by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

A guy stops his friend and relates excitedly: “Did you hear about Harvey? His wife just drove his brand-new Tesla into a swamp!”

The friend responds: “First, it wasn’t Harvey. It was Frank. Second, it wasn’t his wife. It was his mother-in-law. Third, it wasn’t brand new; it was second-hand. Fourth, it wasn’t a Tesla. It was a Prius. Fifth, it wasn’t into a swamp. It was over a cliff. And sixth, it never happened.”

That is what Israel has had to deal with for 75 years: Arab Big Lies gobbled up and regurgitated all-too-willingly by a left-wing anti-Israel mass media that has no soul and lies without hesitation if it sells newspapers, gets online clicks, likes, and followers. The bigger the lie, the more the clicks and followers. People attribute the Big Lie concept to the German Nazis of Hitler, especially his chief liar, Joseph Goebbels. But the Western lying media gobbles more than Goebbels. They are despicable falsifiers whose fake news incites violence and promotes catastrophe. Remember Trump colluding with Putin?

In the Middle Eastern context, the terrorist Arabs lie, and BBC and CNN and all of them jump in to repeat the lies. Perhaps the most infamous of all was when the New York Times blared an Associated Press photo, caption, and story about an Israeli soldier beating the living daylights out of some poor innocent Arab kid, whom the photo showed was all bloodied up. The New York Times story said it was another example of how the Israelis send their soldiers onto the Temple Mount and desecrate holy Islamic soil and beat up on Arabs who are there only to pray sweetly.

Some sharp-eyed Zionists (i.e., people who believe that Jews have a right to live in Israel just as Black Lives Matter has a right to live in Chicago and Ben & Jerry’s has a right to live on ancestral Native American lands in Vermont) noticed an oddity. If the guy with the Hebrew uniform, menacingly waving his billy club at the bleeding teen, was an Israeli soldier gone wild on the Temple Mount, how was it that the photo showed a gas station in the background? Gas stations on the Temple Mount? Really?

So it turned out that — surprise! — the New York Times was lying. It wasn’t the Temple Mount but a Jerusalem street in an Arab neighborhood. The guy with the nightstick was not an army soldier but a civilian police officer. The kid bleeding was not an Arab beaten by the Israeli brandishing the club but Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish kid from America who had just been assaulted and battered badly by a gang of murderous Arabs. And the cop was waving his club at the Arab attackers to get them away from the Jewish kid before they killed him.

Oops…

How did the truth come out? That is the story that should have been page one. First, a Dr. Aaron Grossman of Chicago wrote the liars:

Regarding your picture on page A5 of the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian on the Temple Mount — that Palestinian is actually my son, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago. He, and two of his friends, were pulled from their taxicab while traveling in Jerusalem, by a mob of Palestinian Arabs, and were severely beaten and stabbed. That picture could not have been taken on the Temple Mount because there are no gas stations on the Temple Mount and certainly none with Hebrew lettering, like the one clearly seen behind the Israeli soldier attempting to protect my son from the mob.

Busted.

So the Times posted this correction:

A picture caption on Saturday about fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem included an erroneous identification from The Associated Press for a wounded man shown with an Israeli policeman. He was Tuvia Grossman of Chicago, an American student in Israel, not an unidentified Palestinian. In some copies the caption also misidentified the site where Mr. Grossman was wounded. It was in Jerusalem’s Old City, but not on the Temple Mount.

The correction was inadequate, so the Times was forced to publish a further correction three days later:

A picture caption on Page A6 last Saturday about fighting in Jerusalem gave an erroneous identification from The Associated Press for a wounded man shown with an Israeli policeman. He was Tuvia Grossman of Chicago, an American studying at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem, not an unidentified Palestinian. In some copies the caption also included the news agency’s erroneous reference to the site. The incident occurred in an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem, not on the Temple Mount or elsewhere in the Old City. A correction in this space on Wednesday cited the errors incompletely and omitted an explanation of the scene. The officer was waving a nightstick at Palestinians, telling them to stay away from Mr. Grossman. He was not beating Mr. Grossman.

And a corrective news story had to accompany the correction because so much had been falsified:

They looked out, as they recalled later, and saw a crowd of Palestinian youths blocking the road and closing in on them.

A stone crashed through the back window and Mr. Pollock’s head was gashed. Then all of the taxi’s windows were shattered in a volley of rocks, and the terrified Americans tried to huddle down and cover their faces. The doors were jerked open, they said, and they were dragged out by the mob and beaten….

The officer [shown above Grossman in picture], wielding a club and moving toward him protectively, ordered the Palestinians to back off.

“He recognized that Tuvia was Jewish and was being pursued, and he was yelling, ‘Back off! Back off!’”

