Atrocity stories

Handle with care

On Wednesday October 11, Joe Biden appeared to confirm a report of a particular kind of atrocity committed Hamas militants in their attack on Israel. In a speech to American Jewish leaders, the president said, “I never really thought that I would see and have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.”

After Biden’s speech, reporters asked the White House for details. What pictures had he seen?

The president’s aides didn’t have the photos. Nor had he actually seen them. They said he was referring to statements by the Israeli government and reports by the media. Earlier that day an aide to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that babies and toddlers had been found with their “heads decapitated” at Kfar Aza, a kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza Strip.

Reporters in Israel asked questions like those of the American reporters. What was the evidence? Were there pictures?

Israeli officials were similarly unhelpful. A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces, asked about the reports of beheadings, said, “"We have seen the news, but we do not have any details or confirmation about that." Another Israeli official stuck to part of the story. “There have been cases of Hamas militants carrying out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities. However, we cannot confirm if the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children,” the official said.

Perhaps evidence to confirm the “beheaded babies” accounts will surface. Meanwhile other evidence mounts of the murder of Israeli civilians by the Hamas fighters. And in the broader scheme of things, the details of the killings—whether the victims were beheaded or shot, and how old they were—doesn’t matter much. Noncombatants have been wantonly killed.

Except that details do matter, which was why—true or not—they were included in the original reports. People react emotionally to the killing of babies, and beheadings are particularly appalling to most people. If the evidence never surfaces, those who responded so strongly will feel used.

This has happened before. At the beginning of World War I, German troops invaded Belgium on their way to France. Belgium was neutral and unprepared to defend itself. German commanders told the Belgians that if they didn’t resist, they wouldn’t be harmed. Some did resist; after all, their country had been invaded. The Germans thereupon conducted reprisals against many Belgian civilians.

The killing of civilians violated the recently updated Geneva Conventions, but various propagandists for the anti-German powers sought to add emotional bite to the stories. Reports were circulated of Belgian babies skewered by German bayonets, children with their hands cuff off, women raped and then mutilated, resisters crucified.

The propaganda worked. Americans—the main target of the propaganda, which sought to lure the United States into the war on the side of Britain and France—began speaking of the Germans as “Huns,” heirs of Attila and his barbarian hordes. America in time joined the conflict against Germany, leading to that country’s defeat.

But then a backlash set in. The peace treaty struck many Americans as a victory not for democracy, as Woodrow Wilson had promised, but for British and French imperialism. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty—a refusal that grew more popular in America with each passing year of the next two decades. And when evidence of the bayoneted babies never did appear, Americans concluded they had been played for suckers. Most resolved not to be suckered again.

Other causes contributed to America’s slowness to respond to the rise of Hitler. But the once-burned, twice-shy reaction to the propaganda from World War I played an important part. It also contributed to American skepticism regarding early reports of the death camps the Nazis employed in their efforts to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

In moments when atrocities are occurring, it’s tempting for those seeking sympathy, or merely justice, for the victims to heed and recirculate reports that cast the perpetrators in the worst light. But these moments are precisely when such reports need to be handled with greatest care. Nobody likes being suckered, even in a good cause. One false statement throws a shadow over all the true ones. Evil thrives in the shadows.