Day 52: Monday

Today, let’s take a deep dive. Of necessity, a deep dive insulates you from all of the noise above the surface of the water. This means that I’m not going to wrestle with what will probably, in the next day or two, become Israel’s next unanswerable question: if and when we proceed on the understanding that Hamas will release ten abductees in return for a further day’s pause, and Hamas offers, instead, only nine or eight hostages, will we accept this, or will we tell Hamas to keep the hostages, and resume hostilities?

Similarly, I’m not going to discuss Hamas’s psychological torture of the Israeli public over the exchange of hostages for terror prisoners.

I’m not even going to discuss Kay Burley’s breathtaking assertion during her Sky News interview of Israeli Government spokesman Eylon Levy. (In this particular case, I’m not discussing it because words fail me – thankfully, they did not fail Eylon Levy, although, in his case, his eyebrows were even more eloquent than his mouth.)

Instead, I want to look at a phenomenon that only became prominent following the advent of mass media, and was, indeed, enabled by mass media: fake news. The world’s first big international fake news story revolved around what became known as The Rape of Belgium: the German invasion of Belgium in autumn 1914. This is a story in instalments, and it has relevance to what is happening today.

Between August and October 1914 German troops invaded and occupied Belgium. Rumours quickly spread of brutal acts of violence against civilians, including mass rape and mutilation of Belgian and French women. As a result, Belgium, France and Great Britain set up a committee of inquiry to document the German war crimes in accordance with the Hague Convention of 1907. The committee confirmed the reports of massive sexual assaults on the female civilian population by German soldiers.

The Allies considered the rapes to be a central component of the atrocities committed by the German troops, rendering the German enemy inhuman and impossible to negotiate a ceasefire with. These reports were used to justify the war and the continued killing so as to prevent further such acts and avenge the violence. The defence of family and sexual values became an essential element of Allied motivation. Apart from the mobilisation of the British and French people, the instrumentalisation for propaganda purposes of the German atrocities also served to influence neutral countries, particularly Italy and the United States.

Tabloid newspapers, popular literature, postcards and cartoons disseminated the image of German barbarians and their Belgian and French victims. Not just individuals but the entire German people were accused of the atrocities. Germany became the ultimate evil power capable of committing the most atrocious deeds. The German war atrocities and their exploitation for propaganda purposes contributed significantly to the image of Germany as an enemy and to the moral legitimation for the war by the Allies.

Many of the more sensational stories of German “outrages” are very hard to believe, much less corroborate.  German soldiers eating Belgian babies; German soldiers hanging Belgian nuns between church bells and ringing them to death; German soldiers crucifying dozens of farmers by the roadside; and so on — these are stories that after the war became standard examples of why “propaganda” is not to be trusted, with the result that all stories of German atrocities were largely discredited. It is possible that this distrust led to the English-speaking peoples’ failure to react swiftly to the events of the years leading up to 1939.

In recent decades, historical research has indicated that, in fact, large-scale German atrocities were indeed committed against the Belgians. It turns out that it is not the atrocities that were fake news, but the discrediting of the atrocities.

Fast forward 109 years, and we see that fake news is alive and well, and flourishing in the modern world of social media and online video. Indeed, as media become more sophisticated, so does the range of tools and techniques available to propagators of fake news.

In a world where fake news passes for reliable information, how do we separate lies from the truth? Enter Fake Reporter, an Israeli online watchdog group that uses a combination of professional intelligence experts and an online crowd-sourced research platform to lead efforts against disinformation, Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour (CIB), hate speech, and online incitement.

In 2021, they logged over 9,000 reports, and this number has risen every year since.

The organisation was formed to protect and support Israel’s civil society and pro-democracy forces against targeted attacks, as well as expose the mechanisms and actors behind the distribution and weaponisation of malicious content online. Since October 7, Fake Reporter has been working around the clock to identify, expose, debunk and, where possible, take down, fake news around the events in Israel and Gaza.

For those of you who are Hebrew speakers, this 9-minute TV report on Fake Reporters’ activities in the last weeks gives a sense of the scale of the challenge. Six minutes in (at 2:34:36), it gives an example, in English, of AI-generated video that seems to me undetectable to the naked eye as fake.

If you want to learn more about the organisation’s work, this 25-minute presentation in English, made in 2022, gives an excellent overview of the spread of fake news and how it can be combatted. (Trigger warning: the organisation was founded at the height of the judicial reform demonstrations way back when, and is funded by the New Israel Fund. If the combination of those two facts tempts you to dismiss the organisation out of hand, I would recommend you read the rest of this post.)

If you encounter anything which you suspect is fake news or a fake profile, or which is an inciting post, you can use the following link to report it (in English or Hebrew) to Fake Reporter, who will then research it in depth.

https://www.fakereporter.net/?lang=en

What you should not do is respond to the incitement or the fake news online, since social media algorithms are built to promote any item that generates interest. By responding to the item, you will actually be promoting it.

Which begs the question: how do I spot fake news? The International Federation of Library Associations…. Remember libraries? They used to be large, imposing buildings where people went to google, back in the day. But I digress. The International Federation of Library Associations, as I was saying, has produced the following useful tips.

Let me now try to explain what led me to believe that I should turn my back on all of the headline issues this week, and focus my intention instead on what may seem like a comparatively academic topic.

In the last months, and especially since October 7, I have been puzzled, and sometimes dumbstruck, by the behaviour of much of Western intelligentsia. That a university professor felt exhilarated by the news and scenes of the atrocities of October 7 is astonishing; but it is not, arguably, unimaginable. All you have to do is imagine that degree and intensity of antisemitism. However, that functioning human beings should deny that the Hamas genocide of October 7 even happened seems at an entirely greater level of unimaginability. “But,” we say, open-mouthed, “they filmed their own video of it, and boasted of it in phone calls to their parents.”

In refusing to believe that evidence, I think that these people are saying that they refuse to believe any evidence. This may be a more extreme version of the allies’ inability to believe the evidence of the 1930s. As a consequence of the widening spread of fake news, and of the increasing difficulty of detecting it as fake, people are increasingly refusing to accept any news as true. Unable to judge what is true anymore, they give up the attempt, and reject all ‘objective’ evidence presented to them. What they are then left with is their belief system, their ideology.

What we are witnessing is, I fear, the beginning of what George Orwell documented with terrifying accuracy 75 years ago, in 1984. In Orwell’s words, these people are prepared to believe that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

There is no such thing as historical context, so any past action (such as slave ownership, or even manufacture that depends on purchasing raw materials that were made available using slave labour) must be judged solely by current sensibilities. There is no such thing as extenuating circumstances. There is only the one truth from which all moral judgement derives.

This renders the world binary. Everyone is either an oppressor, and evil, or oppressed, and good. No amount of rational thought will change that binary division, and, therefore, there is no practical benefit in rational thought. To quote Orwell again:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?… The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

Clearly, Israel faces very real and tangible challenges: completing the return of all the hostages; destroying Hamas in the north and then the south of the Gaza Strip; finding a way of preventing the resurgence of Hamas or a similar terror army in the future. Equally clearly, if Israel does not meet these challenges successfully, there will be serious consequences not just for Israel and the Middle East, but for civilisation as a whole.

At the same time, the rise of fake news and the tightening chokehold of binary inter-sectionalism on the Western world may represent a no less serious threat to civilisation. 2050 is less than 27 years away, and Orwell’s prediction is looking more and more accurate every year.