#propaganda war

Useful Idiots: The westerners helping Hamas win the propaganda war

By Tom Gross

The Spectator

October 23, 2025

https://www.spectator.co.uk/.../the-westerners-helping.../

https://www.spectator.com.au/.../the-westerners-helping.../

After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield Hamas can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now. The terror group has survived and is once again exerting control. In the areas of Gaza under its authority, public executions, whippings, stonings and kneecappings have returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas executed at least 100 Gazans.

Hamas survival was achieved not only through its remaining fighters and its holding of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of Western apologists. A coalition of so-called progressives and professional activists has excused, rationalised and defended the group’s actions across universities and in newspaper editorials. The BBC, Sky, Guardian, FT and New York Times have all parroted Hamas talking points.

Tales of impending famine in Gaza, for instance, were broadcast as fact, sourced from UN bureaucrats and ‘aid agencies’ with long records of anti-Israel bias and, in some cases, open sympathy for Hamas. This isn’t journalism: it’s agenda-driven activism disguised as news. What the BBC and others failed to grasp is that, for Hamas, the western media is the battlefield – no less important to its survival than its rockets and tunnels.

While Israel was forced into a military campaign to protect its citizens, Hamas launched a far more cynical war, sacrificing Palestinians by firing rockets from dense civilian areas and daring Israel to respond. Their aim was to trigger international pressure for a ceasefire so as to restore the flow of weapons for their operations.

From the outset, even before Israeli troops had entered Gaza, Hamas’s operatives and sympathisers in the West were shouting about ‘genocide’ and ‘famine’. It was a propaganda trap – and the western media walked right into it.

Consider, for example, these headlines from the early weeks of the conflict in 2023:

* 11 October: Fuel in Gaza will run out in 48 hours

* 15 October: Fuel in Gaza will run out in 48 hours

* 30 October: Fuel in Gaza will run out in 48 hours

* 6 November: Fuel in Gaza will run out in 48 hours

The pattern speaks for itself. It’s been the same story with Gaza being ‘on the brink of famine’ for the last two years. This is how it works:

* Step one: The Hamas ‘health ministry’ makes up a casualty number which could be debunked by the most cursory statistical analysis;

* Step two: Aid organisations repeat the Hamas figures without independent confirmation;

* Step three: UN agencies in Gaza (some staffed by Hamas members) cite the aid organisations;

* Step four: Media outlets quote the UN agencies;

* Step five: Hamas’s supporters in the West claim the numbers are ‘UN verified’.

UN officials have also contributed to the fiction directly. In May, Tom Fletcher, a humanitarian coordinator for the organisation, told BBC Radio 4: ‘There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.’ Almost no babies died as a result of the war in the following days. But that didn’t stop the BBC running the claim in bulletins and news outlets around the world repeating it, citing the BBC as a reliable source.

The Hamas narrative has been amplified, too, by disinformation campaigns driven by Iranian, Russian, and Chinese state-linked bots on social media, which have exploited Gaza as a means of destabilising western societies. These regimes understood how easily such narratives could tap into a pre-existing willingness among many in the West to believe anti-Semitic libels.

This tactic isn’t new. The Tsarist secret police famously forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to incite anti-Semitism, and the Soviet KGB spread anti-Zionist propaganda into western media and academia during the Cold War.

In the Middle Ages, pogroms were fuelled by fabricated claims of Jews killing Gentile babies. Today, similar falsehoods are disseminated by journalists, academics and UN officials – cloaked in the language of human rights but echoing ancient prejudices.

Why were Hamas’s inflated casualty figures reported as facts? Why were incorrect claims of Israel bombing hospitals repeated without scrutiny – while confirmed cases of Hamas rockets hitting Israeli hospitals in Ashkelon and Beersheba were ignored?

In part, this was down to journalistic complacency. The facts were accessible. Thousands of authentic Palestinian social media accounts from Gaza showed everyday life continuing, with cafés, restaurants, supermarkets, even beauty salons all operating, contrary to claims of complete destitution.

Independent researchers discovered that some of the most widely shared images of ‘starvation in Gaza’ were from Yemen. One prominent photo showing a skeletal child was highlighted by the media as evidence of famine. In reality, the child wasn’t malnourished due to famine. He had cerebral palsy, hypoxemia and other genetic conditions. The image was cynically cropped to hide his healthy siblings. Its source? An Islamist outlet in Turkey.

That didn’t prevent the Guardian, the Times and the New York Times running it, unchallenged, at the top of on their front pages, inflaming the emotions of millions of readers. The New York Times later slipped in a discreet correction, but by then the damage was done. Despite its substantial resources, the much-touted BBC Verify unit missed many of these falsehoods.

There has, of course, been great suffering in Gaza, as in any war. But that doesn’t justify using cropped photos, fake stats and Hamas-supplied images to condemn Israelis as child murderers.

The good news? Large swathes of the British public aren’t buying it. Scroll through the reader comments under articles about Israel, and you’ll find thousands of ordinary people who haven’t lost their critical faculties. They know casualty figures from terrorist regimes aren’t a sacred truth. They can spot propaganda when they see it.

Unlike some intellectuals, they don’t lose all logic the moment the word ‘Israel’ is uttered. As George Orwell once quipped: ‘You must be an intellectual. Only an intellectual could believe something quite so stupid.’ Today, he might have aimed that line at Guardian readers or BBC news staff.

