laid bare Western hypocrisy and moral deficit.
When Russia indicated in October last year that it was cutting gas and fuel supplies to Ukraine and the European Union (EU), the EU claimed that doing so amounted to terror and crimes against humanity. They made the same argument when Russia withdrew from the Turkish-brokered grain deal, saying Moscow weaponised food. The 2022 deal allowed Ukrainian grain and fertiliser to reach world markets through the Black Sea.
However, the same EU now finds nothing untoward about the Israeli siege of Gaza. European leaders view the bombardment as not constituting war crimes, terror and the weaponisation of food. The IDF has been using white phosphorus against Palestinians, an act prohibited under the law of armed conflict.
Netanyahu’s government has killed humanitarian workers and journalists. The breaches of these laws are one-sided and now take racialised interpretations because the victims of these atrocities are neither West European nor Caucasian but Muslim.
Imagine how Western countries would react and act if Jewish people were residing in the Gaza Strip and under the occupation of a Muslim nation. The whole world would be bandwagoned to condemn the occupying Muslim country. This best explains the Western world’s view on the hierarchy of grief. Those worthy of Western tears and sympathy are racially connected to the West, including Ukrainians and the Israelites.
Other genocidal demands built on the atrocity propaganda include Israeli army elements ordering at least 1.1 million Palestinians to relocate South of the Gaza Strip from the North within a day. This operation is neither logistical nor logical, and Israel knows it. This Israeli aggression is the new Western onslaught and the continuation of the U.S policy of the “war against terror”, whose strategies amount to Islamophobia, ethnic cleansing and the commission of war crimes.
Israel is resurrecting the Nazi ideology that Adolf Hitler used against them. By internally displacing civilians and strangling Gaza, Netanyahu is creating another Nazi concentration camp in the Strip, and, this time, in pursuit of the holocaust against the Palestinians. And, of course, with impunity.
The West, mainly the US, enables genocide against Palestinians by supplying Israel with ammunition, intelligence and financial backing. International law, the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law have all been breached and contravened. For starters, failing to recognise the existence of the State of Palestine, despite the country meeting all the criteria of statehood provided in the Montevideo Convention, is a breach of international law.
This indicates the need to reform global governance bodies like the United Nations (UN). Sadly, the UN, a multilateral system created after the Second World War to govern world affairs, is no longer helpful, in its current form, to address the challenges facing the world today. The UN is no longer a representative body that can guarantee world peace. It has become a tool to advance the interests of the West.
Since 1950, the USA has vetoed over 53 UN Security Council resolutions against Israel about the situation in the Middle East since the 1948 occupation of Palestine.
The UN leaders have issued lukewarm statements about the ongoing atrocities against the Gazans, and, in equal measure, have failed to condemn Israeli occupation as they did with Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
The Biden Administration has deployed two aircraft carrier ships and 2 000 soldiers to the Mediterranean Sea in support of Israel. It must be stated that the aim of these so-called deterrent measures is not to contain the escalation; it is to make geopolitical manoeuvres that advance the thesis of the West that Israel is a victim of the ongoing war.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Saudi Arabia and his provocative and inflammatory language against Iran, Lebanon and the militant group Hezbollah make the situation more volatile. Any Western alliance that seeks to give Israel military and diplomatic cover for its genocide against Palestinians must be condemned by all peace-loving people.
The current Palestinian holocaust has to be remembered and imprinted on people’s minds so that when historical reflections are made, those who committed crimes against humanity in Palestine are brought to account.
No Israeli genocide can be passed off as self-defence.
Gibson Nyikadzino is a Media and Politics researcher based in Zimbabwe. He holds an MSc in Politics and International Relations.
