• V17@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    People are still spreading the beheaded baby horseshit

    Honestly, the only context in which I see it is people complaining about it being a lie, but that may just be that we have different internet bubbles.

    Personally I don’t call it horseshit because several people that I consider trustworthy confirmed being shown photos of beheaded babies (though not 40 of them, but I’ve never even seen that claim anywhere, I’ve seen a separate early claim that 40 babies were killed in total, not specifically beheaded) by Israeli officials, one of them being our ambassador, who so far has been a completely trustworthy person as far as I know. We also do know that Israelis only showed some photos privately to selected foreign politicians, journalists and diplomats, because (apart from them saying so) the people shown described those photos and they were later released publicly. It is not inconceivable that the beheaded babies were among those not released to public for some reason.

    It’s a basic propaganda technique. You, to great fanfare, release some big fuckoff lie that makes the “other” look bad (“V17 FUCKS GOATS! V17 IS A GOATFUCKER, EVERYONE!”) and then days or weeks later you follow up with the truth to head off any claims that you couldn’t possibly be a REAL journalist (“Our apologies, it seems V17 was only washing his car. There was no goat. He did not fuck the car.”) but you do so in as quiet and half-assed of a manner as possible.

    The issue is that is not what happened. Apart from what I say above, the fact that white house representatives pretty much immediately walked back on that was widely reported by mainstream media a day later. Also, the attack was already so brutal that it changed nothing about how Hamas is being perceived. For most people, slaughtered civilians with marks of torture and burned babies (those were afaik released on photos, but I did not want to look to check) were unsurprisingly enough.

    Compare that to a failed rocket of palestinian islamic jihad falling on a hospital parking lot, Hamas knowingly lying about it according to a released wiretap and people still arguing that Israel did it in similar threads on Lemmy.

    Also I’ll have you know that I fuck sheep, not goats.

    • blitzkrieg@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      So, why don’t they show these pictures to the world?

      Also

      Personally I don’t call it horseshit because several people that I consider trustworthy confirmed being shown photos of beheaded babies (though not 40 of them, but I’ve never even seen that claim anywhere, I’ve seen a separate early claim that 40 babies were killed in total, not specifically beheaded) by Israeli officials, one of them being our ambassador

      Do you by any chance happen to have believed the US lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which the US lied about to invade Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?

      • V17@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        So, why don’t they show these pictures to the world?

        Decency? I don’t know that of course, I’m not saying that I’m sure about this, but not releasing photos of people that are too undignified or drastic is a relatively common policy.

        Do you by any chance happen to have believed the US lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which the US lied about to invade Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?

        I’m not from the US and I was not yet following US/international politics at that time. Also none of the people I talked about were americans (“our” ambassador being czech, a journalist-editor from France also confirmed seeing the photos), so I don’t see it as particularly relevant anyway.

        • blitzkrieg@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Oh, so Israel has images proving that Hamas beheaded babies, which is like, literally the worst thing in the world, but they just decided not to release to show the world for some reason, and you genuinely believe that? You just can’t sense something weird in that at all?

          • V17@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            By how much is it worse than burned babies, which were released?

            Plus, notice that I said it’s plausible, not that I believe one version or the other. And, again, even if we say that it was a lie and therefora a fuck up and journos did not sufficiently crosscheck the validity and several people who claim to have seen the photos are lying even if it could cost their careers, in the light of the colossal fuckup with the hospital parking lot bombing that endangered diplomatic ties with several countries and started protests in the streets of several countries, this was relatively minor and pretty well handled.

            • blitzkrieg@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              No, spreading lies about Hamas beheading babies to dehumanize Palestinians and justify the war crimes Israel is committing against them is not “relatively minor and pretty well handled”.

              • V17@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                Spreading “lies” requires intent. Like what Hamas did with the hospital parking lot. With the babies all context points to a professional screw up at best. And there was no screw up or lying required to create justification for Israel’s behavior, slaughtering hundreds of civilians including babies and likely torturing them was enough.

                • blitzkrieg@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  What makes it a screw up instead of an intended lie?

                  “Yeah there were no actual beheaded babies, but that wasn’t a lie, that was just a screw up!”

                  What kind of mental gymnastics do you play to look at it this way?

                  • V17@kbin.social
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                    1 year ago

                    First news from Israeli forensics institute are out, seems like it was not a lie at all: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-769339

                    Kugel also explained that the age range of the victims spans from 3 months to 80 or 90 years old. Many bodies, including those of babies, are without heads.

                    Asked if they were decapitated, Kugel answered yes. Although he admits that, given the circumstances, it’s difficult to ascertain whether they were decapitated before or after death, as well as how they were beheaded, “whether cut off by knife or blown off by RPG,” he explained.