Palestinian officials said Tuesday that Israel had returned the bodies of 80 people it had held during the Gaza war via the Kerem Shalom border crossing. The Hamas-run government media office said Israel had not identified the bodies or said where they had been taken from. They had been “mutilated,” the media office said in a statement, and there were “clear” indications that organs had been “stolen” from the corpses.The claims could not be independently verified. The Israel Defense Forces referred questions about the bodies to the Israeli agency for civilian coordination with the Palestinians, which did not immediately respond. The corpses, wrapped in blue body bags, were buried Tuesday in a mass grave.
This is not journalism. This is a blood libel pretending to be journalism.
It is impossible to use organs like hearts and kidneys from dead bodies. Tissue donation must be within 24 hours after death and requires a full medical evaluation of the donor beforehand.
In short, it is not just a lie, but a lie that is easily proven to be a lie. Yet the Post didn’t bother to take that extra step and actually inform their readers that it is indeed a lie.
Which would also prove that one cannot trust anything Hamas says. That is a real story, and it is one that the news media is loathe to tackle. It continue to give Hamas statements the same gravity that it gives to the IDF.
Israeli officials are (too) professional. They have to chase down these stories and disprove them. It takes time to do that – they need to find and contact the departments that were responsible for the return of the bodies, find out the circumstances of their return, the circumstances of their deaths, what happened to the bodies in between – in short, they need to do an internal investigation to responsibly answer even the most absurd charges, because respected news media is asking for the information and they need to ensure that they don’t misstate anything.
It takes minutes for Hamas to make up a lie. It takes dozens of man-hours to debunk them properly. This is an asymmetric cognitive war that Hamas has a huge advantage in – as long as it knows that journalists will take their lies seriously.
A real journalist doesn’t simply parrot what a terror organization says. Saying “the claims could not be independently verified” is a way to claim journalistic integrity but in reality it gives the obviously false claims validity. That vaunted journalistic respect for “science” that proves Hamas is lying is missing from this story.
{Reposted from EoZ}
