There is a quote that is often attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
From early on after the October 7 massacre, leftist and left-leaning organizations have attempted to frame the conflict as an Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group co-founded by William Kunstler, declared the war a genocide within a week and a half of the instigating incident.
October 7 was a clear casus belli. To rape and pillage a people and to break a fragile period of relative peace and not expect retaliation is patently absurd. Hamas, in many respects, made a calculated, considered decision. They understood that there would be a massive backlash from Israel in the form of intense military action. They counted on it. The consideration wasn’t the welfare of the people, the innocents of Gaza, but doing as much damage as they could to puncture the enemy, consequences be damned.
And what did the Hamas attack exactly accomplish? They have come no closer to their stated intent of liberating the territory from Israeli control. On the contrary, it has led to the virtual annihilation of Gaza.
Social media is a new battleground
But that is not the going narrative online. To express the culpability of Hamas online is to run into the keyboard warriors that dominate the air on many social media platforms, the public square of our time.
Many times, they are content with simply branding someone a “genocide supporter” or other denigrating phrases not suitable for publication.
Last year, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism found that posts related to antisemitism, Israel, and the Jewish experience increased by 51%, reaching over one billion mentions for the first time.
This also correlated with a massive spike in the promulgation of old conspiratorial tropes. “Conspiratorial content saw a notable rise, with mentions of phrases like ‘Jewish control’ increasing by 95%, ‘Jewish lobby’ by 334%, and ‘Jewish supremacy’ by 199%,” the report stated.
Propaganda has never been so widely and quickly disseminated. Social media is littered with Holocaust denial and inversion, a double insult of weaponizing our history against us and belittling what we went through. Antisemitism masked as anti-Zionism has run rampant in the streets. And there has been quite a consequential real-world impact.
Just last week, a pro-Palestinian activist killed two Israeli embassy staff members outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington. The shooter held a red keffiyeh, yelling, “Free, free Palestine.” After he was arrested, he stated that he did it for Gaza. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the young couple that was murdered, had just come from an event aimed at bridge-building.
In a piece in the Atlantic, author and antisemitism scholar Dara Horn noted the proliferation of “fact-resistant slogans that demonize Jews” within the United States that have sprung up in the wake of October 7.
This type of rhetoric, which Horn says is “recycled from medieval blood libels and KGB talking points,” has echoed in our history many times before.
As Horn put it: “As we are repeatedly reminded, today’s chanting and targeting and harassing and ostracizing of American Jews is nothing at all like that, because we all agree that antisemitism is bad. The mobs pushing Jews out of public spaces in 2024 are in no way similar to the mobs pushing Jews out of public spaces in 1935, or 1919, or 1492, or 1096, or 135. This time, you see, the Jews deserve it.”
There is a wide gulf between what Israelis see and what others outside the country see. Our feeds polarize us. We live online in ideological bubbles, where the algorithms reward conflict. We have forgotten about the power of dialogue and discussion.
October 7 unleashed a groundswell of hatred and animosity towards Jews and Israelis online, on campuses, seemingly everywhere. Hamas might have achieved a Pyrrhic victory there, but it’s no achievement to be proud of.
Israel is at a perilous time in its history. Never has its image in the public consciousness been so maligned, its actions never more scrutinized. It is imperative that, as the Jewish state, the representatives of Israel recognize the dangers that Jews worldwide face.
Jesus Christ is King
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