THE PROPAGANDA SEDUCTION

The world has swallowed Hamas’s expertly crafted propaganda.

By Rolene Marks

You should be horrified. I am. Horrified, enraged, and so very shattered. I hope you are too. I hope that this has shaken you wide-awake. The starved, emaciated images and footage of Israeli hostage Evyatar David, starved to his bones, held in a dark, airless tunnel, shirtless and wearing ragged cut off tracksuit pants digging his own grave is devastating. It is inhuman. For Jews who carry generational trauma, this took us back to our family members, the living dead in the death and concentration camps of Europe.

Blink and you will miss the beefy arm of a terrorist’s performative handing a can of lentils to him. The beefy, fat and well-fed arm of a Hamas terrorist.

Evyatar, described by those who know his as a gentle, kind soul who loves to play music, was stolen by Hamas from the Nova music festival on 7 October 2023.

Released hostage Tal Shoham, who was held together with hostages Evyatar David and Guy Gilboa-Dalal before he was released in February, says he recognizes the tunnel. Speaking to Israel’s Channel 12, Shoham said:

“That is exactly the same tunnel where [released hostage] Omer [Wenkert], Evyatar, Guy and I were held”.

Reacting to the condition of Evyatar in the Hamas footage, Shohan continued:

 “I was shocked to the depth of my soul. He is broken mentally, emotionally. I can’t see any of the joy of life that he had managed to retain in his eyes now…. Really, a shell of the Evyatar I knew.”

Asked what the Hamas video does not show, Shoham says:

“behind the curtain they’ve put up, which is just one of the blankets we used, apparently Guy Gilboa-Dalal is standing or sitting because they don’t let them go to a different tunnel. And right behind the cameraman, there’s an iron door, and a well-lit room, with air conditioners and a group of terrorists who sit and sleep there. They have cable TV. They have plenty of food — food they have stolen from the humanitarian supplies that Israel sent in for a very long time. We could see that they were well fed, that they lacked for nothing. They also bragged about having stolen it, that they had months of supplies in that tunnel and all their tunnels.”

Rom Braslavski stayed behind at the Nova festival to try to help those injured. He was cruelly taken into captivity by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another genocidal terrorist group.

The footage of an emaciated Rom Braslavski crying broke me into a million pieces. It should break you too. He cannot stand anymore and is in terrible pain. There are 18 other hostages we believe to still be alive and every second counts. Medical experts believe they have lost roughly 50% of their body weight and that they could suffer multiple organ failure very soon.  Hamas and other terror groups still hold the remains of 30 others.

With very few exceptions like the NY Post, the vast majority of the media either buried the story of emaciated and tortured Evyatar and Rom amongst other stories – or just neglected to publish, preferring to push their accusations against Israel of genocide and mass starvation.

Hamas know they can show anything they want to – they have the measure of the delirious Jew hatred many in the west are indulging. Israel may be winning on the kinetic battlefield – but losing the propaganda war as many swallow the lies. It is a propaganda war and what is needed now is for the silent majority to speak up loud and clear – before it is too late.

The exploitation of Palestinian children should infuriate you. The media, keen to add fodder to its carefully crafted narrative dedicate to demonizing the Jewish state, have trotted out the photos of children with congenital diseases as proof of “mass starvation”. Nobody stopped to check the veracity – or apologise properly when it was eventually exposed. Did anyone honestly think that the terrorists who murdered, burnt families, raped and kidnapped would not use their own population as human shields or propaganda fodder? They said quite bluntly that they would! Again, and again. Many choose not to hear.

Hamas and their stenographers (of which the press play a major part) have seduced the masses by using pejoratives and sexy soundbites like accusing Israel of genocide and mass starvation and just about any other evil they can drum up. Sadly, it is working.

The accusations of genocide are particularly preposterous. Not only has it been routinely debunked by the failure of the media and the masses to ask the little questions allows a lie to fester. Let us look at one example – the IDF inoculated well over 500, 000 children against polio in September 2024. Never before in a “genocide” has a population’s children been inoculated to guard against polio, or humanitarian aid facilitated by land, sea and air. Are these the actions of people accused of genocide? Yes, Gaza looks disastrous – but to understand what is happening above ground, you have to understand what has been happening below ground.

The media’s failure to investigate and just take the word of a terror organization verbatim, a terror organisation whose foundational charter extols the extermination of the Jewish state and people, over a democratic ALLIED state is unconscionable.

Hamas are the masters of propaganda. One only had to look at the hostage release scenes, which were a veritable theatre of the grotesque to understand exactly who Israel is dealing with – but most, failed to take the lessons on board.

The accusation of mass starvation persists, despite the images of “starving children” having been debunked. The media purposefully ignore the successful efforts of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to feed hungry civilians. The UN and various aid organisations failures to collect and distribute aid after it has entered and cleared the crossings is not just ignored, it is blamed on Israel.  I visited the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing a few days ago at the collection point. I saw mountains of aid left standing in the sun. Some of the boxes were open and we could see flour, cooking oil, baby food, hygiene products for children, women’s hygiene products, toiletries, tomato sauce, canned tuna, sugar, sacks of potatoes and onions and so much more. Boxes were labeled “UNICEF”, “UN” and “World Food Programme” amongst the many. Trucks stood idle with the drivers waiting for the instructions from the UN to load up and go towards civilian sites. It was infuriating and frustrating to see so much waste.

I also witnessed the western media propaganda-swallowing machine in action with my own eyes. I watched as two ABC Australian reporters who had walked the same aid wasteland as I did, do their piece on camera. Puffed up with a full load of self-righteous indignation, the Middle East correspondent said with a completely straight face “this is the face that Israel wants you to see in their argument about how they are prosecuting humanitarian aid.” Sorry, what? You saw what we all saw and now you are spinning it in order to pander to your narrative that casts Israel as the evil pariah in all of this?

It is pointless calling people antisemitic – they are immune to it and quite proud of it. This is something much more nefarious that there is not even a definition for it yet. This obsession with demonizing Israel, this inability to see reason or logic – or even evidence. Seduction by propaganda is easy to implement when the culprit, in this case Hamas, understands the latent hatred that lies in many, dying to be let loose under the guise of self-righteous indignation.

It is an imperative to fight back – no matter how outnumbered we think we are. Every single one of us has a responsibility we need to take on.

 Every single one of us has a moral obligation and responsibility to speak for our hostages. The living and the dead without exception. Every single one of us MUST FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE AVALANCHE OF LIES AND PROPAGANDA. Lives depend on it. Literally.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).