A scandalizing allegation is widely reported, but by the time it is debunked, there’s another scandalizing allegation that has hijacked the conversation.
Another day, another United Nations–sponsored report accusing Israel of engineering a “genocide” in Gaza.
This week, the U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) claimed after a two-year investigation that the Jewish state is engaged in an effort to “destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group.” Israel protested, of course. Jerusalem noted that the commission’s findings had been previously debunked. They observed that the commission’s chairwoman, South Africa’s Navi Pillay, had been accused of anti-Israel bias by many, including U.S. lawmakers, before she resigned her role. They noted that Pillay wasn’t alone. She was joined in exile by onetime commissioner Miloon Kothari, who was forced to resign in 2022 after he alleged that social media was “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby” (remarks Pillay defended).
Other critics of the organization’s findings note that it relies on flawed inputs from anti-Israel interests. Among them, a joint investigation by The Guardian and +972 Magazine, which alleged that 83 percent of fatalities in Gaza — 44,100 — were civilians compared with just 8,900 “militant deaths.” Critics note that the conclusion, which was derived from an Israeli Defense Forces database, does not include many Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who were killed but not identified. Nor does it include Gazans who participated in the fighting but were not members of either group, or Hamas agents and assets who were not members of its “militant” wing. Indeed, the IDF chided The Guardian for relying on information relayed to it by unreliable or compromised sources inside the Strip.
But the U.N. ran with it anyway. Of course, they did. They don’t care.
It’s the same story every time. Whether it’s lurid tales of starving children mercilessly executed for no other reason than to compound the indignity of begging for “scraps” with the insult of summary murder, the widespread deliberate famine in Gaza that media outlets cannot seem to confirm, or the findings of a commission of “genocide” scholars that has almost no barrier to entry and seems to exist only to promulgate sordid allegations against Israel, the pattern repeats. The scandalizing allegation is widely reported, but by the time it is debunked, there’s another scandalizing allegation that has hijacked the national conversation.
We’re getting a taste of this tactic on the domestic level now, as the American left throws all the chaff it can find into the air in the hope of misdirecting good-faith observers away from the obvious fact of Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer’s affinity for left-of-center politics.
It couldn’t be that the shooter left a variety of ideologically indicative messages on the bullets he left behind in his sniper’s perch. No, it must be that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ agents don’t understand how to read manufacturers’ markings on bullet casings — not like the sleuths on the internet. The killer had to be “ultra-MAGA,” a racist “Groyper,” and an aficionado of podcaster Nick Fuentes, a dogmatic right-winger who hated Kirk not because he was conservative but because he was “insufficiently radical.” And if you don’t believe that, maybe you’ll believe that this was a motiveless killing — violence “not driven by any obvious political ideology.”
It’s exhausting. That’s probably the point of exercises like this — to exhaust. The claims on offer may not be particularly compelling individually. But, in the aggregate, they are overwhelming. And if you bother to dwell on any one of them, well, you’re just a crank. Everyone has already moved on to the next sensational allegation. Where’ve you been?