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Why the Truth Matters

(Commentary) Seth Mandel - Journalist David Collier revealed that the ubiquitous image of the Palestinian boy's skeletal frame in his mother's arms - used by nearly every major news organization as the living representation of the mass starvation of Gazan children - was in fact a child suffering from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, plus a genetic disorder. It also does not appear to be the case that, as reported, the boy's father was killed by the IDF while looking for food. Videos and contemporaneous reports strongly suggest the father was killed while looking for Israeli soldiers to engage in battle. Where Gaza is different is in the desire by global information institutions to lie and for otherwise intelligent people to embrace those lies, because it's less stressful and less lonely to live in an online world where the Israelis are always monsters and the truth is treated as a distraction. The truth is that Hamas has engineered real suffering in Gaza, and the lie - that Israel is intentionally starving children - enables Hamas to engineer more suffering by creating global pressure on Israel to let Hamas control the aid again. It matters who is at fault because pro-Palestinian advocates read stories like this and then take it upon themselves to avenge the injustice with violence against Jews pretty much everywhere in the past year. Why was the photo of the Palestinian child published and shared everywhere in the first place? And why will the next one be shared, and the one after that? Pointing to a suffering child and saying "the Jews did this" when in fact the Jews did no such thing is an intentional act.
2025-07-31 00:00:00
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