The word “propaganda” is from the Latin: congregatio de propaganda fide, the “congregation for propagation of the faith,” a Roman Catholic committee of cardinals, founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, to arrange missionary work for church organizations. To propagate something is to spread it, to encourage its growth, as in the propagation of plants, but the word’s also commonly used to apply to the spreading of thoughts and ideas. A related word is “indoctrination.” To indoctrinate someone is to get them to internalize your doctrines through propaganda.
The purpose of the missionary work of the congregatio was to change people’s minds: to convert them from whatever religious belief or mindset they originally held, to adherence to the Roman Catholic faith. So confident was the Church that its doctrines were divinely sanctioned that it even allowed torture in order to convert recalcitrant sinners: hence the Spanish Inquisition, whose main victims were Jews and Muslims. It was torturing their mortal bodies in order to save their immortal souls. Somehow the twisted logic of the authoritarian mind had managed to redefine sadistic violence as a form of kindness.
The modern use of the term dates from the early-20th Century, from World War I. The British were the first to use it to any significant degree. At the start of the war, British propaganda was uncoordinated, spread out between different government departments, but in September 1914 a new organization was set up to focus efforts. This was the War Propaganda Bureau, more commonly referred to as Wellington House. Later it was replaced by the Ministry of Information, a suitably Orwellian name given that its purpose was to spread disinformation.
One of its early publications was the Report on Alleged German Outrages, which came out in May 1915. The pamphlet documented atrocities, both real and imagined, supposedly committed by the German army against Belgian civilians. A Dutch artist, Louis Raemaekers, provided graphic illustrations which underlined its purpose.
This was an early form of what came to be known as “atrocity propaganda”: the use of often unverified accusations of atrocities in order to blacken the name of the enemy. Examples of such stories included the accusation that German soldiers were deliberately mutilating Belgian babies by cutting off their hands, that a Canadian soldier was crucified with bayonets, and that the Germans were slicing off the breasts of Belgian women. All of these stories turned out to be false, but had a galvanizing effect on public opinion in the United States, which eventually joined the war on the British side. German authorities later acknowledged that British propaganda had played a significant part in helping them to win the war.
A more recent example of atrocity propaganda was used prior to the first Gulf War. This was the famous Nayirah testimony, given to the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990, by a 15-year-old girl, only identified by her first name. In it she claimed to have seen Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and leaving them on the floor to die. This was also untrue, despite being repeated a number of times by George H. W. Bush. This false testimony was then amplified in news reports around the world to gain public support for an invasion that was already planned to take place.
I’m sure you can draw parallels with what’s currently happening in Gaza. The current death toll of in excess of 33,000, and the deliberate starvation of an entire population, is being justified by the events that took place on October 7. A whole flurry of atrocity stories were released, many of which have turned out to be untrue. Not that you’d know that by watching the news on TV, or reading the millionaire press. Despite a number of articles and videos debunking the dominant narrative, the bulk of the media either continues to repeat the disinformation, or to ignore evidence to the contrary.
This isn’t to say that there were no Hamas atrocities that day. There were. But there’s also evidence of falsification, exaggeration, and downright lies that led the media narrative, and which have since been used to justify the atrocities being carried out by Israel, supposedly in response. One surprise is that so far there has been no definitive account in the UK of what took place on October 7. Not one major news agency has spent time and resources on gathering the information to try to find out what actually happened. There may be accounts in other parts of the world, but, if so, I’m unaware of them. The only definitive account I’ve seen is provided by the Qatari media network, Al Jazeera, which produced a documentary called, simply, October 7. It’s available here. I urge everyone to watch it.
It clearly shows Hamas atrocities. It shows the murder of unarmed civilians. It shows widespread looting and hostage taking. It shows massive confusion and lack of coordination. It also shows the incursion into Southern Israel of large numbers of Gazan civilians not under the control of Hamas, and the failure of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to properly defend the region, despite repeated warnings.
In addition it shows that a number of the Israeli dead were killed by their own forces. It suggests that a version of the Hannibal directive was deployed. This is the IDF directive that allows for the killing of Israeli citizens rather than allowing them to be captured. As one version says, "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces." Under this directive vehicles fleeing to the Gaza border were attacked by helicopter gunships, regardless of who was in them. Many were Hamas fighters. Some weren’t. And some of the kibbutzim buildings in which hostages were held were fired on by Israeli heavy weaponry, bringing them down and burying everyone underneath the rubble. Later some of the burnt and mangled bodies were lined up and put on display as examples of Hamas barbarity.
