Covering for Genocide

An entire industry has grown up to craft and maintain the conspiracy theory that billions of people and trillions of dollars are devoted to faking apartheid and genocide, just to make Israel look bad

Jul 30, 2025

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In an all too uncommon interview on Sky News on July 27, musician and activist Bob Geldof stated the plain fact that needs to be said: “Israel is lying.”

The show’s host who was interviewing Geldof was stunned for a moment by his forthrightness and haltingly tried to both-sides the point. But any real journalist—one whose job is not to pretend that there are two sides to every argument, but who presents the facts in a straightforward manner—would say just what Geldof said.

Earlier that very day, Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu stated bluntly, “Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza. What a boldface lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.”

You can’t find a bigger, more shameless lie than that. It was such a blatant lie that the master of lies, the man who lies with virtually every breath, U.S. President Donald Trump himself repudiated it. Netanyahu has often, in his nefarious political career, accomplished what many had thought impossible. To that list, he can add surpassing Trump in sheer dishonesty.

Israel’s lies are running out of steam. None but the willfully blind and zealously devoted give Netanyahu’s statement any credence. And, finally, we are seeing the cowardly “moderates” from Emmanuel Macron to Keir Starmer to Barack Obama and Hakeem Jeffries finally calling for Israel to stop its campaign of starvation (all while trying to pretend they are not the very root of the problem, and that Israel is not simply doing what it said it would do while they all showered it with weapons and funding, of course).

As I noted in a recent video, the conspiracy theory Israel weaves to sell its cover story stretches reality even farther than Pizzagate, Qanon, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Israel would have you believe that there is a global conspiracy that includes the United Nations; the entire Muslim world; the global left; the global south; every legitimate human rights organization in the world; European governments such as Ireland, Spain and ow France, and possibly even the UK; plus much of the mainstream media, even clearly pro-Israel outlets like the BBC and the New York Times.

All of those entities and more, a conspiracy of literally billions of people and trillions of dollars all coming together for one purpose: to tarnish the image and eventually delegitimize the State of Israel.

That conspiracy includes many Jews, from the ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta to millions of secular humanist Jews to progressive Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now. These days, it even encompasses liberal Zionist groups like J Street.

But this insane conspiracy theory is not propagated solely by lies from Netanyahu, the IDF Chief of Staff, the Israeli cabinet, the COGAT (Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories—i.e. the West Bank and Gaza) and Israel’s many online and social media trolls.

No, to maintain a fiction this broad, even if only to the anti-Palestinian racists and pro-Israel zealots whose hate makes them open to believing anything, there needs to also be a lot of advocacy and a paper trail that looks convincing even while it is a tissue of lies.

Groups like AIPAC and similar advocacy groups put out short statements, often untrue or deeply misleading, and this helps. But other groups publish whole reports and send experts who draft these reports to speak in public forums. Pathetically, mainstream media outlets can’t wait to highlight their efforts.

Demonizing the United Nations

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One of the main ways Israel has tried to cover up its genocide in Gaza has been by demonizing the United Nations. This is not new, of course.

Israel has shown nothing but contempt for the UN for decades. This contempt started as mere annoyance, but escalated in the 1970s when the General Assembly passed the resolution equating Zionism with racism.

Yet for a while, Israel was content to confine its bile to the UN’s political bodies. It needed the UN’s humanitarian functions, for without it, Israel would have had to assume the burdens of housing, feeding, clothing, educating, and providing the health needs for the Palestinians under their occupation.

Perhaps in retrospect, Israel need not have worried, given the apathy and even contempt so much of the world, including many Arab leaders (not the people), has shown toward the lives of Palestinians. But Israel decided it needed the UN.

Aside from relieving Israel of the burden of caring for the people under its military occupation, the UN provided an easy punching bag, a way to rile up its citizens and supporters against the international community and ensure that the wall against any action on the Palestinians’ behalf would stand stiff and strong.

In recent years, however, as Israel’s essential supremacism and nationalism have grown, so has its hostility toward the UN, and especially toward the UN agency that provided most of the direct services to the Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Many people, not only supporters of Israel have now been convinced that UNRWA’s operations were either in opposition to Israel, were delivered in wasteful and inefficient ways, or even that UNRWA was part of Hamas’ plan to attack Israel on October 7, 2023.

Israel and its supporters have repeated these baseless accusations so many times that people who don’t follow Israel and, especially, the Occupied Palestinian Territories closely have simply come to believe it. But it was not just the repetition.

The mainstream media took “reports” by supposedly reputable groups that purported to expose UNRWA. In fact, these are propaganda outlets, very well-funded, that put out sophisticated, seemingly detailed reports that, without doing some research, any layperson would have a tough time seeing through.

Couple this with the assault on the field of journalism that has been underway throughout this century, and you can see why, even if media outlets made some effort to examine the reports from these groups, they might not have the capacity or competency to do so rigorously. And often, they didn’t try.

Perhaps the most prominent of these propaganda organizations is UN Watch.

