Fighting fake news about rape and the war in Gaza - opinion

How is the fake news about IDF soldiers raping Palestinian women connected to the real and horrific rape cases on October 7, to Amit Sousana's testimony, and to The New York Times' investigation? And what does it say about the unhinged state of mass media, about the ability to find the truth and broadcast it, and about Israeli public diplomacy?

The tweet posted earlier this week by the former CEO of Al Jazeera was, how shall we say, a bit strange - or at least unexpected. "It was revealed through Hamas' investigations that the story of the rape of Palestinian women in Shifa Hospital was fabricated. Of course, the enemy did not hesitate to commit the crime of genocide." Since when does anyone at Al Jazeera rush to clear IDF soldiers of any blame, even if it is fabricated?

Al Jazeera invests great efforts in masquerading as real journalism, despite being controlled by the Emir of Qatar - an autocratic state where freedom of expression is not exactly a guiding light, that supports Hamas and generously hosts its leaders. As part of this pretend journalism game, the former CEO became a "commentator" and also referred to the "testimony" of a Palestinian woman about a horrific case of a pregnant woman being raped in front of her family by IDF soldiers.

This story went viral on social media, but the "commentator" explained that "the woman who spoke about rape justified her exaggeration and incorrect talk by saying that the goal was to arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood! As if more than 30,000 martyrs, 90,000 wounded, about a million displaced people, and comprehensive destruction aren’t enough." In other words, the "commentator" signaled to his hundreds of millions of followers to drop the "rape" stories and focus on the "genocide".

Beyond the interesting glimpse into Al Jazeera's admirable journalism values, this story is still evidence. Evidence that even in the fake news era, where false information it is so easy to spread, lies tend to get tangled.

And that's exactly what happened with this specific lie: it simply over-succeeded. It was spread with the kind assistance of kooky progressives, who supposedly care about the values of humanity and journalism. One of them is Owen Jones, an Israel-hater who churns out commercial quantities of pro-Hamas rhetoric on social media and is given a respectable platform as an opinion writer in the British Guardian as well. That’s another part of the ludicrous imbalance of the current world we live in.

But this specific lie did so well that many Palestinians believed it and started fleeing southward, in direct contrast to Hamas' aim (Hamas wants them to return to the northern Gaza Strip). That is what led to the bizarre admission of the Al Jazeera "commentator," and this whole saga was just a small glimpse into the scraggly conduct of media around the war.

Total shock

Let's observe this harsh word - rape.

It is one of the most horrific things one human being can inflict on another. A profound desecration by penetration of the most intimate and sensitive flesh, often accompanied by severe violence. But even rape has degrees, and the level of sexual abuse that took place in Israel on October 7 is incomparable to the act of forced, non-consensual sex. It is comparable to crimes against humanity committed by ISIS against Yazidi women, of the militias in Rwanda against Tutsi women, and of women during the Armenian genocide in Turkey. It is being gang raped while dismembered, stabbed, shot and mutilated, and it is unthinkable and horrifying to the core.

Now, let's observe this harsh word, rape, in the context of public diplomacy. In the ability to convey to the world what happened here on October 7, and why there is no capacity to think that Israel can live alongside such a thing. All this in a world that seems to have gone mad, where fabricated facts and false narratives can be created with frightening ease.

Try to recall for a moment the total shock of October 7. Israel's recovery was slow and gradual. In the first few weeks, no one dared to speak about rape or the condition in which many of the murdered bodies were found. People were preoccupied with digesting the trauma, knowing only that civilians were abducted to Gaza but not their identities or the shocking number of bodies.

Foreign reporters were invited to the disaster areas only at the end of October, and headlines began to emerge. Hamas, whose barbaric militants documented the atrocities to boast about them on social media, began to deny that it had harmed civilians at all. The method was to behead infants, and once realizing it was bad for their image - to deny and blame Israel for lies. It made every Israeli understand how connected Hamas is to the international vibe.

Israel had to fight for the mere exposure of the rape atrocities. Women's organizations around the world remained silent, and Israeli feminist organizations found themselves in a “Me Too unless you're a Jew” campaign. It was only in mid-November that headlines worldwide reported that the Israeli authorities were investigating the rapes. Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, collaborated with Linor Abargil to raise an outcry at the first global conference on the issue in early December, a full two months after the massacre.

