Hamas lie that ‘the Jews did this’ spread around the world

In an episode of the drama “House M.D.,” the patient at the center of the medical mystery is a brilliant physicist who has intentionally made himself dumber.

He takes a careful mix of the drug dextromethorphan and alcohol every day, which lowers his IQ — but only while under the influence of the cocktail.

He does this because he finds it less stressful and less lonely to live in ignorant bliss.

The Gaza discourse is filled with such people.

Over the weekend the journalist David Collier revealed that the Palestinian child who’d been used by nearly every major news organization as the living representation of the mass starvation of Gazan children was in fact suffering from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, plus apparently a genetic disorder.

The ubiquitous image of the boy’s skeletal frame in his mother’s arms is indeed heartbreaking.

Terribly sad as well is the fact that the boy is now fatherless.

But it does not appear to be the case that, as has been reported, the boy’s father was killed by the IDF while looking for food.

Videos and contemporaneous reports strongly suggest the father was killed while looking for Israeli soldiers to engage in battle.

Many scenes of urban warfare are deeply tragic, and Gaza is no different.

Where Gaza is different is in the desire by global information institutions to lie about what specifically is creating those scenes, and for otherwise intelligent people to embrace those lies, because it’s less stressful and less lonely to live in an online world where the Israelis are always monsters and the truth is treated as a distraction.

A baby starving to death whose father was shot by Israelis while searching for food for his suffering child: It’s the kind of story that so completely flatters a certain worldview that the holders of that worldview ought to treat it with respectful skepticism.

Again, the child’s suffering is real and tragic.

But it was not deemed useful, and so it was falsified in service to The Cause.

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One can forgive the desperation of a parent; one cannot forgive a journalist or a “humanitarian” NGO official who finds it easier to join the mob than to be honest.

Lying about famine in Gaza is a tactic that Hamas and its useful idiots have used repeatedly, because the truth is disadvantageous to Hamas’ war and propaganda machines.

And the truth is that there are real concerns about possible near-term hunger and malnutrition in Gaza because Hamas steals aid, hoards food and medicine away from civilians, and punishes dissent.

Hamas behind the pain

The truth, then, is that Hamas has engineered real suffering in Gaza, and the lie — that Israel is intentionally starving children — enables Hamas to engineer more suffering by creating global pressure on Israel to let Hamas control the aid again.

That way Hamas can keep the cycle going.

And so it matters who is at fault. Since being fooled by Hamas propaganda at this point requires a degree of self-lobotomizing, converts to the cult of Hamas can get quite defensive about it online.

Those of us who have praised Collier or amplified his investigation get criticized for our callous insistence on the truth.

Why, I have been asked, should we quibble over the cause of this poor child’s suffering?

Does it really matter if the Jews are being falsely accused if it raises awareness to the plight of sick Gazans?

That is like asking why we take pains to ensure we convict the real perpetrator of any crime.

Why are juries so preoccupied with the concepts of guilt and innocence?

It’s a preposterous question.

Riles up the loonies

And anyway we know precisely why it matters, and so does the questioner.

It matters because pro-Palestinian advocates read stories like this and then take it upon themselves to avenge the injustice.

It matters because this kind of libel has inspired murderous lunatics to burn an 82-year-old woman alive and to gun down people at the Capital Jewish Museum in broad daylight and it has inspired pogroms in Russia and Amsterdam and assassination attempts on a Jewish governor and his wife and children during the holiday of Passover and an almost incomprehensible number of similarly motivated violence and attempted violence pretty much everywhere there are Jews in the past year.

Antisemitism on rise

Go ahead: Close your eyes, spin the globe, and wherever your finger is pointing when it stops will be a place with a likely unprecedented explosion of antisemitic activity.

But of course that’s the reason the photo of the Palestinian child was published and shared everywhere in the first place.

And it’s the reason the next one will be shared, and the one after that, and the one after that.

Pointing to a suffering child and saying “the Jews did this” when in fact the Jews did no such thing is an intentional act.

At the end of the “House” episode, the dextro fiend doesn’t get clean.

He finds it easier to live life as a coward.

Considering the number of people who are insisting that the truth of a story doesn’t matter, he’s right about that being the less lonely way to live.

Reprinted with permission from Commentary.