There were also outright lies. The most well-known is the story of the 40 beheaded babies at Kfar Aza, reported on Israeli news channel i24 on the morning of October 10, and then relayed around the world. Except that, as the Al Jazeera report shows, no babies were killed at Kfar Aza. In another episode an Israeli commander is standing in front of a burnt-out house. He tells the reporter that he’s seen the remains of 15 burnt hostages, including eight babies. But there were no babies in the kibbutz, and it’s fairly clear, from the extent of the damage, that this house has been attacked, not by Hamas, but by the tanks of the IDF.
Even the lies are inconsistent. Another report, from the exact same house but two days later, shows Yossi Landau of the search and rescue organization, ZAKA, telling of piles of children tied up and burned to death. This account is later repeated by Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call to President Biden: “They took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them,” he says. The same witness later tells of seeing the body of a pregnant woman with the foetus ripped out and stabbed. This was denied by the very kibbutz where the incident was supposed to have taken place. In the course of the documentary Landau finally admits that he was lying about the children. “When you look at them and they’re burned you don’t know exactly the ages. So you’re talking about 18-years-old, 20-years-old… you just don’t look on the spot… to see the ages or something like that.”
In another segment, US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, says this: “A family of four around the breakfast table, the father his eye gouged out, the mother’s breasts cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off, before they were executed. And then their executioners sat down and had a meal.” Statements like this were propagated around the world and helped cement the image of the Hamas fighters as inhuman and barbaric. This story also originates with Yossi Landau, and is also debunked by Al Jazeera. On the back of this, Netanyahu is shown encouraging ZAKA activists to keep up the good work of informing the press.
I can already hear the voices of objection. This is pro-Palestinian propaganda, they’ll say. Al Jazeera is an Arab news network and inherently biased. That’s true. In a diverse media landscape we should expect to hear contradictory voices. But the puzzle is why other media organizations haven’t also committed time and resources to revisiting the events of October 7 and come up with their own version. The information is widely available. Could it be that by re-evaluating the material they’d also have to admit that much of what they reported at the time was untrue?
Humans aren’t motivated by facts, but stories. We’re not moved by cold statistics and careful analysis, but emotions written into our DNA. The disgust we feel when confronted by such horrific descriptions strikes us as more real than reality itself. It persists in our imagination whether true or not. He who controls the narrative, controls the mind. Having planted these stories in our heads in the days and weeks after, they remain as powerful signifiers in the collective unconscious. They dehumanize the Palestinians and allow atrocities to be committed against them. This is the same mechanism by which Nazis dehumanized Jews during the Holocaust. It’s not enough to say merely that Hamas committed war crimes by killing civilians. In order to justify the extent of the destruction, we have to see Hamas as less than human, as animals capable of committing these vile acts. Mere murder isn’t enough. It has to be murder with an extra dimension of repulsion. It has to be unspeakable acts committed against women and children. This is the only way that the unholy mayhem being unleashed against the Palestinian people can be justified. It’d done in order to wipe the evil of Hamas from the face of the Earth. Everything can be blamed on Hamas. Hamas is the justification for everything.
All of this is standard in the propaganda playbook. If the British were the leaders in WWI, the Nazis became the experts in WWII. Here is what Hitler said in Mein Kampf: The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.
He continues: All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.
Zionist propagandists, consciously or not, have employed this precise strategy. Here is David Mencer, the current Israeli spokesman in the British media, on Talk TV: This is a terrorist organisation that cannot be appeased... It needs to be defeated, because if it’s not defeated here it will take roots on the streets of London. We already saw a hundred thousand people marching. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That means the eradication of my people here in Israel.
He’s referring to Hamas, while conflating them with demonstrators on the streets of London calling for a ceasefire, and suggesting that the popular slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is, in fact, a call for the genocide of the Israeli people. It’s worth watching the whole debate, if only to see how deranged some of these Zionist apologists are.
The person he’s talking to is James Schneider, co-founder of Momentum, the organization set up to support Jeremy Corbyn when he was the leader of the Labour Party. Mencer’s argument quickly turns into an ad hominem attack. He refers to Schneider’s “love of Jew-haters,” and continues: You support evil James, you support evil Hamas… Evil Hamas. Child killers. Women rapers. Child beheaders. Yes, evil Hamas James. You support them, I reject them.
Schneider is Jewish. This accusation, that objecting to the mass slaughter of Palestinians amounts to support for “evil Hamas,” is one that’s restated again and again in Zionist rhetoric and is the perfect illustration of Hitler’s dictum that “these slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea....”
—Follow Chris Stone on X: @ChrisJamesStone
