Moreover, Western societies – and most of all the so-called progressives – no longer exalt heroism; rather, they worship at the shrine of victimhood. No one has better understood that change, or more skilfully used the digital environment to take advantage of it, than Hamas.
It fully grasps the media’s insatiable demand for graphic footage: as Sinwar told an Italian journalist in 2018, “We make the headlines only with blood – no blood, no news.” To that end, it deploys “journalists” who, like Muhammad Wishah, Ismail Abu Omar and Mustafa Thuraya, double as senior Hamas operatives and stringers for, or employees of, Al Jazeera, to selectively record incidents in which there are civilian casualties, immediately transmitting them worldwide as “evidence” of Israeli atrocities.
And by the time the IDF can correct the record, those claims have been echoed by scores of keffiyeh-clad radicals and given a degree of credibility by senior members of Western governments, including, on several occasions, our own.
But Hamas also knows that not all of the world shares the West’s self-loathing addiction to victimhood – and it tailors its propaganda accordingly. Its reporting of the fighting at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital – which Hamas used to store weapons, operate a command and control centre and hold hostages – is a case in point.
In Arabic, its social media posts glorified the gunbattles, highlighting the “heroism” and “Jihadi spirit” of the fighters it had inside the hospital complex. In contrast, its English-language posts, which were predictably relayed by the ABC, simply denied that there were any Hamas gunmen at the hospital and portrayed the Israeli operation as a cruel assault on a purely civilian target.
The trouble is that Hamas’s tactics work. Machiavelli, who regarded deliberate misinformation as an indispensable part of statesmanship and admired Ferdinand I of Spain and Pope Alexander VI for the effortless skill with which they lied, would scarcely have been surprised. Great pretenders, he wrote in The Prince, will invariably get the better of the simple-minded, and the astute deceiver will “always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived”.
Machiavelli also thought a state whose rulers were vulnerable to being duped was doomed to be destroyed. Perhaps that is where we now are in the West.
But the immediate tragedy is that the success of Hamas’s propaganda spells disaster for the people of the Middle East – including the people of Gaza.
They truly are the casualties of lies that kill. And for so long as those lies are believed, the killing will never end.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/hamas-propaganda-wins-spell-disaster-f...
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