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Reports of beheaded Israeli babies were bound to be propaganda
Anyone who has studied the history of propaganda must have rolled their eyes as I did upon hearing reports of babies being beheaded by Hamas militants after their incursion into Israel a year ago. History has repeatedly shown that such reports are inevitably fabricated or at least wildly exaggerated in order to influence public opinion in favour of war, which is why they should always be doubted, if not disregarded. Pediatric propaganda has a long history dating back more than a century to the First World War, when German troops were accused of bayoneting Belgian babies. The Times of London even published the second-hand account of one man who said he witnessed German soldiers “chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s skirts.” France’s propaganda office offered up a phony photograph of the handless baby that was printed in the French newspaper La Rive Rouge, while other French media published a drawing of German troops supposedly eating the dead baby’s hands.
These atrocity tales were used to great effect in drawing the US into the conflict, which tipped the balance between the deadlocked sides. The well-organized American information effort, which enlisted some of the era’s most notable journalists, is widely regarded as the first modern propaganda campaign. It was so successful in reversing the country’s ardent isolationism into a rabid interventionism that its plot has been closely followed ever since. The bayoneted babies story was doubtless made up, as Phillip Knightley noted in his classic 1975 book The First Casualty, despite having been included in the UK’s infamous 1915 Bryce Commission report. It was based on written depositions supposedly taken by British lawyers from 1,200 unsworn and anonymous Belgian refugees that then mysteriously vanished. A post-war Belgian investigation, added Knightley, failed to corroborate a single atrocity tale in the Bryce Commission report.
A more recent example of babies being offered up on the altar of wartime propaganda came after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. While most Americans opposed military intervention to restore the Kuwaiti royal family, which had fled to Saudi Arabia, an atrocity tale soon changed that. “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns,” sobbed one 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to a US Congressional committee. Identified only as Nayirah, supposedly for the safety of her family, she testified that the soldiers “took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.” The United Nations Security Council heard from a man who testified under the false name of Dr. Issah Ibraham. “The hardest thing was burying the babies,” he said. “Under my supervision, 120 newborn babies were buried in the second week of the invasion. I myself buried 40 newborn babies that had been taken from their incubators by soldiers.” The use of force to liberate Kuwait was soon authorized by both the UN and US, which led the 1991 invasion known as Operation Desert Storm.
The New York Times revealed in early 1992 that Nayirah was a daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. The CBC’s newsmagazine The Fifth Estate chronicled later that year how the story was fabricated by the infamous PR firm Hill + Knowlton, which was paid more than US$10 million by the Kuwaiti royal family to promote the invasion.
Baby propaganda is also notably central to the antisemitic “blood libel” which for centuries has claimed that Jews commit ritual murder of abducted Christian infants and use their blood in sacrificial rites or the baking of unleavened bread consumed during Passover. Anti-Jewish propaganda and paranoia based on the blood libel even resulted in the expulsion of Jews from England by King Edward in 1290.
That’s why alarm bells should have started going off when tales began emerging from Gaza soon after the October 7 attack last year that Hamas fighters had decapitated and/or burned alive 40 Israeli babies. “Those critical of Israel immediately doubted the claim for a variety of reasons,” noted Davide Mastracci in The Maple on the attack’s anniversary. “As it became increasingly clear that the story was a hoax, those who had initially believed it protested that it didn’t exactly matter if the babies were beheaded or burned alive, because they had been killed anyways (though this would also end up being proven false, with one baby, not 40, included among lists of those killed that day).” Mastracci reasoned that exaggeration was required because “whatever brutality Israel had planned needed something particularly egregious to help justify it.”
Yet the supposed infanticide would never have served its purpose had it not been offered up by credulous and even culpable journalists. “I saw the decapitated heads of babies and children,” wrote Toronto Sun columnist Warren Kinsella after claiming to have watched video of the massacre last November. “I saw babies with bullet holes in them. I saw babies and children who had been burned until all that you could see was the outline of their little bodies, arms reaching up to God.” The first clue that this might be propaganda came in his use of such emotive language. “I saw a girl, perhaps six or seven, her tiny frame covered in blood and dirt,” Kinsella continued. “She was wearing Mickey Mouse pyjamas. There was the body of another girl, even younger. She was still in a sun dress with blue butterflies on it. Her hands were arrayed across her chest, like little broken pieces of china.”
Mastracci noted that the story originated with Israeli soldiers and officials who told it to “a gullible or willing Israeli journalist who reported it as fact. From there, it spread widely.” The Maple listed the publications that reported it as fact in Canadian newspapers based on Mastracci’s content analysis of the Canadian Newsstream database.
At least the Toronto Star corrected two opinion pieces it published last October, according to Mastracci, adding a note to the columns saying that “reports of babies being decapitated by Hamas haven’t been confirmed.” The Globe and Mail and newspapers of the Postmedia Network chain have left their reports uncorrected, and Mastracci said writers and editors at the newspapers did not respond to his request for comment, except for one. Kinsella, who is a long-time paid political propagandist once dubbed the “Prince of Darkness” by Maclean’s, responded colourfully. “I asked Kinsella if he regrets contributing to the spread of this narrative and if he has taken steps to correct it,” wrote Mastracci. “He replied, ‘Fuck off, Holocaust denier.’”
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