The fabricated death of a Palestinian boy is only the latest offense.
T here was a direct correlation between the sudden popularity enjoyed by Anthony Aguilar, a former contractor with the joint U.S.-Israeli charitable organization Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and the luridness of his tales of Israeli malice and American perfidy.
During an interview with Israeli activist Offir Gutelzon and the dogged Benjamin Netanyahu critic, journalist Noga Tarnopolsky, Aguilar related the harrowing and tragic tale of a young Palestinian boy known only as “Amir.”
“He puts out his hand, and so I beckoned him to come to me,” Aguilar said of the boy. “I said, ‘Come here.’ And he reaches out and he holds my hand, and he kisses my hand and he says, ‘Shukran [Thank you].’” Abruptly, this touching moment was interrupted by “pepper spray, tear gas, stun grenades and bullets,” Aguilar recalled. The air was alive with the sound of machine gun fire as “women and children and small children and kids and children and babies” ran for their lives. In the chaos, Aguilar could see Israeli soldiers “shooting into this crowd,” and “Palestinians, civilians, human beings, are dropping to the ground, getting shot.” Heartbreakingly, “Amir was one of them,” he said. The boy had walked twelve kilometers for “nothing but scraps” of food, “thanked us for it and died.”
Aguilar’s command of this and other sensational accounts of Israel’s ghastly conduct in Gaza made him a celebrity. The dozens of advocacy and media venues — alternative and legacy alike — that granted him a platform lent no credence to GHF’s account of Aguilar’s erratic behavior, his dismissal for cause, and the former contractor’s promise to get revenge on his former employer. The stories he told were just too juicy to check.
If they had checked, we might have learned far earlier than we did that eight-year-old “Amir,” whose real name is Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamden, is alive and well. He and his mother were extracted from the Strip with the IDF’s assistance this week and withdrawn to a safe but undisclosed location (a necessary security precaution for Palestinians that contradict Hamas’s preferred narratives). “Abboud’s stepmother also refuted Aguilar’s claims that the boy had been killed in May, saying he didn’t go missing until July 28,” our own Brittany Bernstein reported, using the boy’s nickname. “The day Abboud went missing was the same day Aguilar first told his story about ‘Amir’ on a podcast called Unxeptable, which has the stated mission of criticizing the Israeli government.”
At least that podcast has the rectitude to inform its audience that the show’s mission is to air anti-Israel narratives irrespective of their veracity. The rest of the press is not nearly as forthright. Not that their vaunted objectivity has spared them from one humiliation after another as an audience starved for verifiable evidence of Israeli malevolence grows more and more agitated over its paucity. In the effort to satisfy this unmet demand, the mainstream press has stumbled into one credibility-shredding buzzsaw after another.
It hasn’t even been a week since the usual suspects in the international press corps abandoned all prudence in the race to popularize the notion that “the world’s leading genocide scholars’ association” had established the fact of Israel’s genocidal intent and actions. You didn’t even have to know that the previously unknown outfit was about as prestigious as the $30-$125 membership fee allows, the only barrier to entry into it save the application. You only had to be slightly curious about why, as was widely reported, only a fraction of its members participated in this deliberative process and its usual channels for dissent were blocked off. You may also have wondered why the group followed Amnesty International’s lead in revising the definition of genocidal intent seemingly only to force Israel’s round peg to fit in that square hole. Identifying these nagging questions doesn’t require any special expertise; only the curiosity typically expected of the journalists.
But why was this body elevated to the authoritative status it enjoyed for those heady 96 hours? One explanation, though certainly not an excuse, is that there had been a drought of evidence corroborating the summer’s ubiquitous allegations that Israel was deliberately engineering a famine in Gaza. The extraordinary claim, which was once again credulously retailed by major media outlets, lacked equally extraordinary — or, really, any — proof. That disparity had become its own crisis. “I want to be clear that I am not accusing Israel of genocide,” House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark insisted late last month after having explicitly accused Israel of conducting a campaign of “starvation and genocide.” The only defense available to Clark was that the claim was faddish at the time, and there were plenty of media outlets providing cover for her calumny.
Indeed, when mainstream venues weren’t running grotesque soft-focus profiles of the poor Hezbollah terrorists whom Israel maliciously targeted with indiscriminate violence by wiring military communications equipment, which were distributed on individual basis to Hezbollah operatives by their commanders, the press ran with image after image of the children — it was only ever children — who suffered from Israel-induced malnutrition.
It took the outlets that promulgated those narratives far longer to confirm that they were not verifiable than it did the citizen journalists who retain their capacity for skepticism when it comes to Israel. Only after it was obvious to all that the skeletal frame of just one of these tragic cases was attributable to a genetic disorder did the New York Times, just to name one example, retract its claim that one of the stricken children was a victim of Israeli malice. As Max Tani later revealed in his report for Semafor, Times editors knew the story they planned to run around one starving child could not be independently confirmed, so they ran with another photo to illustrate the point — and they did, after a fashion. Just not the point they were trying to make.
The Times was in voluminous company. To its credit, the Free Press tracked down those who became “viral” figures among the anti-Israel set, all children whose emaciation was attributable to disorders and maladies unrelated to starvation — cystic fibrosis, rickets, osteoporosis, et cetera. Many of these cases were highlighted by United Nations functionaries, who have demonstrated a conspicuous desire to ensure Hamas retains control over the distribution of aid, which it uses to extort the Palestinian population (as evinced by the riotous mobs who occasionally raid U.N. stockpiles under Hamas control).
Over the summer, the U.N. promoted the notion that Israel, for no reason other than its own viciousness, cut off global aid to the Strip. Indeed, the extent of Israeli evil — there’s no other word for it — alleged by U.N. functionaries should have led the press to get to the bottom of whether the IDF was right when it claimed that the U.N. refused to resume aid deliveries (paused after the collapse of a brief cease-fire in May) to force the IDF to abandon its security and military goals in Gaza. Again, the narrative promulgated by so many media outlets died a quiet death, but only because yet another macabre anecdote had taken its place.
Clearly, no one in the press is interested in learning any lessons here. As the flurry of criticisms of Israel that followed in the immediate wake of an Iranian ballistic missile attack on an Israeli hospital attests, international media are as committed to the demonization of Israel as they were days after the 10/7 massacre, when it was widely reported that an Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short of Israel and hit a medical center was a deliberate Israeli attack.
Of course, we’re not the audience for any of this. It matters not whether we refuse to observe the pretense that domestic and international news outlets are capable of covering Israeli defense initiatives objectively. The goal is agitation. These reports circumnavigate the globe at the speed of information, fomenting anti-Israel demonstrations and putting pressure on European and Middle Eastern capitals to cast the Jewish State to the wolves. That must be the point of this enterprise then — not the promotion of the truth but the promulgation of one useful lie, albeit one with many permutations.
We might conclude that the international press’s credibility is all but spent, but the international press doesn’t care. They have their own war to win. If credibility and truth become its casualties, well, that’s acceptable collateral damage.