The Atrocity Olympics When the Whole World is Watching
Sometimes social media can help the truth-seeker
Truth is elusive in the age of social media. You see a quote from a politician, say, or a claim about some alleged event that purportedly occurred, but you can’t be sure of whether they are true. You dig a little deeper and after a while even with all your research, you’re still not sure.
The challenge of discovering the truth is amplified enormously by war. Which is why people say the first casualty of war is truth.1
In war, tribalism runs rampant and people are prone to believe the worst things about their enemies. And the leaders of each side are prone to exaggerate wildly the bad deeds of its enemies in order to steel the resolve of its own people to fight. It is easier to risk your own life and to kill someone on the other side of a border if you believe that they’re not just opposing your country, but they’re monsters. Social media puts this phenomenon on steroids as algorithms feed us posts that confirm our biases.
Using propaganda to enrage soldiers and the home front is a very old story, going back at least 1000 years when the Crusades were justified by the Pope claiming that Muslims "had ravaged the churches of God in the Eastern provinces, circumcised Christian men, violated women, and carried out the most unspeakable torture before killing them."2 Accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children in order to make matzah for Passover was used to justify and encourage pogroms against Jews for centuries.
At the start of World War I, the British fabricated or exaggerated numerous stories about the German invasion of Belgium to fire up the troops:
Historian Nicoletta Gullace writes:
the invasion of Belgium, with its very real suffering, was nevertheless represented in a highly stylized way that dwelt on perverse sexual acts, lurid mutilations, and graphic accounts of child abuse of often dubious veracity.
In 1915, the British government released Report on Alleged German Outrages in Belgium which claimed that
after a thorough investigation they had indisputable evidence that German soldiers had cut off women’s breasts, bayonetted babies, chopped the hands off little children, and generally raped, pillaged and maimed the citizens of that peaceful and neutral country.
Monsters.
But that “thorough investigation” may not have been so thorough. As the Wikipedia entry “Atrocity Propaganda” puts it:
Few at the time criticised the accuracy of the report. After the war, historians who sought to examine the documentation for the report were told that the files had mysteriously disappeared. Surviving correspondence between the members of the committee revealed they actually had severe doubts about the credibility of the tales they investigated.
Which brings us to the present moment. Three weeks into the Hamas-Israeli war and the Atrocity Olympics are in full swing. Each side highlights the most lurid details possible to illustrate the barbarity of its enemy. Israel has released footage showing the most horrifying acts of Hamas. On the other side, Hamas is outraged by a blown-up hospital, a destroyed refugee camp, and they produce a list of the names of thousands of children killed by Israeli attacks.
Both sides try to parry the reports of atrocities. Israel denies blowing up the hospital and blames it on an errant rocket coming from Gaza. Israel explains that the refugee camp is not a camp but a neighborhood and that any deaths there were due to the collapse of tunnels protecting a Hamas command post. The number of dead children in Gaza? Do we know the the accuracy of that number? Hamas leaders calmly explain that the claims of rape, beheadings, and other acts of inhumanity never happened. Hamas would never target civilians.
One of these is not like the other.
I would say that, of course. I’m an Israeli. But because of social media, it’s a lot easier for anyone to say it.
Unlike the old days of mainstream media in America for example—three television networks, and newspapers—the truth in today’s world is actually a little easier to figure out than say, whether Germany really did commit atrocities in Belgium at the start of WWI. But only if you’re so inclined to seek the truth. And we all understand that many times, we don’t want the truth. Some truths make us too uncomfortable. On both sides.
The truth is easier to figure out in the age of social media—at least until AI blows everything up—because on X and Instagram and TikTok, we got an unfiltered, uncurated look at what happened on October 7. It may be the first Atrocity Olympics where the whole world is watching and watching in a way that’s different from previous wars, even wars covered by 24/7 cable news.
In the old days of mainstream media and before cellphones and GoPro, the atrocities of October 7 would have been reported verbally and mostly discounted by many, I’m guessing, as the kind of exaggerations all countries make in wartime about their adversary. But Hamas murderers recorded and broadcast the cold-blooded murder of civilians—families in their homes, young people at a music festival, the children in their cribs. Hamas spokespeople can make the claim that Hamas didn’t target civilians. That claim isn’t credible thanks to the urge of the murderers to broadcast their cruelty and the ability of social media to share it, during and after. And now the whole world has seen it, if they choose to look.
Some pro-Palestinian advocates respond to what we have seen with the slogan “by any means necessary. How can you blame Hamas, goes the argument—they face an oppressor with overwhelming firepower. In such a reality, goes the argument, everything is justified in the name of resistance and liberation. Brutality is the only weapon available. But the scope of the cruelty—rape, the mutilation of children, the uploading of a grandmother’s murder to her Facebook page to torment her granddaughter, the dismembering of victims—has caused some people to rethink the slogan. What happened on October 7 looks a lot like the Germans in Belgium, but this time, we don’t need a committee or a report to exaggerate what happened. We’ve seen it with our own eyes.
The power of social media is even clearer when we imagine a world without it, a world where the BBC and the New York Times and the AP filter what we see, hear, and read.