Thanks to the Times

It's a bit hard to compliment The New York Times on covering Israel, but The Times' investigation into Hamas' horrific acts of rape, published at the end of December, marked a milestone on the issue. One could even say that the way the Times documented and described the barbaric and methodical rape that characterized the October 7 attack was perhaps the most important investigation on the matter, at least until now.

It had a major impact. For young progressives that are not exactly experts on the psyche of the Middle East, it is easy to be drawn into unfitting narratives of "justice." They may find themselves justifying the massacre as a "response to the occupation" or "resistance to oppression," or naively think that Yahya Sinwar is similar to Nelson Mandela, as we saw on some US campuses.

The childish slogans of pro-Palestinian students claim that the oppressed can respond to oppression "by any means necessary”, but even they have their limits. When it came to the means of rape, many young people couldn’t argue that it is legitimate to rape in response to oppression. The boundary was crossed.

Therefore, it was precisely The Times' investigation, which went into the granular details of the systematic rape, based on interviews with more than 150 people, that made a difference. It was far from being the first to talk about Hamas' acts of rape on October 7, and even far from being the first anti-Israel media outlet to report on the phenomenon - and yet it was the deepest and most effective.

It was quoted and replicated in countless media outlets, creating a huge buzz on social media. It was also followed by a UN report by Pramila Patten, the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, which unequivocally stated that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence, including rape and gang rape occurred”, and found “clear and convincing” information that hostages in Gaza were (and still are) sexually abused. But as we said, we live in a world that seems to have gone mad, and in the face of the abundant evidence of Hamas' horrific rape, there were those who invested considerable efforts to deny it.

Al Jazeera is not alone

If you type the search terms "Hamas" and "rape" on Al Jazeera's website, the first headline you'll see will refer to the UN report, and it emphasizes that "the Palestinian group has consistently denied allegations its fighters committed acts of sexual violence during the October 7 attack." The second headline will refer to The Times' investigation, proclaiming its "unraveling" and “falling apart”.

But Al Jazeera is not alone. A pro-Hamas website called "Electronic Intifada" announced "Watch: New York Times' 'investigation' on Hamas' rape falls apart; weaponized story is a fraud, we debunk it." A site called Presstv declared “New York Times admits its Hamas rape story was fabricated," lamenting that it damaged the Palestinian resistance and the “Al-Aqsa Flood" operation.

The "debunkers" relied heavily on another "investigation" published on a fringe site called "Intercept," which gained some recognition as journalistically credible when initially established to publish Edward Snowden's documents. The site took a radically anti-Israel twist. Let's just say it's a bit odd for a respected investigative outlet to obsess about an investigation of brutal barbaric rape, rather than on the rape and those who committed it.

It accused the Times of being pro-Israeli, no less, after publishing other "investigations" attempting to undermine the credibility of Zaka workers' testimonies and claiming that The Times suppressed a podcast on the rape cases due to credibility issues. JNS defined it as engaging in “rape denialism” and “spinning an anti-Israel conspiracy without appearing to do so”.

"Intercept" targeted the central testimony in the Times investigation and the Israeli reporter who documented it. It found that the family of one of the murdered victims, whose disturbing body photographs became known as "The Woman in the Black Dress," did not know about the rape until the Times reporter contacted them. For Israelis, it is clear that many such cases occurred on October 7, whether because the shock and horror at the amount and state of the bodies prevented the identifiers from even thinking about creating rape kits, or because the authorities shielded the families. Some things are better to remain unknown, and many families were spared the need to identify the remains of their loved ones.

The Israeli reporter, documentarian Anat Schwartz, who joined the Times as a writer only after the war began, was targeted for “liking” a tweet by journalist David Verthaim, a liberal left-winger. On October 7, it's not surprising that Verthaim tweeted: "We need a disproportionate response. Let Israel show what it's hiding in the basement. If a hair falls from their heads (of the abducted, L.S) - execute security prisoners. Break every norm as a deterrent. We face human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules, including murder of medical teams and infants."

