Hamas Baby Beheading WASN’T

The old adage that something which looks too good to be true probably isn’t true has once again evaded the attention of our free and fearless press, whose burning desire to fall over themselves to support the state of Israel during the latest conflict with Hamas and others has led them to publish a story that was not only fake, but which they knew to be fake.

How the press justifies this kind of behaviour was illustrated superbly by former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil, who told “Unconfirmed reports that Hamas has slaughtered 40 babies, beheading some, increasingly and sadly look like being true. Major news outlets now carrying the reports. The English language does not contain the vocabulary for an adequate response to this”.

“Unconfirmed … look like being true … Major news outlets now carrying the reports”. None of this confirms the claim. But the media’s pack mentality took over: this morning, several titles have repeated that claim. But here a problem enters: yesterday, Anadolu Agency had reported “Israeli army says it does not have ‘confirmation’ about allegations that ‘Hamas beheaded babies’”.

This was Tweeted out before 2130 hours yesterday. In other words, well before the next day’s first editions had to be committed to print. Fake claims of unspeakable harm being meted out to babies go right back to the Great War. More recently, the régime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was accused of baby killing during its occupation of Kuwait. That wasn’t true either.

So one might have expected the press to stop and think, however briefly. But such a thought would have been sadly misplaced: only the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph managed to qualify its front page splash “Hamas massacres babies and children” with “The Telegraph could not verify the claim”. There was no such caution elsewhere.

The Daily Mail - the same paper that ran those viciously anti-Semitic attacks on the memory of the late Ralph Miliband - thundered “This was a holocaust pure and simple [punctuation is also a casualty here] … Babies beheaded”. Free sheet Metro, also owned by the Mail owners, claimed “'40 babies murdered by Hamas’ … children beheaded … says Israel”.

And the Murdoch Sun, owned by the same boss who moaned about the “Jewish owned press”, led with “Slaughter at the Kibbutz … Savages ‘beheaded babies’ in massacre”. Only in the supporting article are we told “Terrorists from Hamas also reportedly beheaded babies”, which does not support the headline. So who was to be the first to say sorry?

As if. This morning, the line has morphed into “They killed them anyway”, but one has to wonder, if a single source claim about babies being beheaded has been allowed to sweep across the media with so little resistance, how many more of the stories being backed up by those associating the idea of stopping and thinking with support for Hamas will also turn out not to be true.

It didn’t seem to bother the Murdoch Times, except to deploy those all-important quote marks: “Hamas ‘cut the throats of babies’ in massacre”. Or the Daily Brexit, still called the Express, which also had quote marks at the ready with “HORROR AT ‘PURE EVIL BEHEADING OF BABIES’”, again with the qualification “horrified Israeli soldiers claim”.

Our free and fearless press should have known better. But this plays into the upcoming dual narrative, for which readers are being softened up. Hamas is so unspeakably evil that this justifies any level of response: mere facts, like Gaza’s population of over two million being 50% children, are not allowed to enter. So the night and day bombing of the area gets a free pass.

The second part of that dual narrative, which is yet to play out, is that there is highly likely to be an Israeli land offensive into Gaza. In war, there are inevitably episodes of less than saintly behaviour from the military; anything from the IDF will be either ignored or dismissed because Hamas. Atrocities may indeed have occurred. But that is not the point the press is making.

They want you to believe one side is good, and the other evil. There can be no grey areas. Thus will the mass killings of Palestinians be justified.

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