My mother used to tell a story about how when she was in college, she believed that she had a professor who liked her so much that her papers were never checked, but just given an “A” automatically. Of course, that’s a better problem than a teacher automatically failing a student without looking at their work, but it bothered her all the same.
To prove it, one day she submitted a paper having inserted a full typewritten page from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” in the middle. The teacher didn’t look, and my mother got an A.
I learned from this experience, and from my parents in general, the importance of personal integrity. I apply that to all facets of my life, and I measure others by theirs, or lack thereof. As I age, I see and am more critical of others falling short of my standard, but especially those in positions of public influence and trust.
No more glaring example exists today than the media, the polarization of which would make Walter Cronkite turn in his grave. And no more glaring example of lack of integrity in the media exists than when it comes to Israel. One could get a PhD in that without having to work very hard, but recently we have seen that in spades.
There’s hardly a media outlet that didn’t plaster images and reports of allegedly starving Palestinian Arab children from Gaza going viral at the speed of light globally before being debunked and proven that the children in the images were suffering from a congenital illness that had nothing to do with allegations of “famine” in Gaza. Corrections barely made the light of day.
One has to ask if there were, in fact, starvation and famine, and increased death tolls reported by Hamas due to these, why would they need to use fake images? Where are the pictures of the real starving children? Yet media outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, Guardian, Sky News, just to name a few of those in English, didn’t hesitate to use these without checking a single fact, or the source of the “reports.” My mother, who was a talented writer, would be screaming over the lack of integrity in this poor excuse for journalism.
Another fake image that made it to the cover of Time Magazine (still publishing and trying to stay relevant), entitled “The Gaza Tragedy,” showed a photo of Gazan children holding empty pots and buckets. Without any words, Time depicted either: A. starving children, or B. that they had just dropped off their laundry. The intent of the photo was to depict starvation, and just like my mother’s teacher, nobody needed to turn a page before their opinion was cast. But the truth was a vulgar form of child abuse not seen since Hamas began using women and children as human shields. Now they are the best supporting actresses.
But that image was not only determined to be a fake, it was staged. It’s the world’s first Fake Famine. Subsequent pictures have surfaced by photographer Anas Zayed Fteiha, capturing the shot. All part of the lies of what’s become Pallywood, a key element of the propaganda arm of Hamas and others who will not only use every opportunity to criticize Israel for anything, but they will even fake it for the gullible media rushing to publish it. Their readers and viewers lap it up. There is even a video showing happy, well-fed Gazan children being used as extras in a gruesome, phony reality show. But it was all staged. Fake.
One could imagine the scene remade today with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal from “When Harry Met Sally,” where she (the media) fakes it so well that he (the public) cannot tell the difference between what is real and fake.
The German-language papers, BILD and Süddeutsche Zeitung, are the rare media exception. They not only caught and called out the journalistic fraud, essentially saying they will be ‘having none of what the rest of the media is having,’ but they even cut ties with and will not use the Palestinian Arab photographer Fteiha.
The same week the media was gleefully faking stories for the whole world, Hamas released videos of two Israeli hostages in Gaza who are literally starving to death. Footage shows skin-and-bones Evityar David digging his own grave, and an emaciated Rom Braslavski breaking down—images that have gone viral among those who care. These videos, filmed and released by Hamas itself, prove beyond any reasonable doubt the group’s atrocities and inhumanity. The real outrage is that the world’s media, so eager to push fabricated narratives, barely reports on this genuine starvation and the fact that Hamas openly documents its own crimes—no fake pictures required.
It doesn’t take a Pulitzer Prize winner to connect the dots between the fantasy of Carroll’s “Alice” and the Palestinian fantasy where anything, no matter how ridiculous, is accepted as reality.
Prophetically, Lewis Carroll penned words 150 years ago that could just as easily describe Gaza and the so-called “Fake Famine.” His line, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality,” fits all too well with Hamas’s propaganda playbook. Carroll even conjured a scene that, in another context, feels eerily familiar: terrorists sitting at breakfast—pita in hummus—declaring, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
As a writer himself, Carroll understood what the media would do in the voice of his character, the Queen of Hearts. “No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
Between Alice, Harry and Sally, and Hamas, the world is filled with lots of fakes. The problem is that the media that races down the dark rabbit hole to publish defamatory, libelous images depicting a Fake Famine in Gaza should at least try to hold itself up to a standard that has the appearance of objectivity. There should be an effort to scrutinize reports and images before rushing to publish them, as well as question the sources. Objectivity requires covering all angles of a story, including, in this case, the images and condition of the 50 hostages Hamas has in captivity. This is not only an actual atrocity, but there’s even a parallel between alleged and actual starvation.
Barring actual fairness and objectivity, those who value truth and integrity should figuratively apply the Queen of Hearts’ verdict—“Off with their heads”—to the way we consume most news.