Grossman’s family sued and won a libel judgment, as Nick Sandmann would sue the media decades later and win.

Such despicable liars. That’s how they all operate. Shameless. And even worse is the BBC, as Douglas Murray brilliantly stated the other day on British TV:

The latest Big Lie against Israel now is the day’s top international news: a hospital in Gaza that got blown up, killing several hundred Arabs in it. Right away, Hamas accused Israel of mercilessly blowing up a hospital and murdering hundreds of innocent Arabs. Arab countries Jordan and Egypt called off a conference that Joe Biden was supposed to attend. Abu Mazen (the terrorist in a suit also called Mahmoud Abbas) declared three days of mourning in “Palestine” over the Zionist butchery. Lots to unwind here. And yet so simple, simpler than Occam’s Razor.

First, even if Israel blows up every hospital in Gaza and kills thousands, understand that Hamas stations and stores inside the Gaza hospitals (and in schools, residential apartment buildings, mosques, and ambulances) the weapons they use to launch rockets and drones (as well as the missiles and other materiel) to murder Jews in Israel. Unless you the reader personally want to go into one of those hospitals in Hamas-run Gaza and personally ask Hamas’ permission to blow up the drones and missiles, there sometimes may be no other way to take out those weapons than to blow up the whole hospital that is serving as an auxiliary warehouse for the deadly items.

After what happened on the Sabbath of the Holy Day of Sh’mini Atzeret on Oct. 7, Israel is finished with playing games and “mowing lawns.” They will take out those weapons — and good for them. The blame for civilian deaths in such sorties is on Hamas for storing murderous weapons in hospitals and other civilian locations, and on the people of Gaza for voting Hamas into office and dancing in the streets and celebrating when Jews are mass murdered and Jewish naked corpses are paraded in the backs of pickup trucks. Israel is not targeting people, trying so very hard both to avoid bad publicity and utterly uninterested in vengeance. They simply have to eradicate the weapons used to murder Jews. Anyone who gets in the way is collateral damage. There is a real war going on. Ask survivors of Hiroshima and Dresden.

Point 2: The main central HQ of Hamas is believed to be located under a different Gaza hospital. Not a smart place to go this week for a lung transplant. If and when Israel locates and decides to take out that hospital, be ready for the reaction and lies. It is on Hamas for locating there. What country situates its military personnel to hide headquarters in a hospital or under it?

Point 3: Ready for this point? Israel did not bomb the hospital anyway. Rather, it was Islamic Jihad. The whole brouhaha is a lie. Gaza terrorists shoot homemade rockets that have a high failure rate. They are made in kitchens, not by Raytheon, Lockheed, or Boeing. So far, hundreds of their missiles have not even made it into Israel but have landed within Gaza and even inadvertently have blown up Gaza buildings and killed people in Gaza. One of these days, these morons will end up blowing up the Al Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock, clearing it for erection of the Third Holy Temple.

Point 4: How do we know it was they, not we? (Nominative case after intransitive verb.) Aerial photographs and video show that the explosion was caused by a rocket or missile launched from the ground and following an upward trajectory … and then back down to the hospital. Israel is not situated such that they could launch from the ground in Gaza; rather, Israel is bombing from overhead fighter planes that drop bombs from the sky, like in WWII movies. It’s a clear evidence thing, beyond question, that the Arabs themselves blew up their hospital and killed their hundreds.

هل تريدون المزيد من الاثباتات؟

المنظمات الارهابية تستخدم الفلسطينيين كدروع بشرية، ويجب تحرير " فلسطين" من حماس، الجهاد والمنظمات الارهابية التي تمنع من المدنيين الابرياء حماية انفسهم. pic.twitter.com/I0iP7jcrWx

— Lorena Khateeb | لورينا خطيب (@kh_lorena) October 17, 2023

Even better proof: Al Jazeera telecast the launching of the rocket.

A better view pic.twitter.com/JEu2aW1bbG

— Emily Schrader – אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر (@emilykschrader) October 18, 2023

Even so, as soon as Hamas accused Israel, the vile anti-Semitic BBC reported that Israel did it: “Gaza hospital deluged as Israel retaliation kills and wounds hundreds.” Lies. Damned lies. And more damned lies.

Arabs are calling for their third “Day of Rage” this month. Presumably, 32 Jew-hating clubs at Harvard will condemn Israel. Ben & Jerry’s will announce free ice cream for anyone at the hospital still alive, assuming they can find the hospital in the crater. Black Lives Matter will post something on X (formerly called Twitter) and will shake down corporate America.

Let’s see what lies they have for us tomorrow.

Originally published in The American Spectator

Photo Credit: TechnicalFault on Flickr