Constant Lying About Gaza Makes It Hard to Know What’s Happening in Gaza
Though legacy media credibility is a confirmed casualty
Assume a humanitarian tragedy — this is a pure hypothetical, I’ll talk about how much it applies to Gaza in a minute. Your goal is to alert people to the tragedy. Should you:
A) Relate the facts as you know them, holding yourself to the highest possible standards of honesty and objectivity so that your account is credible. Or…
B) Constantly lie, exaggerate, and misrepresent the situation until no thinking person believes anything you say.
When it comes to Gaza, many people have chosen “B”. Their latest Highly Visible, Credibility-Incinerating Fuckup involves the International Association of Genocide Scholars. If you’re thinking “I’ve never heard of the International Association of Genocide Scholars,” don’t worry — that’s the correct answer. Nobody had heard of the group before Monday,1 at which point their declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza got reported in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NPR, Reuters, the AP, the BBC, The Guardian, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and countless other publications. But it seems that not one single person at any of those news organizations bothered to google “What in heavenly fuck is the International Association of Genocide Scholars?”
But someone at The Free Press DID google it, and now there’s a major scandal. Because it turns out that for the very reasonable price of $30, any dickweed can join the International Association of Genocide Scholars. And many-a-dickweed has now done exactly that; in the wake of the Free Press story, people signed up their dog, Cookie Monster, Emperor Palpatine, and Hitler — all of those figures were, for a brief time,2 International Genocide Scholars. And some of the non-joke scholars were kind of a joke, like activist Nidal Jboor, who recently called the “freedom fighters” of Gaza “heroes”. The Free Press says that 80 of the group’s 500 members are listed as being based in Iraq, which is odd, since nobody has ever called Baghdad “Boston on the Tigris”. The group seems to basically be a bunch of randos who gave themselves a distinguished-sounding name, which reminds me of this Clickhole headline: