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November 19, 2023

SHOCKING: Western media let Hamas author their ‘news’ stories

By Andrea Widburg

In past conflicts, one side has successfully managed to push through propaganda that changes how civilians on the other side view military action. However, we have never before seen a situation in which the world’s media simply hand over to one of the combatants the entire responsibility for reporting on the war. That’s what’s happening across the West, though, including in America, as rising antisemitism is fueled by “news” reports direct from Hamas central.

One of the most powerful stories out of WWII was the claim that the Allies engaged in malevolent overkill when they bombed Dresden in 1945, murdering over 100,000 people (or, as the Nazis claimed, over 200,000) without any clear military objective.

While these claims didn’t affect the war’s conduct, they were one of the foundational beliefs behind the post-war narrative that the Allies were no better than the Nazis. For post-war leftists and their increasingly ignorant followers, it didn’t matter that the Nazis had directly targeted civilians across England and Europe. Nor did the deaths of six million Jews matter. The Dresden story was simple and buried deeply into the Western psyche: Allies, led by America, were evil.

Hamas "journalist: image by Andrea Widburg using AI

However, the truth is that far fewer civilians died in the Dresden bombing raids than the propaganda reported. Moreover, just as Truman’s successful decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought a swift end to the war, the Dresden raids also sought to drive Germany to surrender before millions more died:

The Allied firebombing of the eastern German city of Dresden in 1945 killed no more than 25,000 people — far fewer than scholars' previous estimates running as high as 135,000 — a special commission has found.

The team of a dozen experts, including university professors, archivists and military historians, said Wednesday that four years of research so far has confirmed 18,000 deaths and showed that police and city administrators at the time believed there were about 25,000 victims of the bombing.

One doesn’t have to travel back to 1945 to find an enemy narrative driving popular opinion. You probably remember the 2006 “study” from the once-reputable British medical journal, The Lancet, which claimed that the 2003 invasion of Iraq resulted in 100,000 deaths. (Later, leftists pumped up those numbers to a million.) That “study” was thoroughly debunked, but not before it supercharged the anti-war movement that hampered U.S. foreign policy and that, until the even more successful 2020 BLM movement, gave new life to the American left.

Those incursions into the narrative, though, are small potatoes compared to what’s happening nowadays. While the Western media were occasionally vulnerable to false narratives, they mostly wrote their own copy and came up with facts based on their own observations. This time around, it’s different.

In a receipt-filled X thread, David Collier, an actual investigative journalist, provides chapter and verse showing that the Western media are simply reprinting the narrative straight from Hamas. What we’re getting isn’t news; it’s hardcore propaganda from a combatant that, while it’s losing on the ground, is successfully spreading antisemitism throughout the West, especially in America:

To understand what is happening, imagine The Times of London and The New York Times, in 1943, running a purported “news” story written by Joseph Goebbels. In it, he states as fact (and that’s how the media sell it) that, despite Allied claims that they had no boots on the ground in Germany, British and American troops had actually infiltrated German territory, where they joined up with millions of Jews who had been lurking on the Polish border, waiting for this raid. Joining together, these forces had indiscriminately raped and slaughtered German civilians.

Then, imagine that this wasn’t a one-time error. Instead, it was the norm, with these outlets relying solely on reporting to come from Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry.

That is what we’re seeing now.

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