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Our age is one where information is much more openly available and quickly verifiable than ever before. Yet it is also an age when speedily provable untruths are asserted ever more brazenly by leading figures, even in open, democratic societies. They do not seem to mind – or to suffer – when their untruths are exposed.
Donald Trump is the best-known western leader who excels in these methods. This week, he launched one of his notorious Oval Office ambushes. He suddenly confronted president Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa with a film show purporting to prove the “genocide” of South African white farmers.
BBC Verify quickly got to work to demolish Trump’s claims. His “burial site” of “over a thousand” white farmers was actually a line of temporary crosses commemorating the murder of one farming couple. A picture he waved at president Ramaphosa was actually a scene from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Although Trump is right that white farmers are persecuted and occasionally murdered in South Africa (some fleeing to America), this is nowhere near a genocide and his facts, which the White House surely has the resources to get right, were wildly wrong. The BBC easily established this, and was happy to do so, because it hates Mr Trump.
In the same week, another public figure made another unevidenced claim, on an even more incendiary subject. On Tuesday, the BBC Today programme interviewed Tom Fletcher, a former British diplomat who dislikes Israel even more than do his former employers at the Foreign Office and is therefore a frequent voice on the BBC. Nowadays he is the United Nations “humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator”.
In his Today interview, he strayed way beyond relief coordination and into politics, accusing Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war”. Grandly, he explained that, when addressing the Security Council, “I weighed with great thought and care what I should say”.
On the BBC, Mr Fletcher weighed nothing carefully at all. He said that if Israel did not let UN food through there were “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them”.
This was an obviously ridiculous statement. Even if Mr Fletcher were right – which he emphatically is not – that only Israel is to blame for the delay in getting aid through, no one could accurately name such a number in such a timescale.
His words were uttered five days ago. Although some aid did get through this week, if Mr Fletcher had been speaking true, thousands of babies would have starved in Gaza in the past three days. Not one such death has been reported.
The BBC did later probe Mr Fletcher’s assertion and reported what they politely called “more detail” on his claim. He had been relying on a report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) that it expected 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition over the course of a year, should the same level of aid continue.
His enumeration of mass deaths in 48 hours was a wild extrapolation for which he has not apologised and will surely not be punished. By the way, the same IPC whose projections he grossly distorted has admitted that there is currently no famine in Gaza.
The substance of Mr Fletcher’s claim was no more than that the blocking of aid would worsen hunger and suffering in Gaza. We knew that already, and we also know, though Mr Fletcher skirted this point, that the greatest problem with aid is that it is vulnerable to Hamas exploitation. The UN never admits this because its relationship with Hamas is collusive: it is, at root, a political not a humanitarian organisation.
Anyway, the damage was done. In Parliament, 13 MPs supporting the attack on Israel by David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, repeated the Fletcher dead baby formula, unrebuked. Tom Gross, the respected monitor of Israel coverage in the media everywhere, noted that the New York Times, NBC News, Time magazine, The Guardian and ABC news all repeated Mr Fletcher’s 48 hours claim, citing the BBC as a reliable source. On Friday, Mr Fletcher’s 14,000 dead babies were still up on the BBC website.
Although admitting the “horrendous level of suffering” in the conflict, Mr Gross also says, “I follow it incredibly closely, and so far as I can tell, no one has yet died of hunger in this conflict”. Yet the times since October 7 2023 that the BBC has run starvation scares about Gazan people are almost uncountable.
You barely hear that Israel’s policy is not to stop the aid but to find more secure ways of distributing it. It is establishing aid delivery via a US-backed group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, protected by foreign security guards.
Mr Fletcher probably has an untroubled conscience. He will brush aside his “48 hours” distortion and the BBC will treat him gently because it thinks his heart is in the right place. He may even feel proud of grabbing the headlines.
But in Gaza, more than in any other current conflict, the battle is being fought not only by weapons, but by constant propaganda. The overall effect of this is to dehumanise Israelis and, by extension, all Jews.
The constant use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s war is not merely a heartless insult. It is designed to make Jews seem like the Nazi murderers who sought their extinction in the 1940s.
If that propaganda succeeds, two things happen. The first is that, as in 1945, Israel will be made to face a legal reckoning for what will be claimed as war crimes. The rhetoric of Mr Lammy and, indeed, of the joint statement this week by Britain, France and Canada, ramps up the idea that international courts have the authority to punish Israel, and threatens trade and further arms export restrictions. By implication, they see what they call “the Netanyahu government”, as an illegitimate regime, even though it is the only government with democratic legitimacy in the Middle East.
The second effect is on the collective mind of the West. If those in power here half-endorse the suggestion of genocide or, in the case of Mr Fletcher and UN agencies, directly state that Israel is deliberately engendering starvation, then officialdom endorses the logic of extremism.
If Israel is killing babies, say angry, radicalised young men, let’s kill the baby-killers.
In Washington DC on Thursday, a young Israeli couple, engaged to be married, were murdered in the name of Free Palestine. The man arrested is said to be a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation of the United States. His extreme anti-Israel ideology was the gateway to his actions. If we judge by the slogans shouted in the pro-Gaza marches in Britain, many are passing through the same gateway here.
For Labour, in particular, such people, chiefly Muslims, are a significant part of its constituency.
The party will pay a high price in civil unrest and terrorism for feeding their delusions.
In a lecture this week at Policy Exchange, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, tried to revive official interest in the concept of subversion, which our intelligence services took so seriously during the Cold War.
At much the same time, in France, the interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, newly elected leader of his party, has succeeded in declassifying his government’s internal report on subversion by the Muslim Brotherhood – the global organisation of which Hamas is a part – in his country.
We have never managed the equivalent here, preferring the vapourings of people like Mr Fletcher.
