I looked in on the CBN website today just out of curiosity. There I found an article on the many Palestinian people killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza under this headline: ‘Hamas Sacrificing Children’: Why Gaza Clashes Aren’t Peaceful Protests but a Hamas-Inspired Death Cycle (dated 5/17/18).
Knowing that CBN is a major provider of “Christian news” in the US, and that an article like this will (mis)inform many, many more people than will ever read even-handed reports on what has happened in Gaza, I decided to use this article as an exercise in how to deconstruct propaganda.
This article is pure propaganda for a Christian Zionist readership, intended (a) to tell people what they want to hear and thereby (b) reinforce what they already believe. There is nothing informative about it.
- First, notice the headline. The Hamas organization is mentioned 3 times. In Zionist parlance, Hamas is nothing more than a deranged terrorist organization intent on destroying Israel by any means possible. Thus, the headline immediately paints the past 7 weeks of protests as an exclusively Hamas-controlled, “terrorist” event designed somehow to destroy Israel.
Note the phrases “cult of death” and “sacrificing children,” both implicit references to the repeated Israeli refrain that all Palestinians — especially Hamas — raise their children to hate Jews; that they have no appreciation for life but only yearn to die as suicide bombers attacking Israelis.
So, the stage is set. This is a story about the irrational hatred of people whose only goal is to “drive Israel into the sea,” as Zionists love to repeat.
2. Second, notice that all the embedded videos, ostensibly providing evidence for the many inflammatory claims made throughout the article, come from MEMRI TV.
So, let’s check out MEMRI. What is this organization? Where does it come from? Who is behind it? A little investigation (take some time to read this investigative article from The Guardian newspaper by Brian Whitaker) will quickly reveal that MEMRI is a “non-profit institute” located in Washington, D.C. (subsidized by US tax dollars) established by former members of the Israeli intelligence services, i.e. it is a strongly Zionist outfit that exists in order to promote political Zionism in the English-speaking world.
It seems that MEMRI’s “research” method is to watch and read Arabic and Farsi (otherwise known as Persian; the language of Iran) TV, magazines and newspapers. They find the most outlandish public statements possible — without providing any context, so the reader/viewer has no way of judging how representative the statements may be — and then disseminate those statements as if they represent the widespread views of the average Palestinian, Arab or Iranian.
THAT is a dishonest, misrepresentation of the facts, and it makes me angry to know that my tax dollars (and yours) are subsidizing this stuff! It is not hard to find a convenient wacko saying something stupid wherever you look. (I am tempted to say, “Just turn on Christian TV.”) But using those kinds of words to depict an entire group of people as equally wacko is not only dishonest; it is also slanderous and racist, things that every Christian ought to stand against, call out and reject whenever possible.
3. Once we get into the body of the article, its first major point is that:
“…one Hamas official admitted that 50 of the 62 people killed were Hamas members, a group labeled a terrorist organization by the US State Department.”
Let’s ask a few questions about this statement:
(a) 62 people were killed on Monday, May 14 alone. The total number of dead over the entire period of the protests was 112 – 120, while the wounded were 12,000 – 20,000. The article deliberately fudges the death toll and fails to mention the injured in order to downplay the vast numbers of people shot by Israeli soldiers.
(b) Is the so-called “Hamas official” a genuine Hamas spokesman? I don’t know. That needs investigation.
(c) If he is, does he know what he is talking about? Is he telling the truth? Or is this another example of an organization taking credit for something it didn’t really do? That happens often. This also needs investigation.
(d) Reminding us that Hamas is “labeled a terrorist organization by the US 
State Department” is intended to give the claim special authority, legitimizing it. However, our State Department works in lockstep with the Israeli government and its own views on its “enemies.” So, this assertion is nothing more than a tautology, i.e. the US government is repeating Israeli assertions. It has no independent value.
4. Yes, indeed, Hamas has committed past acts of violence against Israelis, though nothing of significance since Gaza was cordoned off in 2011. (We don’t have time or space here to address the claims of “rockets fired” from Gaza into Israel or the horrific genocide committed by the Israeli military against civilians in Gaza. I urge you to watch the new documentary, “Killing Gaza”, by the journalists Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen).
But, within Gaza, Hamas functions largely as a political organization which many people join because they need connections to get a job, or they are involved in Hamas-sponsored community/youth activities. Also, not every member of Hamas is involved in their military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. In fact, the majority of Hamas members are not part of its military wing. They are two different things.
5. But even if all of the people shot and killed by Israeli snipers in Gaza were members of Hamas, since when does membership in an organization frowned upon by the government give the military permission to kill unarmed people — unarmed men, women and children often standing hundreds of yards away? Is it permissible to shoot anyone simply because they are/may be members of Hamas?
6. The article continues to misrepresent what actually happened in Gaza, as all major US media outlets have also done. So we read that these deaths resulted from“confrontations with Israeli troops as they [the Palestinians] tried to breach the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel.”
(a) Go scan the net. Watch the many videos now available about the Gazan Land Day Marches. I have. I have not seen a single one that merits the label “confrontation.” That word implies close contact between two groups, which would require Palestinians to be on the opposite side of their fence, able to make physical contact with Israeli soldiers. I have not seen or heard of any place where this happened. In fact, even Israel admits that not one single soldier along the fence was injured in any way. There was no “breach” of the “border” anywhere. Period. There were no “confrontations.” There were only unarmed people being shot dead by army snipers positioned many, many, many yards away.
Neither have I see anyone throw a bomb or Molotov cocktail or shoot a missile. Though these charges are often repeated, I have yet to see a scrap of evidence to substantiate them. Have you?
(b) As Norman Finkelstein has ably explained (here, here, and here ) the huge fence surrounding Gaza is not a border. The fence is not delineating two countries. It is a prison boundary, unilaterally and arbitrarily constructed by Israel to confine the Palestinians living there. It is ghetto fence; something that should haunt every Jew who aims a rifle into it. Palestinians hate this fence because it keeps them confined like animals in a cage.
Followers of Jesus Christ are supposed to be supremely devoted to telling the truth and eschewing lies. That includes a refusal to spread misinformation. Furthermore, everyone, but especially those who claim to be God’s people, need to exercise the common sense of reading responsibly, evaluating our sources of information, and testing the veracity of claims made by so-called “authorities.”
Shame on CBN for spreading lies and misinformation about the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Shame on all Christian Zionists for holding their Zionist ideology as more sacred than Jesus’ own convictions about truth, honesty and justice.