By Chris Menahan – Information Liberation
NewsGuard, the pro-Israel smearing outlet masquerading as a “fact checker” that’s now funded by the US government, is going to punish Information Liberation for exposing the “Hamas mass rape” hoax.
NewsGuard’s Hilary Rosenberg Hersh emailed InfoLib earlier this week to say their “review” of my site “found recent examples of content on the site that appears to be false or egregiously misleading.”
Hersh shared the following “examples”:
A September 2024 article titled “Donald Trump Dominates Kamala Harris in Their First And Possibly Only Debate” stated, “The Israel portion of the debate was a cringefest on both sides with Harris once again repeating the ‘Hamas mass rape’ hoax.” Another article that month titled “CNN’s Jake Tapper: It’s ‘Antisemitic’ to Criticize Dana Bash’s False Reporting on Israel-Gaza War” said, “Both Bash and Tapper spread the ‘Hamas mass rape’ hoax to provide Israel with cover to commit genocide in Gaza and rape Palestinians en masse in Israeli torture camps.” The stories link to a March 2024 article that debunked the claims of one prominent witness.
However, many other witnesses have attested to the crimes against Israelis, according to research conducted by The New York Times. The newspaper conducted a two-month investigation in which it examined “video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors,” according to the article about that research.
Also, the March 2024 report of a United Nations team that had researched the allegations stated, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023,” according to the UN’s press release. “The team also found convincing information that sexual violence was committed against hostages, and has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may still be ongoing against those in captivity.”
Do you have any comment on these examples? [Emphasis and links added]
The Times was forced to retract part of their “Screams Without Words” article pushing the “Hamas mass rape” hoax because their key witness from an Israeli paramilitary unit was found to have lied about two sisters being raped. Nonetheless, Hilary Rosenberg Hersh insists the rest of the piece based entirely on hearsay is still credible.
Rather than write to the New York Times and CNN and ask them to provide actual evidence “mass rape” took place she’s writing to InfoLib to demand I prove their hearsay is not true.
This was my full response:
Thanks, I needed a laugh. Iraq had WMDs too, right? The New York Times said it, so it must be true!
When they retract the lies they spread about mass rape once the war is over and it’s no longer of any use will you be correcting your report or changing their label to red? They lied about WMDs to start a war which got ~1m killed according to some estimates yet I would assume you don’t even mention it (I don’t use your spyware and never will, so please let me know if you do).
As to your question, the main writer of the Times’s “Hamas mass rape” piece, Jeffrey Gettleman, said he didn’t even like to call the stories he gathered “evidence.”
Quote:
“I worked with two other colleagues and we interviewed almost 200 people over the course of two months,” Gettleman said, “and what we found — I don’t want to even use the word evidence because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court.”
“That’s not my role,” he continued. “We all have our roles and my role is to document, is to present information, is to give people a voice.”
The UN didn’t verify anything firsthand because Israel refused to give them access to the alleged victims:
Quote from the UN report:
“The Commission has reviewed testimonies obtained by journalists and the Israeli police concerning rape but has not been able to independently verify such allegations, due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities. The Commission was unable to review the unedited version of such testimonies. For the same reasons, the Commission was also unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation. Additionally, the Commission found some specific allegations to be false, inaccurate or contradictory with other evidence or statements and discounted these from its assessment.”
[…]“The Commission did not find credible evidence, however, that militants received orders to commit sexual violence and so it was unable to make conclusions on this issue.”
I’m sure you’ll include that in your piece, right? Or do you just want to focus on presenting hearsay as “evidence” and truth because it was printed in the “paper of record?”
The evidence Hamas committed mass rape on October 7th is non-existent whereas the evidence Israel is raping Palestinian prisoners is overwhelming and it’s even celebrated in the Knesset.
NewsGuard’s “fact checks” are all phoned in and odds are they’ll just run with the smear they’ve got ready to go regardless of my response.
One of their previous “fact checks” said InfoLib wasn’t a reliable source of news because a story I wrote merely reporting on French microbiologist Didier Raoult’s claims about hydroxychloroquine contradicted a study from the famed Lancet which said taking hydroxychloroquine would kill you.
The study was retracted after it was found to have been written by some Indian scammer and an “adult content model” who faked their data but NewsGuard didn’t even know that fact and didn’t care.
Perhaps NewsGuard will hire that pair to write their “fact checks.”
[Header image shows NewsGuard founders Steven Brill and Louis Gordon Crovitz. Brill image by BlueRasberry, CC 4.0, cropped. Crovitz image by Rex Hammock, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped.]
