Sunday, January 26, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
It was after B'Tselem, admitting it could not verify the story, parroted an absurd claim that Israeli soldiers forced women in Gaza to line up to enter a house, and then shot the first one in the head.
I noted others:
September, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" reported seeing a settler shoot a boy at point blank range 20 times. It turns out he had been killed by a grenade, and no Israelis were involved.Nothing has changed in eleven years.
July, 2008: A Hamas work accident levels a house and kills 7. "Eyewitnesses" said it was an Israeli airstrike.
June, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" say that Zionist settlers release wild pigs to destroy their crops.
February, 2008: "Eyewitnesses" reported that an explosion in the Bureij camp that killed 8 was caused by Israeli airstrikes, but it was an work accident.
Later in 2009, Palestinians claimed 40 civilians killed in a tank shell attack on an UNRWA school. In the end it was 9 Hamas members and three civilians.
In 2012, AFP reported that a supposed airstrike that killed a 15-year old boy never happened and he died when an explosive device he was carrying went off.
Kids killed by Hamas rockets that fell short have been routinely falsely blamed on Israel. Also, kids who died of pre-existing conditions had their deaths blamed on Israeli tear gas.
Even Amnesty International noticed that "eyewitness" claims by Palestinians are unreliable.
Over the past couple of days another insidious lie was publicized. An Arab child in Jerusalem went missing, and the family initially claimed he was kidnapped by Jews. They later recanted that claim but it was too late - social media pushed the lie and continued the lie after the boy's body was found, drowned.
Someone with no credentials at all named Seif Bitar tweeted the lie, where thousands of people retweeted it - including Hanan Ashrawi and Rashida Tlaib.
Bitar isn't a journalist. He isn't an official. He wasn't claiming to be an eyewitness. Yet his lie was swallowed whole and repeated by Palestinians in power in the PA and in the US.
Without a modicum of fact checking.
The only explanation is that Tlaib and Ashrawi want to believe the worst about Jews in Israel and they will uncritically accept even the most vicious lies that fit their antisemitic viewpoint.
It turns out that Bitar has been doing stuff like this for years. In 2018, he posted a video he claimed of Jews chasing a poor Palestinian woman, and said they beat her up later. I researched the incident and saw that it was a Palestinian woman with a knife who stabbed one Israeli and was trying to stab more, and a crowd tried to keep her at bay until one managed to disarm her without firing a shot.
Just this past week we saw another Palestinian tweeter claim a photo of his "grandpa" that was really taken in Turkey. But that's just social media. Far worse is that official Palestinian media this past week claimed that Israel opens non-existent dams to flood Gaza, and that the Holocaust was not as bad as the Nakba. Those lies are not being reported by mainstream media and not being retracted.
This is only a tiny sample of Palestinian lies over the years, many by Mahmoud Abbas and Saeb Erekat directly.
Palestinians lie because of the honor/shame culture they live in where appearances are more important than the truth. Ordinary Palestinians are taught from birth that they must not tarnish their cause. Hell, we saw Arafat threaten reporters who broadcast Palestinians celebrating the 9/11 attacks on America. The cumulative lesson for Palestinians is to avoid shaming their leaders and their people at all costs.
The leaders themselves lie, knowingly, because they know they can get away with it. It is rare that mainstream Western media calls them out on their lies (here's one example, where Abbas was forced to walk back a blood libel.) And even when Western media is quite aware of the lies, they will keep quoting these Palestinian leaders with no caveat the next time, and the lies will be multiplied by anti-Zionists.
The truth is the only thing that any real peace can be based on. As long as their leaders are addicted to lying, nothing will change.
