The Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas

Imagine going back in time, a decade or so, and telling anti-fascists that one day they’ll be doing the bidding of fascists. Imagine telling anti-racists that they would soon become propagandists for racists. Imagine telling those woke campus feminists, the sort who thought that being propositioned at the student bar was ‘rape culture’, that in the not-too-distant future they’d be making excuses for literal rape. They’d have thought you mad. And yet it’s happened. Many of yesteryear’s self-righteous haters of bigotry have morphed into the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas – one of the most bigoted movements on Earth.

This week, we got a grim insight into this unholiest of hook-ups between our own bourgeois anti-fascists and Gaza’s religious fascists. A story emerged about members of the Israel Defence Forces raping women in al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. It sounded hellish. Women were brutalised in front of male family members. Some women were summarily executed. One of the rape victims was five months pregnant. Al Jazeera splashed with the horror story and it spread with staggering speed through activist circles online. It was signal-boosted by some in the mainstream media too, including the Guardian’s Owen Jones.

There was only one problem: there wasn’t so much as a sliver of proof these atrocities took place. The terrible tale came from an interview with one woman. She said she witnessed IDF troops ‘raping women [and] then killing them and burning entire families alive’. It now seems she made the whole thing up, in the hope that her ‘incorrect talk’ might ‘arouse the nation’s fervour’ – that is, drum up yet more hate for Israel. Al Jazeera has taken down its report about the hell in the hospital and a former director of the channel, Yasser Abuhilalah, has flat-out said it was fake. It was ‘fabricated’, he says.

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