Right now about half of the information on the Israeli-Hamas war that we read in both social and traditional media is fake news. It is poisoning the minds of readers, telling them to hate based on falsehood. The momentum is intensifying. The fake news makers are having a field day. There is an intensifying fake news war.
The end result is — violence everywhere. The Israeli-Hamas war has spilled over to the streets of America, Europe and Asia through cyberspace hate campaigns. It is a global phenomenon. Fake news is feeding the hatred everywhere. Global anarchy is being spawned by a cyberspace gone haywire. The fake news frenzy is unstoppable.
To this day, we do not know if the bombing of the hospital in Gaza was done by Israelis or Palestinians, both of whom came up with convincing conflicting blow-by-blow accounts of how it happened.
Readers believe one or the other, fake or true, according to their biases. India has banned TikTok, which it claims is a major source of pro-Palestinian fake news. But pro-Israel fake news is equally all over Tiktok.
Israel believes that Hamas has built its underground headquarters beneath hospitals in Gaza. If it is true that they are using hospitals and patients as human shields, is it possible that the IDF bombed the hospital to take out the Hamas headquarters beneath the hospital?
Everything is pure speculation at this point for either side.
Case No. 1. There was a video of angels hovering in the sky seen by Israeli civilians. Was this staged? The angels floating at a far distance could have easily been a video trick, with the civilians in the background heard weeping and crying out, "Oh Jesus, thank you, Jesus, hallelujah."
The majority of Jews do not believe Jesus is the Messiah. Could this be a trick video to show that God is on the side of the Israelis, a warning that God will defeat their enemies, that Israel is justified in its vendetta — the ongoing Gaza genocide? If you are pro-Israel, you would believe the angel video instantly without thinking.
Case No. 2. There was a video showing Hamas killing Gaza citizens trying to flee the city. We do not know if this was real or staged. It would have been actually easy to stage. Just get people to lie down looking dead on a 200-meter stretch of highway after you drenched them in ketchup, for a nice cellphone camera shot from a moving motorcycle. However, it was also possibly true. That is the dilemma.
Case No. 3. All hospitals in Gaza will stop functioning soon when the fuel which generates electricity disappears totally. Hamas, if they are using hospitals as shields — which will be evacuated because they are no longer operational — may find their shields disappearing. The empty hospitals may easily become targets of IDF deep penetration bombs to take out the Hamas underground headquarters. If the news is true that Hamas is stealing all the fuel for itself to the detriment of civilians, in a few days the fuel will disappear completely.
Case No. 4. An Arab journalist, accusing Hamas of shooting Gazans who tried to flee Gaza City, got 3.7 million views in the blink of an eye. The measure of success of a social media post is the number of viewers in a given time period. The Arab journalist may be telling the truth, or not. We will never know. The crisis caused by the fake news war is that truth is elusive, unless someone investigates. Even fake news identifiers are being criticized for fake fake-news alerts.
In our "truth crisis" today, we turn to an excerpt from St. John Paul II's prayer for peace in 1957, which is so prophetic for us today. "O Immaculate Heart of Mary, help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today, and whose immeasurable effects weigh down upon our modern world and seem to block the paths toward the future.
"From famine and war, deliver us…. from nuclear war, incalculable self-destruction, sins against human life, from the loss of awareness of good and evil, deliver us. Accept, O Mother of Jesus, this cry laden with (our) sufferings. Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit to conquer all sin. Amen. (Say a Hail Mary).
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