In late February, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a message to superiors shacked up in ritzy Qatari hotels, reminding them that “high civilian casualties [in Gaza] would add to the worldwide pressure on Israel to stop the war.”
Indeed, starting wars and then cowering behind civilians, churning out martyrs, lying about death tolls, and putting on low-budget Pallywood productions for credulous Western audiences is almost as old as Palestinian nationalism itself.
And for over seven months now, world leaders, American politicians, “experts,” and many establishment media figures have regurgitated the wholly unverified casualty numbers provided to them by a terror organization. It is a detestable abdication of duty that feeds the delusions of the far-left/Islamist alliance that’s infected college campuses, media organizations, and the U.S. government. Namely, it gives credibility to the “genocide” myth.
There are the usual offenders — United Nations, The Washington Post, The New York Times, MSNBC, and other organs of the left — but perhaps for the first time in history, the White House has also given these lies credence. In a Ramadan message to the Islamic world, Joe Biden repeated the fantastical claim that “[m]ore than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians, including thousands of children” by Israelis. Samantha Power, now administrator of USAID, made the same claim during National Arab American Heritage Month.
This is roughly the equivalent of using al-Qaeda propaganda in the middle of the invasion of Afghanistan or repeating Russian information in a Christmas message to Europe.
Last week, the United Nations
