Mick Hartley

A powerful piece from Liel Leibowitz in Tablet:

It is no coincidence that Hamas brazenly chose to publish photographs of the skeletal Jewish prisoners it is deliberately starving in its war tunnels after a week of successfully marketing its blood libel about how the IDF is starving Gazans. If you’ve ever seen a Mafia movie, you already know the trick. Having groomed a new recruit for months, the mobsters have one final test: whack a guy, rob a joint, shoot up an innocent girl with heroin, do something so blatantly immoral and evil that it will tie you down to a life of crime forever. Once you’ve crossed the bright line into blatant immorality, in front of witnesses, on what basis will you object to the boss’s next order?

Hamas is now doing the same thing, with Western liberals in the role of the new recruits. For weeks, the terrorist group passed off photographs of people suffering from genetic disorders as evidence of Israeli cruelty; at the same time, it prevented ample aid supplies from reaching those very people by hijacking more than 90 percent of U.N. aid trucks, selling family aid packages—which enter Gaza for free—at insane markups, and shooting into crowds of people trying to access aid provided by a U.S.-backed humanitarian consortium. None of these tactics is new or in the least bit original to the current Gaza war. What’s new is how brazenly Hamas is doing it, and how avidly European presidents, editors, intellectuals, activists, and even some Jews are closing their eyes and ears and going along for the ride, parroting the Hamas propaganda line like toddlers.

Which is precisely what Hamas was counting on. The point of the starvation photographs wasn’t to prove anything; to the contrary, the evidence that the photographs did not show children suffering from a lack of food was right there in the picture frame, in the form of the well-fed-looking mothers and other relatives. It doesn’t take any special feat of research or in-depth knowledge of conditions on the ground in Gaza or acquaintance with the medical literature on starvation to know that mothers feed their children first. That’s why in pictures from actual famines—of which there are unfortunately many thousands of examples in the photo departments of every big-city newspaper and major magazine on the planet—you see skeletal mothers along with skeletal babies. Not in Gaza, though.

That’s because the point of the photographs was to provide onlookers with a fig leaf of an excuse to embrace the narrative of a terrorist organization whose aims are, in fact, openly genocidal—and which had done its best to live up to its promises by shooting, gang-raping, and stabbing thousands of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, setting entire families on fire in their homes, and live-streaming the proceedings, before dragging off more than 250 captives to their internationally sponsored dungeons in Gaza, to be beaten, tortured, and starved. It’s no contest. Hamas makes the Mafia look like choirboys….

Worth reading in full.