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WATCH: 'Pallywood' Video Shows Us One Way We are Lied to About the War in Gaza

Aaron Walker
Aaron Walker  |  11:50 PM on October 26, 2023
@alganmehmett/fair use

Everyone has seen it at least once, online.

A pro-Palestinian/Hamass account posts a video that is ordinarily sad or heartbreaking, showing some people of middle eastern descent in a tough situation and they tell you ‘THIS IS A HORRIBLE THING THOSE JOOOOOOS I MEAN ZIONISTS ARE DOING TO THE PALESTINIANS!!!’

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Here’s a prime example of this. It’s allegedly a Palestinian father having successfully taught his daughter to laugh every time an Israeli airstrike hits nearby, apparently being told it was not something dangerous. There are shades of Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful there, and it's heartbreaking. But the Community Note gives the deception away:

We saw earlier today where a Palestinian Vlogger made a miraculous recovery, and that is a valid example of what we call Pallywood. And so is this. You see, conservatives have noticed a trend for a while. Whenever there is any fighting between the Isrealis and the Palestinians, there is an unusual amount of outright lying on the pro-Palestinian side and we started to call it Pallywood. We’re not sure who started the term, but here’s a classic video showing just how much obvious lying can be involved in this kind of coverage—which often leaks into the mainstream media:

That is one way in which we are we are lied to about the current war between Israel and Gaza, but the video by ‘Censored Man’ is another example. Mind you, we don’t know if Censored Man was lying, or if he or she had been lied to and unknowingly repeated that lie, and we won’t assume anything about his or her character because we frankly never heard of this account before today.

But there is definitely some lying going on, here.

As you were told from the community note, the video is apparently real, but it was shot years ago and not even in any confrontation with Israel. In fact, we found the original and we might as well show enough of the thread to show the happy ending:

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According to Google Translate, the first post says:

A friend from Idlib took refuge in the border town of Sarmada with his family. He taught his 4-year-old daughter that the sounds of planes and bombs were a game. Every time a sound is heard, the family laughs so that the game will not be disrupted. Syria has become a slow-motion defeat for humanity. Huge heartache.

And the second one says:

Abdullah and his beautiful daughter Selva. The father and daughter whose situation I shared above. And again that devastating game repeats itself. You don’t need to know Arabic to understand it.

Actually, you do kind of do need at least some explanation (in a language you are fluent in) to understand it, otherwise you might think this is a little girl enjoying the sound of fireworks, but we get his point. And even Al JizzJazeera reported on it at the time:

Of course, Al Jazeera is not particularly trustworthy, but how can we say this? They get more trustworthy when no jooooos or Americans are involved in the story. And the article makes it clear, none were involved:

The video was filmed in Sarmada, a small town near Syria’s border with Turkey where the family has sought refuge amid a renewed offensive by Syrian government forces and their allies on rebel-held northwestern Syria.

The family were forced to flee their home in Saraqeb, a strategic town in Idlib province that fell to government forces earlier this month, when the air raids became too ‘intense’ to handle, al-Mohamed told Al Jazeera.

And let’s all take a step back, here. Let’s pretend that the video was what Censored Man claimed it was. If Israel was dropping bombs in the general area—please note, this child was not being hurt in the video (not even psychologically, truly)—who’s fault is that? Israel didn’t start this war. Hamass did. And Hamass could end it at any time by surrendering. 

Yeah, it’s more than a little weird that we are agreeing with David Frum on anything, but even a broken clock is right two times a day. So, the entire fault for the war in Gaza falls on Hamass and so the blame for any conventional warfare carried out by Israel falls at its feet.

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And the lesson we should all draw from this deception is pretty much summed up in a sign we keep ‘tapping’:

It is fair to say that as a general principle, you should never absolutely trust a video or photo that has no proof of date on it—and some rando on Twitter/X saying it was taken at a certain place on a certain date doesn’t count. And if someone shares a picture of an article or a social media post, be extra suspicious—why not just link to it? What it comes down to is you have to learn who to trust as institutions and to be discerning in that.

That goes double with Pallywood.

And for the love of G-d, don’t allow yourself to have Gell-Mann Amnesia. To quote the late, great Michael Crichton:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

And, of course, with regard to the current war in Gaza, reporters know even less than normal, because many of them won’t even go into the region. And they rely on local reporters who … um … seem to have a bias problem:

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And really, this is kind of on-brand for the New York Times:

That’s an article discussing the New York Times first ‘profile’ of Adolf Hitler, and, in the history of takes that didn’t age well … it was a doozy. You’d think the Times would be more careful more than a century later, but you would be wrong. We suppose the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In the world of computer programming, they have an acronym: GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. It means that if the data you give to a computer is bad, the output it will give you will also be bad. In this metaphor, you are the computer. If you don’t guard yourself against bad data, you will draw bad conclusions.

And, for the record, sometimes that means you won’t know what precisely is happening and you have to learn to be comfortable with not knowing. For instance, we have not seen any credible evidence that a single civilian has been killed by Israeli action in Gaza during this entire war. We’re not saying that this definitely hasn’t happened—we tend to assume some civilians die in every war, however honorably it is being fought—but we haven’t seen a report of it happening that we can trust. And if you go back to previous wars, did we have that kind of real-time information in those struggles? Did we have anything approaching an accurate body count, for instance, in Nazi Germany? We doubt that we had any solid idea how many died at Hiroshima until years after the fact—even today, historians only estimate the number. The point is you can’t always get perfect information, immediately, and you need to be comfortable just saying ‘we don’t really know what is happening, right now.’

Some reactions—only some of which seem to be aware of the Community Note:

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FSA evidently stands for Free Syrian Army, and thus his name seems to be a reference to the Syrian rebels. We won't pretend to know enough to know how to feel about that, except to say it would be a mistake to assume he is really in their military. He could be some dude in his mom's basement in Poughkeepsie for all we know.

Google says it translates from Persian to say:

The content produced in Arabic social networks includes a lot of fake news, old videos and baseless and misleading content. For example, this very famous video of the Syrian father trying to make his daughter not be afraid under the bombings of Idlib was introduced as ‘Palestinian father’.

Good that it is being called out in other languages.

We include posts like this, so you can see how this false information can be directed toward antisemitism.

Hey, if anyone out there in Twitchyland has a Twitter account, this seems like a good Community Note to rate.

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It’s important not to let the heart get ahead of the brain. That being said, the video was genuinely heartbreaking,

Perversely, it does call attention to the plight of people in Syria. Indeed, we think one of the more interesting reactions, though, is calling people out for ‘misappropriating’ videos from the struggles in Syria, thus denigrating that suffering:


And here it makes it into Spanish:

Google translates as follows—but with very minor censorship by us:

It’s Syria.

Syria.

When all you ‘anti-imperialists’ didn’t give a s—t because the aggressor was Russia along with a secular dictator and the victims were all ‘terrorists’ (macabre coincidence).

I wish you had cared as much then.

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This is not the first time. We have seen videos of children being taken from rubble of alleged Israeli air strikes, only for it to have actually been a real video from Syria, this time from the aftermath of an earthquake.

Finally, this guy makes a pretty good point in Italian (presuming rough accuracy in the translation):

The translation:

#Israele #Hamas #Gaza If the situation in Gaza is so dramatic, what need is there to ‘steal’ old videos of Syrians under Russian bombardment?

Not only an excellent point, but an excellent example of how translation programs are lowering language barriers in a way that positively contributes to the discussion.

***

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Tags: ANTISEMITISM FAKE NEWS GAZA ISRAEL MISINFORMATION SYRIA

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