August 14, 2024

Ricky Gervais said “Opinions don’t change facts. Facts, if you’re reasonable, may change your opinions”. But it is possible that being reasonable, or the importance of facts, is slipping away from us as a society.

In the case of Gaza, for instance, there was an unfortunate incident of an explosion on 17/10/2023, exactly 10 days after the massive terror attack Hamas carried out against Israeli towns and civilians that left over 1,200 dead, and 250 kidnapped. The explosion was due to a rocket launched by Islamic Jihad (“PIJ”, which is another terror organization in Gaza) as a part of a 10 rockets barrage aimed at Israeli towns. The rocket misfired, landed next to the hospital, and left over 30 dead. These are the facts.

Hamas reacted by publishing that 500-700 civilians died, in the minutes after the explosion, and blamed Israel.

A thorough investigation revealed none of what Hamas published is true – not hundreds dead and not that Israel attacked. But that didn’t matter, from Al-Jazeera to Lusa, from senior-officials in Brussels to the political analysts in the studios of CNN Portugal – all repeated Hamas’ message: that Israel was to blame and that hundreds died. By the time the truth saw light, the truth didn’t matter. The attempt to defame Israel succeeded, and the apologies from the media and from the diplomatic ranks were too quiet, too few, too late, and uninfluential.

So does the truth matter anymore? Or do trends on Tik-Tok and on university campuses matter more than the facts?

Recently we saw another example. On 10th of August, 2024, Israeli intelligence learned of a presence of 31 armed Hamas’ members in a room designated as a mosque that was part of the compound of Al-Tabaeen school. The compound was used as a base of operations of Hamas, because since it was not active as a school, it was meant to be used as a civilian shelter. Israel initiated an accurate strike in the part of the mosque in which the terrorists were barricaded. Hamas, at first, published the real number of casualties: 40. Seeing the media attention, Hamas altered the numbers to 93, including 11 children and 6 women (which is hard to believe as they were not allowed in the men section of the mosque).

Hamas provided no proof to the claim, and has not released a single name of the "innocent victims", while Israel has published the name and photograph of each of the armed terrorists who were eliminated. But Al-Jazeera inflated the number to 100 – and that’s what the media in Portugal reported. Not a single word on combatants and armed terrorists, somehow it is always reported as hundreds of women and children only…

Officials tweeted in the spirit of Borell that the attack on a school in intolerable, drawing an image of a teacher, in a classroom, with children, that are becoming a target for a bombing. This could not be further from the truth, but does the truth matter? Defaming Israel with fake news used to be a hobby for the radicals, for the few. It had been normalized in the media, which begs the question: do we no longer care about the facts?