by Kevin Barrett, American Free Press

Philip Weiss, the Jewish ex-New York Times reporter, says Jews dominate American media—and use their dominance to protect Israel. Case in point: As Israel massacres the civilian population of Gaza, Jewish-dominated American media blame the victims. Lurid atrocity stories about Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Storm operation on October 7, none with any evident basis in truth, have convinced many ignorant Americans to support Israel’s genocide.

Israel is well-known to seize every conceivable opportunity to propagandize. If substantial numbers of rapes had really occurred on October 7, wouldn’t the whole world have heard a grossly exaggerated version of them by October 8?

But it wasn’t until December, more than six weeks after initial reports of “40 beheaded babies” and “babies roasted in ovens” were exposed as propaganda lies, that Israel’s hasbara machine suddenly began fabricating claims of alleged rapes by Hamas fighters. Oddly, and tellingly, no such claims were made during the two months immediately following the raid. It wasn’t until mid-December that Israeli propagandists suddenly claimed to have discovered that rapes had occurred on October 7. And it wasn’t until December 31 that those claims were taken seriously by The New York Times.

The Times’ top-of-the-front-page headline “Screams without Words” should have been “Screams without Evidence.” The story, based on “research” by a rabidly genocidal Israeli non-journalist named Anat Schwartz, is built around claims that an Israeli woman named Gal Abdush was raped and killed by Hamas fighters. Only one problem: Abdush was not raped, and her family members know it.

How did non-rape-victim Gail Abdush become the centerpiece of a lying, genocide-inciting New York Times article? The whole excruciating story is told in The Intercept’s “Between the Hammer and the Anvil: The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé.” It seems that the Times hired an Israeli intelligence operative, Anat Schwartz, to peddle a predetermined rape narrative. Schwartz had no prior reporting experience, but she hated Palestinian “human animals” with a passion according to her Twitter feed. Apparently that burning, genocidal hatred, and her Israeli intelligence credentials, were all the qualifications she needed to moonlight as a New York Times journalist.

Schwartz searched Israel high and low for any evidence of Hamas rapes on October 7 and came up empty. The Intercept notes that during a podcast interview “Schwartz details her extensive efforts to get confirmation from Israeli hospitals, rape crisis centers, trauma recovery facilities, and sex assault hotlines in Israel, as well as her inability to get a single confirmation from any of them. ‘She was told there had been no complaints made of sexual assaults,’ the Times spokesperson acknowledged.” Not a shred of forensic evidence, she discovered, supported even a single rape allegation.

Faced with the problem that there was no credible evidence whatsoever of any sexual assaults, Schwartz turned to known fabricators and notorious serial liars, like an anonymous Israeli Air Force official who was subsequently caught telling ludicrous tall tales, and the thoroughly-discredited ultra-Orthodox fanatics of Zaka, a self-styled “rescue organization” that has been the laughingstock of Israel for years. Another such lunatic—a mendacious IDF rabbi named Shari Mendes—had been caught inventing B-grade horror fantasies like “A baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded and then the mother was beheaded,” only to be subsequently exposed by Israeli authorities who confirmed that no such events happened. Yet the hysterical liar Mendes became Schwartz’s key source for the New York Times story.

Today, more than two months after the New York Times tall tale brought the issue to the world’s attention, it’s clear that there is no convincing evidence that even a single rape occurred on  October 7. The entire hoax was woven out of the transparently bogus statements of bad liars.

Since rapes are common in wartime (and since Israel is known to routinely sexually abuse Palestinians by the tens of thousands) it is in fact quite remarkable that Hamas has for all intents and purposes been certified, by virtue of thorough investigations that have come up empty, as possibly the first rape-free army in human history.

Another remarkable fact that has emerged from the Hamas rape hoax scandal is that Israeli propagandists have been forced to rely on such amazingly incompetent liars. Couldn’t they find any skilled liars to invent more credible, internally consistent fabrications?

Unfortunately, war propaganda (and genocide propaganda) doesn’t have to be true, or even plausible, to work. It targets the emotions, not the intellect. So the hundreds of millions of people who get their vague impressions of what is happening in the world from Western media have had the hypnotic suggestion planted deep in their subconscious minds that Hamas and the Palestinian resistance are diabolical rapists.

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