In this war, it is not Israel or even Hamas who has lost its purpose, but the media.

(Tom Gross is former Middle East correspondent for the London Telegraph and New York Daily News)

***

See also:

Doctored and misleadingly cropped famine photos from Gaza reproduced by leading world media

I'm sorry, was the live footage of missile strikes killing real people and the stolen pop culture clips and music the more ethical option for you?

Is Iran supposed to commission Sony Studios to make this while they are being bombed by the US and Israel?

I don't support the use of AI for much of anything when we live in a country that has the wealth and luxury of being highly isolated from hostile neighbors to afford the time and labor to make entertainment.

I support the use of sensationalizing and trivializing the lives of real human beings even less. I shared it as a means of providing historical context to the conflict with Iran as well as highlighting the propaganda war being waged between the US government and Iran.

First, it is quite clear that there are those in Gaza who know how to make extensive use of the networks and social media for the purposes of emotional extortion and also false propaganda, exactly like they live-streamed the October 7 massacre and somehow turned it into “justified resistance”, they use quite a few Western buzzwords such as “genocide”, “occupation”, “oppression” and “Zionism”- and this is the simplest way to distinguish between Hamas propaganda posts and authentic people in Gaza, whom I’ve known all my life, who use much simpler words and not this indoctrinated manipulation bullshit.

I was looking for THESE authentic people - the real voices. And I think I found a few.

So first of all, what do I think there is NOT happening in Gaza? There is no genocide and no famine.

Yes, there is quite a lot of suffering, shortages in some places and lack of decent shelter etc. And there’s a lot of cynical exploitation of it for propaganda purposes. I’m saying it because you can see children are getting payed for it, you can see the absolute control of distribution and you can see how basic needs and the way out is blocked with money- Israel is not taking money for any of it, the West is sending free aid, so the money is demanded by those who want to control the suffering and use it.

You should know, that before the war - there was already quite a lot of very poor population in Gaza, but now the economic difficulty has greatly increased for two main reasons: one, the war damaged many sources of livelihood and the second - a major source of livelihood was working in Israel and this option was closed for a long time now, since October 7, and is now much less operational.

So in fact the main source of income is donations and funding from Hamas for control purposes of course.

This is how, among other things, Hamas uses the population to "work for them", and also to smile or cry for the cameras on demand.

Now on the issue of claimed famine- famine is when there’s NO food and water, enough for the population. As I said, my personal conclusion is that there is no shortage of food and water in Gaza at all.

The problem is that the food is not distributed equally, it is controlled by those who are powerful (usually Hamas operatives) and then sold at high costs to the population without them having sources of livelihood.

Food that should be distributed for #free is actually sold at a high price, the shelter tents are also paid for and the exit from Gaza is particularly expensive (5000$ that are paid to the transporters).

There are quite a few who refer to Gaza as a "prison" but Gaza is not a prison, Hamas has simply created a situation where it is very expensive to leave it - and thus the poor and the new poor are completely dependent on Hamas and other clans (Hamulas) in everything to do with food, shelter and exit, and they play with them as pawns.

If Gaza is a prison - then it’s because Hamas are imprisoning it.

All the suffering in Gaza started because of #Hamas it continues and increases because of #Hamas, but the main point is that #Hamas is also the one factor that can stop it.

If Hamas surrendered unconditionally and released the Israeli hostages, as done in any war in which you are forced to admit defeat - they would truly liberate Palestine. Remember- this is a war that #Hamas started, a war that on Oct. 7 was celebrated in the streets of Gaza.

But #Hamas prefers to keep the Palestinians captive so that it can showcase suffering (which they create) and use it as a tool for financial donations, manipulation of the West and a messianic jihadist war that will never end for them.

Колхоз атакует: Лукашенко назвал Украину «бывшей УССР» и жахнул в диктаторский памперс

(The collective farm attacks: Lukashenko called Ukraine "the former Ukrainian SSR" and  filled up his dictatorial diaper)

Самый сок 2

Тем самым, он пытается подыграть Путину, который тоже любит порассуждать об истории, а вернее, рассказывать всякие фантастические истории о прошлых делах. Правда, с фантазией у Путина и его холуев – не очень и постоянно получается унылое Г, которое настолько слабо слеплено, что разваливается в тот момент, как Путин это выкладывает. Автор: anti-colorados 

(So, he is trying to play along with Putin, who also loves to speculate about history, or rather, tell all sorts of fantastic stories about past affairs. True, with imagination, Putin and his lackeys - not very efficient, and they constantly creating a boring BS. It is so weakly fixed together that falls apart instantly at the moment, when Putin spreads it.... )

by Seth Mandel

The propaganda debate over the war is reminiscent of MSNBC’s Joy Reid once explaining that “The enemy of the far-right, in their own words, are Antifa, meaning anti-fascist. So, they are anti-anti-fascist by their own reckoning.” If you oppose a group called anti-fascist, you are a fascist. Magnify this galactic stupidity by a thousand and you have something like what Israel is facing in the international media.

What if we call the Hamas government’s police forces the “Gaza civil police”? Then the UN can argue its trucks are being guarded by legions of people like Dwight from The Office, who boasted of his status as a Lackawanna County volunteer sheriff’s deputy.

And where do you go when you need some solid medical or hospital information? May I suggest the Gaza Health Ministry? The ministry is not affiliated with Hamas because, as you can see, the word Hamas appears nowhere in its name.