No babies aged 0-3 years have yet been named amongst the dead of Hamas’s October 7th attack. The stories of beheaded babies, it now seems likely, were in fact weapons of mass destruction launched by experienced Israeli and American media warriors to enflame emotions and soften the ground for genocide. It’s not the first time this has happened. It is time we learnt the lessons of history.
Within hours of the October 7 attack Israeli Defence Force spokesmen reported that babies had been beheaded by Hamas fighters. The story was obligingly flashed across CNN, the Guardian, BBC, countless front pages, and shot out via a billion complicit or gullible Facebook and X posts. Within another few hours the story had mutated into “40 babies beheaded” and flew out of the mouths of influencers on countless news channels.
“Stranger Things” star Noah Schnapp was one who fuelled the fire, sending his 25 million Instagram followers this post: “40 babies were beheaded and burned alive in front of their parents by Hamas.”
President Biden said he had seen images of them, and said “I have been doing this for a long time, I never thought I would see – have confirmed pictures of – terrorists beheading children.” The White House quickly retracted his claim. The Hill warned that Biden is a “serial fabulist” – but the old boy had done his job: genocide is now easier for Israel to commit. 3000 Palestinian children now lie dead, along with a number of Israeli children, including at least one four-year-old killed in the Hamas attack. All civilian lives, especially children's, should be inviolate. No exceptions.
Parts of the media are now rowing back their claims. CNN anchor Sara Sidner said: "Yesterday the Israeli Prime Minister's office said that it had confirmed Hamas beheaded babies & children while we were live on the air. The Israeli government now says today it CANNOT confirm babies were beheaded. I needed to be more careful with my words and I am sorry."
Unlike the real victims of October 7 and unlike the hundreds of Palestinian babies who have been slaughtered by the Israelis, whose shattered bodies we’ve actually seen, these 40 fictive infants survived the attack and will be boxed up, ready for repackaging next time a monstrous lie is needed to justify war crimes.
Haaretz, Israel’s leading newspaper, which has been filled with war cries since the attack, has published details of over 930 named dead from the October 7 attack. As of the time of writing, not one baby aged 0 to three years old has been publicly identified. Not one. Let alone a beheaded one. Let alone 40.
Does that matter? Wasn’t what Hamas did sufficiently bad, evil, enough of a war crime to justify the revenge we are witnessing? Apparently not. But don’t ask me; ask Biden, Netanyahu, Ursula Von Der Leyen, Rishi Sunak and the thousands of western journalists who spat it into the faces of people trying to stand up for now-dead and soon-to-die Palestinians. When I raised my voice in defence of innocent Palestinian civilians, I was shouted down by friends, incandescent with rage over dead babies. Now when I raise my voice after hundreds of babies have been slaughtered in Gaza, I’m greeted with indifference by many of those same people. But the tide is turning … the arc of history must surely turn towards justice. Justice is the seed; peace is the flower.
Here is why this particular lie was so important to tell: When your business is genocide you want your victims to appear as evil as possible.
I’m Irish: we know what it is to be vilified, treated and described as animals, forbidden fundamental human rights, bombed and burnt into submission, to be driven off our land and to be starved into death or exodus. Dehumanising us was part of the project.
Back to dead babies as tools of propaganda.
The Bible tells of the Jewish King Herod slaughtering new-borns as he tried to eliminate the little Babe Jesus. Mary and Joseph fled into Egypt (where the Israelis would like to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians of Gaza). The rest is history. Or not.
The bible story mutated over centuries into the famous Blood Libel that blamed the Jews not only for the death of Jesus but said Jews sacrificed, even ate, Christian babies in secret rituals. It was a Convenient Untruth used to justify mass murder and persecution of Jewish populations throughout Europe from the Middle Ages to the 20th Century.
But times change and the dead babies are assigned new duties.
Who remembers the dozens of babies thrown out of incubators by Iraqis soldiers at the hospital in Kuwait City in 1990? Millions of people across the world, me included, sat riveted by the testimony of a tearful young Kuwaiti woman called Nayirah who gave evidence at a crucial Congressional hearing that helped build support in the American mind for a holy war against Satan Saddam Hussein. Nayirah was working as a volunteer in a hospital when Iraqi soldiers burst in, removing the babies from incubators and tossing the wee mites onto the floor to die. Immediately following her testimony, which created a global media storm at the time, Chairman Rep John Porter, said: “We have never heard in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, brutality, and sadism as the ones the witnesses have given us today.”
Powerful. Moving. But a pack of utter lies.
The knowing and cynical Rep. Porter had asked that only Nayirah’s first name be used to protect her family. Good reason for that: Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to Washington. She was a member of al-Sabah family, the ruling house of Kuwait, had never worked in a hospital, and, as she admitted much later, had never witnessed any babies being thrown out of incubators. Not one. What she had done was sit for days with Hill & Knowlton, the American public relations company used by the Pentagon to build war lust amongst the US population. Not a difficult thing to do. They scripted the story, coached the young princess and set the dead babies to work on gullible minds.
Rep. Porter told listeners that people in the “civilised” world must do everything in their power to remove this “scourge”. Shortly after Nayirah’s testimony A-10 Warthogs, Abraham tanks, cruise missiles and all the same sort of instruments of death now being used on Gazan civilians were unleashed on the Iraqis. Hundreds of thousands were killed or maimed. When challenged over the deaths of thousands of real Iraqi babies in a subsequent US blockade, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said: “This is a very hard choice but we think the price is worth it.”
The Incubator babies had helped lay the groundwork for such monstrous inhumanity. The beheaded babies of Israel have done their job too - allowing Netanyahu to say the assault on Gaza is a “holy mission”. Fellow Knesset MPs have called for a non-nuclear Hiroshima, a second Nakba, another bombing like that of Dresden - praising the resolution of the British and Americans in committing these acts. “It is time to be cruel,” Cabinet Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who leads the Religious Zionist Party, told the world last week.
The Americans and Israelis have two comparative advantages over any of their adversaries. Unrivalled ability to kill people. And storytelling. Nobody does it better.
So beware of dead babies. They can kill millions