The BBC and New York Times reporting on the rocket attack that hit the Al-Ahli hospital allegedly destroying the hospital and killing 500, taught us more about those media sources than about what happened. We quickly discovered that it was a parking lot not the hospital itself that had been hit. There weren’t 500 dead. All we saw were charred cars. The Times showed a destroyed building on their front page story that turned out not to be the hospital.
We have learned that the BBC and the Times and others (the Associated Press, for example, that called the bloodlust unleashed at the Dagestan airport a “protest”) have clear sympathies with one side of the Atrocity Olympics over the other. I think I understand that. Some of it is the oppressor-oppressed narrative. It’s a milder version of those who excuse the atrocities entirely—Palestinians are oppressed victims so who can really blame them for their actions? Justice, nay, even fairness, requires putting one’s thumb on the scale when doing journalism, because, well, oppressor/oppressed. Of course Hamas lies. But they’re the underdogs. They don’t have airplanes, so they shade the truth. Or make it up. Or deny it. The media goes along in a way it never would in other situations.
Of course media sources are biased. On both sides. But we have learned beyond our imagining of how much those media sources are willing to forgive or ignore. It’s not just post-Marxist oppressor/oppressed vibes being embraced in the newsroom. That the New York Times has a stringer in Gaza who admires Hitler seems a little different from business as usual. And it’s something that even the Onion or Babylon Bee would fail to imagine. Not plausible enough to be funny. But it’s real.
None of this means Israel is blameless in the military response or blameless in how it has treated Palestinians in previous decades. It does mean that the Atrocity Olympics are a little different in the age of social media. It’s harder to lie. There will always be people who ignore lies or who are uncomfortable with the truth on both sides. Social media makes it a little harder to ignore those lies. And sometimes it forces us to take what a friend of mine calls a reality shampoo. You can’t run away from it.
The coverage of the hospital attack also taught us something about Hamas. They lie in a way that is hard to imagine for a Western journalist. People are enraged over thousands of dead children in Gaza. They should be, if it’s true. Every dead child there or anywhere is an immeasurable tragedy. Even one dead child in an aerial attack is a tragedy; the most recent reports from the Gaza health ministry say that 3,760 children are dead in Gaza from Israeli attacks, so 3,760 tragedies.
The deaths of children should engender outrage. We could debate who is to blame for those deaths in Gaza. But after the Al-ahli hospital farce, after Hamas spokespeople explain with a straight face that no civilians were targeted on October 7, one might question the casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. But because there is no way to verify those numbers or challenge those numbers with social media, Hamas scores a few easy points in the Atrocity Olympics.
On October 7th, Hamas dropped the mask. With the help of social media, we saw what was underneath. Anybody who wanted to see it could see it in all its ferocity. Because the whole world has been watching, the world has a better idea of what Israel and the Jewish people are up against. And in case you aren’t sure, check out the video below from the LBCI—Lebanese Broadcasting Company International—it’s the same Ghazi Hamad who denied in the video above that there were attacks on civilians on October 7. He’s a former deputy foreign minister of the Gazan government.
Listen carefully to his words. There are some edits in the video. Maybe some context is missing. Maybe the translation isn’t accurate. I’d love to think so. Do let me know. But for now, I’ll take his words to heart. Before October 7th, some of us may have deceived ourselves about what Hamas was really about. After October 7th, Israelis, Jews, and the world would be foolish to ignore what Hamas stands for. With the help of social media, we’ve all gotten a reality shampoo. Double click on the image below and follow the link that pops up. We ignore reality at our peril.
Ironically, we don’t seem know who said this first but that’s another story for another time.
Nicholas Cull; David Culbert; David Welch (2003). Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. ABC-CLIO. pp. 23–25. ISBN 1576078205.
I'm not sure you're correct that the truth is easier to find, with social media. It is true that it is easier for narratives that are counter to the mainstream to find a foothold, but ultimately it is still up to the individual media consumer to decide who to trust.
In an environment of competing truth claims, where the mainstream claims are sometimes incorrect, it seems to me quite difficult "get to the truth" in each case of controversy.
Back here in the states, the worry about the Gaza humanitarian crisis -as people are calling it- is becoming ever-present. There is a rally in my town today. There was an interesting article in the WSJ that brought up the bombing of Dresden. People debate; was it necessary, did we have to bomb so hard, and on and on. But in the end, no one really worries too much because after all the enemy was so evil that we couldn't risk them having any power. Now I'm not saying I just want to indiscriminately level everything in sight, but everyone has some internal scale, and if the enemy is bad enough we accept the cost. Some things can't continue. Growing now (right now in my downtown oddly) there is a tacit acceptance that Hamas is somehow not that bad. The safe and supposedly enlightened way to say this is that Israel needs to be a little slower, we need a pause, we need more restraint, consider both sides. It's Saturday Night Live logic to say "time-out" to the murderous armed burglar. I think it's partly an American fascination with the underdog. If all men are created equal then if someone is less powerful we assume it's because of some injustice, not because hard-won progress has rightfully ground their lunacy out of power. Thank you for the Podcast and I hope you and your family are safe.