Social media can deceive but they can
IT IS fashionable to claim that the internet is a purveyor and spreader of fake news. This may be true in certain respects, but when it comes to Israel, I would argue the opposite is often the case.
Take one small example from April 2002, before Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had been invented, and the term “blog” was barely known.
That month, almost every British news outlet repeated the same lie, day after day, about events in the West Bank town of Jenin — and it was all but impossible for audiences to know the truth.
The Daily Telegraph reported the IDF had “stripped [the Palestinians] to their underwear, they were searched, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots to the head”. The Evening Standard spoke of Israel’s “staggering brutality and callous murder”. The Times’s Janine di Giovanni wrote: “Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.”
“We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide,” wrote a columnist for the Evening Standard.
These reports seem to have been based on the claims of a single individual: “Kamal Anis, a labourer” (the Times), “Kamal Anis, 28” (the Daily Telegraph), “A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis” (the Independent).
The Independent reported that: “Kamal Anis saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank.”
The Times wrote: “Kamal Anis says the Israelis levelled the place; he saw them pile bodies into a mass grave, dump earth on top, then ran over it to flatten it.”
The Western media claimed 500 Palestinian civilians had been killed, mostly in mass graves.
None of this was true. You only had A Palestinian hurls a rock at Israeli soldiers near Nablus in the West Bank