On Sunday, Oct. 18, 2015, I attended a Chicago rally sponsored by American Muslims for Palestine. I witnessed at most about 800 people gathered, and media reported several hundred, yet the Arab Press magically multiplied the numbers and manipulated the photos to report 15,000 marchers.

800 or 15,000 or?

This wild exaggeration would be comical if it were not for the other lies which were the foundation of the rally and which were blasted across loudspeakers: the lies that kill.

The rally was called "Al Aqsa Under Threat.” There is not – and never has been – any threat to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. This is the big lie that Palestinian extremists are spreading in order to incite people to kill. In fact, Palestinian security services, who have control of the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, prohibit non-Muslims from praying or engaging in other forms of worship on the site. In contrast, areas under Israeli control have complete religious freedom. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Bahais, Druze and dozens of religions pray as they wish and where they wish in Israel. This has always been and will continue to be.

The other lie which set off the recent Palestinian knife attacks was perpetrated by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who claimed that Ahmed Manashrah, a 13-year-old Palestinian, was “executed in cold blood” by Israeli settlers. In fact, Ahmed was caught on surveillance footage attempting to stab to death a 13-year-old Jewish boy and another man and was wounded in apprehension. An October 15 video shows him alive and well and recovering in an Israeli hospital. 

Speakers included American Muslims for Palestine, (AMP), Students for Justice in Palestine, (SJP) and a strange group of Israel-loathing Jews, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). It was the full alphabet of anti-Israel animus. In addition to well-worn accusations against Israel for being "imperialist, apartheid, murderous, etc." were new chants denying that Israel is a democracy. The marchers may have been lost. I wonder if the people of Gaza and Ramallah and the rally supporters would recognize a democracy if they landed in one.

Here is a region controlled by terrorist Hamas billionaires in Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas, who is in the 10th year of his four-year elected term. If they set their GPS for “democracy in the Middle East,” the only stop will be Israel, where Israeli Arabs have served in the Knesset (legislature) since the rebirth of the state in 1948 and where a Supreme Court Justice is an Arab and where critics of the government are free to criticize and not worry about sleeping safely in their beds. 

The lies unchecked entered the realm of the absurd with a Palestinian spokesperson, shown here, going from camera crew to camera crew, spewing libelous allegations that Israel is targeting Palestinians, i.e. children for death, that Israelis see a Palestinian home they want and throw out the current tenant, and that packs of Jews from New York go to Palestine to kill Palestinians and confiscate their property. I mentioned to one of the reporters that Israel has the highest concentration of media in the world.

Note that when someone reports on Lebanon he or she is probably standing in Jerusalem, not Beirut.

Just as these lies of commission are the even more lethal lies of omission. The rally speakers didn’t mention that Palestinian terrorists are driven by hatred for Jews. The anti-Israel speakers did not say that from birth to death, Palestinian leadership instills constant hate education about Jews, blaming Jews and Israel for all Palestinian woes and absolving itself of any responsibility. There was no mention of the daily doses of incitement on Palestinian social media, in the mosques, and in all Palestinian public media -- official and unofficial.

While railing against non-existent threats to Muslim worship on the Temple Mount, the speakers failed to point out that Jewish and Christian holy sites are systematically being destroyed in an effort to erase any Judeo-Christian historic claims upon the land. There was also no word about the Palestinian rioters who two days before set fire to the Joseph's Tomb compound in Nablus and attacked Jewish students who were in prayer at the holy site.

The rally was a family-friendly bash-Israel day with lovely little children accompanying their parents to a festival of lies about Israel amid screams of "Support the Intifada," "Free Free Palestine" and waving of the Hamas terror flag.  Let’s not lie about what those chants mean. By "Palestine" they mean all of Israel with not one inch allocated to the Jewish homeland, and by “Intifada” they mean the murder of all Jews. These are the lies that shed Israeli blood and poison young Palestinian souls. These are the lies that murder hope and kill the chance for peaceful coexistence.

Peggy Shapiro is Midwest Director of StandWithUs.