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UN Watch’s campaign against UNRWA and how it has been tacitly accepted in the West

UN Watch’s key allegation of the past 22 months is that 19 members of UNRWA’s staff participated in the October 7 attacks. When these allegations were made, the UN investigated. They found there was no evidence to connect one of those accused to the crime; that there was scant evidence against nine others; and for the remaining nine, the investigation concluded that there could be sufficient evidence to indicate they had in some way participated in the attack of October 7, but since Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation, that evidence could not be corroborated.

UNRWA dismissed those nine staff members anyway. UNRWA Commissioner-General of UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini stated, “Despite that the evidence was NOT corroborated or authenticated, I have decided to terminate the contracts of those staff in the interest of the Agency.” In other words, UNRWA erred on the side of caution due to the importance of UNRWA’s work and fired nine of its more than 30,000 employees in case they might have conducted this serious breach of both the agency’s rules and the law.

As an example of UN Watch’s dishonesty, in one of their more notorious recent reports, The Unholy Alliance: UNRWA, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, UN Watch makes the outrageous claim that UNRWA “is essentially a Palestinian-run organization whose purpose is to perpetuate Palestinians as refugees with the aim to one day dismantle Israel.”

They present no evidence for this claim, obviously intending the report itself to back it up in people’s minds. And, for many, it did so, and we have seen how this radically distorted image of UNRWA has taken hold.

UN Watch plays on UNRWA’s very nature and charter. UNRWA’s mandate explicitly forbids it from acting to promote any political solution to the plight of refugees. This stands in stark contrast to the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, which, in addition to its humanitarian role, is empowered to seek resolutions to the refugee issues it works on.

UNRWA’s restrictions effectively mean they cannot promote any solution to the refugee crisis. They can only provide services. UNRWA, as an arm of the United Nations, supports international law, especially those parts enshrined in UN resolutions, treaties, and the charter. This includes the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and homeland. But UNRWA is forbidden, and does not, promote any particular political path.

In order to fulfill the mandate that UNRWA operates under, as set forth in UN General Assembly Resolution 302 in 1949, the organization must work with the local governing authority. That includes Israel, which has, since its creation, had Palestinian refugees under its control, and since 1967 has been the administrative and military power in both Gaza and the West Bank.

It also means that, since 2007, UNRWA has needed to work with the government administrating and providing internal security for the Gaza Strip, which is Hamas. This has never been a secret. Indeed, there’s no alternative. Without Hamas’ cooperation, it would have been impossible for UNRWA to operate in Gaza.

As part of its work, UNRWA employs many Palestinians in the areas it serves. Every one of UNRWA’s employees are checked, and each one—including the ones whom Israel later accused of terrorism, with no, scant, or uncorroborated evidence—is vetted by Israel. If Israel accused a potential employee of being in a militant group, that employee would not be hired. Indeed, this happened regularly.

Even the United States recognizes the need for humanitarian organizations to work with and among the community it serves, and that is why the Office of Foreign Assets Control makes exceptions to its ban on meeting with “blocked persons,” such as Hamas, exceptions that remained in place even after the October 7 attacks.

None of this is relayed by UN Watch. Thus, they can create the illusion that UNRWA was conspiring against Israel, and plotting attacks, even including the massive one on October 7, 2023.

Instead, insinuation abounds in UN Watch’s report. They discuss, for instance, a UN official, Leni Stenseth, having met with Yahya Sinwar, well known now as the leader of Hamas’ military wing, who conceived and planned the October 7 attack and whom Israel assassinated on October 16, 2024. But the meeting in question took place two years before the events of October 7 and Sinwar was the unquestioned leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time. It was Stenseth’s job to coordinate with him, and this is specifically the kind of necessity the OFAC exception mentioned above is designed for. UN Watch fails to note this.

Thus, the specter of UNRWA is implicitly created in the minds of readers, some of whom are decision-makers or in media. Using not only UNRWA’s mandate, but the practical realities of delivering aid to a massive refugee population under belligerent occupation and an authoritarian local regime to create the illusion of malfeasance is a tactic UN Watch employs over and over in their reports. It’s not the only one.

In May 2024, UN Watch issued a short paper alleging that UNRWA staff were stealing and selling humanitarian aid, an accusation that echoed others and that has had grave consequences since, including the current starvation policy employed by the U.S. and Israel in Gaza.

The only evidence UN Watch cites for their accusation that UNRWA staff members were stealing humanitarian aid was random posts in various social media chat rooms. No substantiation for any of the accusations or of these random posts is offered. Yet they put out the accusation anyway, creating a paper trail for others to point at to “confirm” their beliefs or assertions about UNRWA acting malevolently, and about Israel being an innocent victim of a propaganda campaign.

These examples are only the tip of the iceberg, as is UN Watch.

There is an entire ecosystem out there devoted to perpetuating the massive conspiracy theory that the entire world hates Israel for no reason other than antisemitism and that all the cruelty we see perpetuated against Palestinians is staged, or is the fault of Hamas or Iran.

It’s a conspiracy so wild and outlandish that only with massive effort can it be sustained even for the increasingly small minority that still clings to it.

More to come….

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Covering for Genocide

An entire industry has grown up to craft and maintain the conspiracy theory that billions of people and trillions of dollars are devoted to faking apartheid and genocide, just to make Israel look bad

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