The propaganda jihad is nowhere more sophisticated or virulent than in Israel. Not only does the Palestinian media fabricate Israeli atrocities; the Israeli media does too. From “Citizens should insist on a fair press” in the Jerusalem Post, with thanks to JS:
A particularly flagrant Israeli example was Ilana Dayan’s report on the October 5 shooting of a 13-year-old girl in Gaza by IDF soldiers. Initially, the soldiers claimed to have no idea that Iman al-Hams was a schoolgirl; they merely saw an unidentified Palestinian carrying a backpack near their outpost, where no innocent Palestinian had reason to be, and concluded that it was a bomber coming to attack them.
Later, however, several soldiers accused their company commander of “confirming the kill” — i.e. shooting al-Hams repeatedly at close range, where he could not have avoided seeing that she was a schoolgirl. (The star prosecution witness in the commander’s trial has since admitted in court that his “eyewitness” account of this “confirmed kill” was a lie.)
After the “confirmed kill” story broke, Dayan broadcast an investigative report into it on Fact, the acclaimed television news magazine she anchors. The IDF subsequently accused her of having distorted, or even fabricated, parts of the report in a libelous fashion. Most egregiously, the IDF said, she tacked footage of the soldiers celebrating onto the footage of them shooting, so that anyone watching would assume they were celebrating al-Hams’ death.
In reality, the celebration footage came from a Rosh Hashana party several weeks earlier — a fact Dayan admitted when confronted.
Tacking unrelated celebration scenes onto the ostensible footage of al-Hams’s killing (in reality, the shooting scenes also turned out to be from a different incident) is indeed slanderous fabrication; it implies that the soldiers rejoiced over having killed a schoolgirl.
Yet not only did Dayan pay no price; her media colleagues vigorously defended her right to indulge in such fabrications.
Her boss, program editor Doron Glazer, for instance, dismissed the incident by declaring: “The chief of staff has more important work to do than attacking Fact.” And Haaretz columnist Ehud Asheri went even further, writing that Dayan was not guilty of “tendentious and intentional fabrication,” because “the celebration scene was shown in the context of the general atmosphere in the company.”
In other words, since Dayan believed — rightly or wrongly — that those particular soldiers were capable of celebrating a schoolgirl’s death, it was legitimate for her to fabricate footage that showed them doing so when they did not.