Reports of beheaded Israeli babies were bound to be propaganda

 

Sensationalized stories during wartime should always be doubted, if not disregarded

Anyone who has studied the history of propaganda must have rolled their eyes as I did upon hearing reports of babies being beheaded by Hamas militants after their incursion into Israel a year ago. History has repeatedly shown that such reports are inevitably fabricated or at least wildly exaggerated in order to influence public opinion in favour of war, which is why they should always be doubted, if not disregarded. Pediatric propaganda has a long history dating back more than a century to the First World War, when German troops were accused of bayoneting Belgian babies. The Times of London even published the second-hand account of one man who said he witnessed German soldiers “chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s skirts.” France’s propaganda office offered up a phony photograph of the handless baby that was printed in the French newspaper La Rive Rouge, while other French media published a drawing of German troops supposedly eating the dead baby’s hands.

These atrocity tales were used to great effect in drawing the US into the conflict, which tipped the balance between the deadlocked sides. The well-organized American information effort, which enlisted some of the era’s most notable journalists, is widely regarded as the first modern propaganda campaign. It was so successful in reversing the country’s ardent isolationism into a rabid interventionism that its plot has been closely followed ever since. The bayoneted babies story was doubtless made up, as Phillip Knightley noted in his classic 1975 book The First Casualty, despite having been included in the UK’s infamous 1915 Bryce Commission report. It was based on written depositions supposedly taken by British lawyers from 1,200 unsworn and anonymous Belgian refugees that then mysteriously vanished. A post-war Belgian investigation, added Knightley, failed to corroborate a single atrocity tale in the Bryce Commission report.

A more recent example of babies being offered up on the altar of wartime propaganda came after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. While most Americans opposed military intervention to restore the Kuwaiti royal family, which had fled to Saudi Arabia, an atrocity tale soon changed that. “I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns,” sobbed one 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to a US Congressional committee. Identified only as Nayirah, supposedly for the safety of her family, she testified that the soldiers “took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor.” The United Nations Security Council heard from a man who testified under the false name of Dr. Issah Ibraham. “The hardest thing was burying the babies,” he said. “Under my supervision, 120 newborn babies were buried in the second week of the invasion. I myself buried 40 newborn babies that had been taken from their incubators by soldiers.” The use of force to liberate Kuwait was soon authorized by both the UN and US, which led the 1991 invasion known as Operation Desert Storm.

The New York Times revealed in early 1992 that Nayirah was a daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. The CBC’s newsmagazine The Fifth Estate chronicled later that year how the story was fabricated by the infamous PR firm Hill + Knowlton, which was paid more than US$10 million by the Kuwaiti royal family to promote the invasion.  (more...)

Reports of beheaded Israeli babies were bound to be propaganda