OPINION:
Factual accounts of current events keep society on the narrow path of stability. Yet the temptation to distort fact beckons as a shortcut to achieving self-serving ends. The propaganda emerging from the Palestinians’ war on Israel resembles another recent brush with deception-induced social upheaval here at home.
The Oct. 7 attack on Israel from the Palestinian enclave of Gaza has inspired outbreaks of hatred unparalleled in modern times. These have not taken the form of Islamophobia; rather, they have been virulent displays of antisemitism.
Little has triggered more hostility toward Jews than news reports that the Israeli Defense Forces purportedly bombed a Gaza hospital. Headlines in influential publications, including The New York Times, dutifully published Palestinian officials’ claim that 500 innocents were killed by an Israeli bomb.
Within days, the damning charge faded as forensic evidence pointed to an errant Islamic Jihad rocket as the cause. But the disinformation genie was out of the bottle. The U.N. Security Council rejected a resolution condemning the Hamas terror attack on Israel, and hundreds of thousands waving Palestinian flags thronged streets in New York, London and other world metropolises. U.S. colleges have witnessed anti-Israel rallies, and a Cornell University engineering student was arrested for online threats to shoot and stab Jewish classmates on campus.
It’s hardly surprising that FBI Director Christopher Wray described the rise of antisemitism in jarring terms in a Senate hearing last week: “This is a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels.”
Americans have suffered their own recent encounter with propaganda-driven turmoil. Three years ago, fast-and-loose reporting portrayed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis as a racially driven police murder, which fueled nationwide rioting. Not even murders of innocents by the dozens and property destruction calculated in the billions could slow the conflagration of outrage that made the Black Lives Matter movement a phenomenon.
Nuance that was glossed over at the time provides a clearer picture now of the cause of Floyd’s death. An ongoing but unrelated lawsuit involving the Hennepin County, Minnesota, prosecutor’s office has opened a window into relevant conversations between a staff member and the county medical examiner who performed the Floyd autopsy:
“He called me later in the day on that Tuesday and he told me that there were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation,” a staffer recounted, according to court records.
That Floyd’s death was the result of the callous use of a police chokehold nevertheless became the dominant narrative. The victim’s health vulnerabilities resulting from drug use — unknowable to four officers on the scene — did little to spare them from conviction on criminal charges brought under “extreme pressure” placed upon prosecutors, as described in the lawsuit records. Persistent social discord reverberating from the case has plagued the nation since.
Palestinian propagandists, like U.S. race hustlers, distort facts to fashion a portrayal of monstrous injustice. Americans should remain wary of deception unleashed by those who seek to inflame the society in which they dwell. Reality matters.
