On Wednesday, Tal Heinrich, a spokeswoman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, said that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated”. The perpetrators were Hamas.
The next day, US President Joe Biden repeated the story. He said, ‘I have been doing this a long time, I never really thought that I would see… have confirmed pictures of terrorist beheading children’.
Immediately the story went around the world’s media.
Yet it was a blatant lie. On Thursday, CNN the US news outlet was forced to issue a statement that neither they nor the US President had seen any evidence to support their claim.
There were two purposes to the lie.
First, to justify the ‘righteous revenge’ of the Israelis. The people of Gaza who voted for Hamas had to be so thoroughly punished that gruesome deeds would never happen again.
As a result, hundreds of Gazan children have already died under bombed apartment blocks. The Western media does not name them – they become the invisible ‘collateral damage’.
Second, to present opponents of colonialism as savages. It is a familiar device used by the French in Algeria and the British when they denounced the ‘Mau Mau’ in Kenya.
Today, Israel repeats the old colonial story. They, so their story goes, fight according to the civilised ‘rules of war’. The anti-colonial resistance resorts to savagery. Hence the equation of Hamas and Isis and the beheading of babies.
Truth is the first casualty of war.
In the coming days think twice before swallowing Israeli lies and the hand ringing of the Western leaders who ‘regret’ civilian casualties while giving full backing to Israel.