4,500 Israelis liked that tweet, one of them being Anat Schwartz. The "investigation" noted that she “liked” posts calling to turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse, and that she served in the IDF, God forbid.

Intifada in the newsroom

The Times summoned Schwartz for a hearing and has not published any more of her articles since, but stood by the details of the investigation. The only correction published was regarding the age of one of the witnesses - 26, not 24 as originally reported. But it’s hard not to wonder if the Times' top brass has already realized that the paper has been swept into the progressive whirlpool that it created itself.

It was reported that the "Intercept" investigations were based on internal leaks from within the Times. Newsroom personnel seem to have leaked the details and are now subject to an internal investigation.

During the months of the war, several damning articles about the mess in the Times newsroom broke out, the most prominent of which appeared in The Economist, under the headline "How The New York Times Lost Its Way." Over the course of 17,000 words, practically a small book, the former opinion editor detailed how he was dismissed three years ago for daring to publish an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas. An internal mutiny arose against him in the newsroom, by younger journalists who felt that Cotton's views “endangered their safety”.

Like other senior figures who have since left the Times with allegations that it has changed beyond recognition and no longer upholds the values of journalism, James Bennett wrote that the Times’ “problem has metastasized from liberal bias to illiberal bias… (infected by) pressures of intolerance and tribalism”. He explains the phenomenon as a response to fierce competition from digital media outlets that drew the young audience the Times craved, leading it to imitate their approach and even hire their staff.

The result, according to him, is opinion journalism. In other words - journalism that offers its readers an extremely narrow range of opinions, some of which are presented as news. But alongside this, The Times pretends that nothing has changed: "the paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial – and this misleads them".

According to reports in other media outlets, these opinion journalists are now staging an inside intifada, claiming The Times targeted them for their Middle-Eastern origin. This is what happens when the Times airs a thorough investigations that collides with their different perceptions of journalism. 

The "Free Press," a media outlet run by a journalist who left the Times under similar circumstances, wrote this week that “The problem for the Times is that many of its own staffers do not want to investigate the sexual violence that occurred on October 7. They see it as a vulnerability to their own side in the information war about Gaza. There are a huge number of people at the Times who are activists, and it is their job to tell a particular story… The precedent was set that this works. If it doesn’t work through one means, they will find another”.

The Difference Between Warfare and Barbarism

This week, another important interview aired in The Times and echoed loud. Unlike Al Jazeera's fake news, this was the story of released captive Amit Sousana, who suffered real sexual assaults, violence, and torture. It's interesting to see the twisted path that truth has to take in order to emerge from all the noise surrounding us, some of it focused primarily on obscuring the truth. This happens with domestic Israeli issues as well as with the way the world sees us, and this article was just a summary of only one topic - the documentation of rape on October 7 as of today - with all its crazy implications.

Within all this frenzy, can any conclusions be drawn at all? 

One conclusion is that Israel must invest tremendous efforts in continuing to document and amplify the nature of the October 7 attack, which Hamas, Iran, and Al Jazeera would like to see forgotten. It is particularly important to focus on the horrific acts of rape, as they demonstrate in the clearest way the difference between legitimate warfare, regardless of its cause, and inhuman barbarism that has no place in the world.

And the Times? It would do well to pause from judging events on the outside and look inward for a moment. How is it possible that a reporter is scrutinized over liking a tweet, while a photographer suspected of a planned entry into Israel alongside Hamas militants on October 7 received unequivocal public support? The Times has indeed lost its way, even though it is still capable of producing good journalism amidst all this chaos. But if it does not strive to restore basic journalistic principles to its newsroom, over time it may become just another social network that suppresses the truth and serves entities like Hamas.

The New York Times said that “Ms. Schwartz was part of a rigorous reporting and editing process. She made valuable contributions and we saw no evidence of bias in her work. But as we have said, her ‘likes’ of offensive and opinionated social media posts, predating her work with us, are unacceptable.” It also said that “the reference to a photographer ‘suspected of planned entry into Israel alongside Hamas militants’ is flatly false”, and that “no one in our newsroom or company has been or will be scrutinized because of ethnic or national origin”.