The Nazis would have been proud of Hamas's vile propagandists

Telegraph

2 days ago

Desperate people clamouring around a truck begging for food. An emaciated child on death's door. Women, girls, children, babies: no innocent is immune from Israel's psychotically cruel campaign of bloodlust in Gaza. It is unbearable to see. Who can stand by and watch such crimes?
This, at any rate, is what most of the world's media, from the most respectable broadcaster to the grimiest freesheet, is eager for you to think. It is also what Hamas wants you to think. As long-term masters of some of the most cynical propaganda the world has ever seen, Hamas is succeeding in its plan with resounding success.
Keir Starmer last week appeared to speak for the whole of Britain when he said that scenes from Gaza fill us with 'revulsion' – against Israel, of course.
Largely because of such images of suffering, Starmer wants to reward the forces of Palestinian terror with the recognition of a state. 'I think people are revolted at what they are seeing on their screen,' he said. The next day he spoke of 'starving babies, children too weak to stand, images that will stay with us for a lifetime'.
Pictures. Images. Screens. These are what appear to be deciding Israel's – and the Palestinians' – legal status on the world stage.
It is not that there isn't immense suffering in Gaza. There is. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are in dire straits, have lost family members, are in pain, injured, hungry, homeless, desperate, scared, the terrorist group's blood-soaked grip always around their necks. It's a tragedy.
But a lot of what sets the world alight is massaged, manipulated and in many cases downright fake.
One of the most iconic images of the last few weeks, which helped consolidate the false worldwide consensus that Israel has become a rogue, genocidal state while the Palestinians deserve a state, was the skeletal boy allegedly nearly starved to death by an Israeli blockade, held in his mother's arms.
What the great and the good left out in their haste to publish this picture, posed as a tableau reminiscent of Mary holding Jesus, was that the boy suffered from a congenital disease. It was later quietly acknowledged by The New York Times – way too late – that he had pre-existing health problems and they would have highlighted this if they had known before publication.
We see lots of pictures of desperate people clamouring for food banging pots and pans. Some of these might represent the strangled reality on the ground.
But as the German tabloid Bild bothered to discover, one of the most prominent pictures of such clamouring hunger in recent weeks has photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, a freelance journalist commissioned by the Turkish news agency Anadolu, snapping the photos in the manner of a director.
Fteiha, as Bild reveals, isn't quite the impartial documentarian suggested, but an activist whose agency answers straight to Turkey's Hamas-sympathising president, Recep Erdoğan. Fteiha's social media profile is informative. His Instagram page includes a video captioned 'F** Israel' plus a painting by an arch-anti-Semite. He is publicly committed to the 'free Palestine' end game. But his pictures, notable for their perfect lighting and close-ups of idealised suffering, especially of children and mothers, were swallowed without question, disseminated in New York Magazine, CNN, the BBC, plenty of German papers and more.
The wildfire success of such lies tells you much less about people's gullible compassion than about how far Hamas now rules the global playbook of anti-Semitism, Israel-hating and Israel-blaming.
Let us be clear. For the terrible suffering in Gaza, the blame falls squarely on Hamas's manifold crimes. Hamas invaded Israel, knowing that, with its tunnels, weaponry and soldiers embedded in homes, schools and hospitals and behind civilians, Gazan civilians would take the brunt of Israel's inevitable response.
The terror group's continued stranglehold in the Strip and refusal to hand back the hostages is the only thing prolonging the war and suffering, all of which could have ended long ago.
Aid distribution systems have been corrupted, smashed or perverted, keeping food from some who badly need it, and ensuring it goes to those with the right connections. None of this is because of Israeli cruelty. All of it is because of Hamas's cruelty and infinite scheming.
The truth has never mattered, though. Hamas knew Israel would be blamed, ostracised, and punished on the world stage on a scale never seen before, its very legitimacy called into question amid irreparable diplomatic crises. It was easy; Hamas was just kicking at a door its own predecessors helped kick open.
Hamas is finessing and darkening a tradition of propaganda built by Yasser Arafat, a master of the fabricated sympathetic picture, such as that during Israel's 2002 operation in the West Bank that showed him alone and besieged in his compound. He sat at his desk with only candlelight to see by – an image the world lapped right up – only for lights to go right back on after the shoot.
As the historian Richard Landes describes in his essential book, Can the Whole World Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, one of the defining images of the 21st century, the signal 'icon of hatred' against the Israel and the Jews, was the 'eyewitness' film apparently capturing Muhammad al-Dura, a defenceless 12-year-old boy, being shot in cold blood by the IDF, while held in his father's arms, on September 30 2000.
It spread like wildfire. Analysis of the footage later contradicted this narrative. The IDF didn't kill the boy. But by the time it was corrected, the damage had been done. Nobody cared, then, or now. This laid down a grotesquely immoral media-age template that has been used ever since.
Those of us who have followed media bias against Israel for many years are well versed in the absolutely central role of 'Pallywood' – the well-known industry in the Palestinian territories that oversees the staging of fake news footage of Palestinian children and women suffering at the hands of Israel, producing a stream of emotive imagery for the world's media. No true imagery produced by Israel, or even the true, boastful footage from Hamas of the Israeli hostages it has starved and murdered at close range, can even begin to counter Pallywood's work.
The use of emotive imagery to peddle genocidal ideology is hardly new. Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Third Reich's propaganda films (who lived to the age of 101), offers an interesting comparison. Whereas Pallywood stages suffering, Riefenstahl's art pretended that even those bound for Auschwitz were just fine and dandy. She cast gypsies as frolicking extras, then said they all survived the Holocaust. Not only were they sent to Auschwitz, Riefenstahl was thought, in some cases, to have helped them on their way though she denied it all.
While people were tortured, executed after show trials, or sent to the gulag, the Soviet propaganda department ensured a constant flow of idealised images of healthy, happy, sturdy people: courageous, righteous, industrious, reproductive and the biggest lie of all: finally free.
What makes the global hook, line and sinker acceptance of Hamas propaganda so surreal is that it comes a century after Stalin took power, and nearly a century after Hitler did.
What has history taught us? Sadly, those in Israel who know the answer are ignored and vilified, and those outside Israel who know the answer are now too old to provide it.