Reports of beheaded Israeli babies were inevitably propaganda – Canadian Dimension

Anyone who has studied the history of propaganda must have rolled their eyes, as I did when I heard reports of Hamas militants beheading babies after their invasion of Israel a year ago. History has shown time and time again that such reports are inevitably fabricated or at least greatly exaggerated in order to sway public opinion in favor of war, and should therefore always be doubted, if not ignored. Children’s propaganda has a long history, dating back more than a century to World War I, when German troops were accused of bayoneting Belgian babies. The Times of London even published a second-hand account of a man who said he witnessed German soldiers “cut off the arms of a baby who was clinging to his mother’s skirts.” The French propaganda office offered a fake photo of the handless baby that was printed in the French newspaper La Rive Rougewhile other French media published a drawing of German troops allegedly eating the dead baby’s hands.

These atrocities were used to great effect to draw the US into the conflict, tipping the scales between the deadlocked sides. The well-organized American information campaign, involving some of the greatest journalists of the time, is widely considered to be the first modern propaganda campaign. She was so successful in turning the country’s passionate isolationism into rabid interventionism that her plot has been closely followed ever since. The story of the bayoneted babies was undoubtedly made up, as Phillip Knightley noted in his 1975 classic The first victimalthough it was included in the infamous 1915 British Bryce Commission report. It was based on written statements by British lawyers from 1,200 unsworn and anonymous Belgian refugees who then mysteriously disappeared. A postwar Belgian inquiry, Knightley added, could not confirm a single atrocity story in the Bryce Commission report.

A more recent example of babies being sacrificed on the altar of war propaganda came after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. While most Americans opposed military intervention to restore the Kuwaiti royal family, who had fled to Saudi Arabia, this soon changed an atrocity story. “I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with weapons,” a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl sobbed before a US Congressional committee. Identified only as Nayirah, ostensibly to protect her family, she testified that the soldiers “took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators away and left the children to die on the cold ground.” The United Nations Security Council heard from a man who went by the false name Dr. Issah Ibrahim testified. “The hardest part was burying the babies,” he said. “Under my supervision, 120 newborns were buried in the second week of the invasion. I personally buried 40 newborns taken from their incubators by soldiers.” The use of force to liberate Kuwait was soon approved by both the United Nations and the United States, which led the 1991 invasion known as Operation Desert Storm.

The New York Times revealed in early 1992 that Nayirah was a daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The CBC newsmagazine The fifth estate Later that year, it was reported how the story was fabricated by the infamous public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, which received more than $10 million from the Kuwaiti royal family to promote the invasion.

Baby propaganda also plays a central role in the anti-Semitic “blood libel,” which for centuries has claimed that Jews commit ritual murders of kidnapped Christian infants and use their blood in sacrificial rites or the baking of unleavened bread eaten during Passover. Anti-Jewish propaganda and paranoia due to the blood libel even led to the expulsion of Jews from England by King Edward in 1290.

For this reason, alarm bells should have rung when rumors emerged shortly after the October 7 attack from Gaza last year that Hamas militants had beheaded and/or burned alive 40 Israeli babies. “The critics of Israel immediately doubted the claim for various reasons,” noted Davide Mastracci The maple on the anniversary of the attack. “As it became increasingly clear that the story was a fabrication, those who had originally believed it protested that it didn’t really matter whether the babies were beheaded or burned alive, since they had been killed anyway (although this would be the case in the end). proved false since a baby, not 40 years old, was on the list of those killed that day.” Mastracci argued that exaggeration was necessary because “whatever brutality Israel had planned would require something particularly egregious to achieve to justify them.”

But the alleged infanticide would never have served its purpose if it had not been offered by gullible and even guilty journalists. “I saw the severed heads of babies and children,” he wrote Toronto Sun Columnist Warren Kinsella after claiming to have watched a video of the massacre last November. “I’ve seen babies with bullet holes in them. I saw babies and children burned until only the outlines of their little bodies could be seen, their arms reaching out to God.” The first indication that this might be propaganda came from the use of a such emotional language. “I saw a girl, maybe six or seven years old, whose tiny body was covered in blood and dirt,” Kinsella continued. “She was wearing Mickey Mouse pajamas. There was the body of another girl, even younger. She was still wearing a summer dress with blue butterflies on it. Her hands were arranged across her chest, like little broken pieces of porcelain.”

Mastracci noted that the story came from Israeli soldiers and officials who told it “to a gullible or willing Israeli journalist who reported it as fact. From there it spread widely.” The maple listed the publications that reported this as fact in Canadian newspapers, based on Mastracci’s content analysis of the Canadian Newsstream database.

At least that one Toronto Star According to Mastracci, it corrected two opinion pieces it published last October, adding a note to the columns that “reports of Hamas beheading babies have not been confirmed.” The Globe and mail and newspapers in the Postmedia Network chain left their reports uncorrected, and Mastracci said writers and editors at the newspapers but one did not respond to his request for comment. A longtime paid political propagandist, Kinsella was once described by him as the “Prince of Darkness.” Maclean’sreplied colorfully. “I asked Kinsella whether he regrets helping to spread this narrative and whether he has taken steps to correct it,” Mastracci wrote. “He replied: ‘Fuck off, Holocaust denier.'”

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author living in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.