By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — If the story is true, then it’s a scandal. But even if the reporting of The New York Times and the leftist NGO source for the article about Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs creating fake social-media accounts to influence the U.S. Congress is accurate, what’s outrageous is the newspaper’s attempt to portray the Jewish state as the main source of disinformation about the war it is waging against Hamas in Gaza.
If it were interested in highlighting the places where the overwhelming majority of the lies and distortions about the conflict were found, then the Times would do far better to investigate its own reporting and that of most of its corporate liberal media colleagues than this small-scale operation. And if the newspaper’s editors were truly concerned about misleading propaganda campaigns aimed at deceiving Americans about the cause and conduct of the war, then they might devote more space to probing how a vast network of blatantly anti-Zionist and antisemitic groups have helped flood social media with the denial of Hamas atrocities and the terrorists’ intentions, as well as lies about Israel.
The piece, which led the Times’ website for a while this week, raised some serious questions about the judgment of some in the Israeli government, specifically in the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which categorically denied the allegations. It allegedly involved the ministry contracting with Stoic, a Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm, to create “hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on [social media] to post pro-Israel comments.”
The point of the effort, which was said to use ChatGPT technology to create posts and also manufactured fake news sites containing pro-Israel articles, was to influence members of Congress to maintain support for the Jewish state. Among those targeted were African-American Democrats such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), both supporters of Israel, as well as Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who is not.
The real disinformation machine
Let’s start by noting that while the methods of the alleged Israeli project were illegitimate, the information it sought to spread about what Hamas has done and the efforts that Israel has made to avoid civilian casualties even while pursuing a just war against a ruthless enemy that hides behind non-combatants was clearly true.
That doesn’t excuse the creation of fake accounts, but taken in perspective in the course of a war that began with the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, it hardly rises to the level of importance that the Times gave it. Indeed, anyone who is outraged about this project but not about the systematic rape, murder, kidnapping, torture and wanton destruction deliberately employed by Hamas on Oct. 7 — or indifferent to the denial of those crimes and the way the terror group has lied about casualty figures — has no moral authority to judge even the most foolish Israeli effort to counter them.
The information war matters
The kerfuffle about fake media accounts matters because the information war about Gaza is a crucial element in the battle for American opinion. It is precisely the sort of lies about Israel wantonly attacking schools and hospitals or the vastly inflated Palestinian casualty statistics that are not only inaccurate but ignore the fact that it is likely that as many as half of those killed were terrorists, not noncombatants. Indeed, this same week, the Associated Press published a report that admitted that the exaggerated numbers of Palestinian women and children that it has been reporting as having been killed by Israel have been wrong all along. And it is this media campaign built on falsehoods that creates the pressure on Israel to end the war before Hamas is completely defeated or even before all of the remaining hostages are released, a point often left out of the conversation.
The pro-Hamas mobs on American college campuses and in the streets of our cities chanting their support for Israel’s destruction and spewing lies about “genocide” are being fueled not just by the toxic myths of critical race theory and intersectionality that are forced down the throats of students by leftist professors. Still, the effort to divert the world from the massive propaganda campaign that has been undertaken to falsely claim that Israel is guilty of “genocide” or “apartheid” does not alter the truth about who is really spreading disinformation about Gaza.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate)