YouTube sensation Rachel Griffin Accurso (42), famous for her Songs for Littles series, is under the radar of antisemitism watchdog group StopAntisemitism.
The group has accused her of spreading anti-Israel content and pro-Hamas propaganda through her posts about the Gaza conflict.
Among the disputed content shared by Accurso were viral images of a child, purportedly showing starvation in Gaza.
StopAntisemitism claimed these images were debunked and that the child, Fadi al-Zant, wasn’t starving but suffering from cystic fibrosis.
However, the child’s mother has clarified to The Washington Post that her son was indeed suffering from both cystic fibrosis and starvation.
So laser focused on whether the one image is legitimate, ignoring all the other evidence that Israel is indeed intentionally starving people.
Deflect, confuse.
Yeah, this shit is why I get on my wife about checking the legitimacy of images from Gaza before she shares them. I tell her, “If you make one mistake that is they excuse they need. The bad actors will focus entirely on that and use it to delegitimize everything you post about it.” These people will repeat lies and falsehoods all day, but the moment you make a mistake they will pounce and never let go.
They don’t have any truth to stand behind, so they have to make you into a liar.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that these people are actually aiding anti-Semitism by labeling any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. They are doing so much damage, people are not going to take real anti-Semitism seriously because of all this crying wolf. They’re just awful.
I think stirring up antisemitic sentiment is part of the goal. An anti-zionist Jewish friend, who had lived in Israel for a few years, told me they were thrown off by realising the Israeli propaganda machine targets Israelis (and overseas Jews, to a lesser extent), by making them feel unsafe — this is Israel’s raison d’être. Many Israelis have been raised on a steady rhetoric of “no matter where we go, they want to kill us. Our only chance for the Jewish people to survive is to gather together and be prepared to defend ourselves”. It’s straight up weaponizing generational trauma.
If a Jewish person in the US is the victim of an antisemitic hate crime, then that person may be more likely to believe that moving to Israel is the only way to safely be Jewish. And even if not, that violence is more useful at propagandizing other Jewish Americans than anything Israel could directly put out.
I hate how much sense this dynamic made when it was pointed out to me. It is a well tuned propaganda machine. I wish they could fucking see that a fascist ethnostate will not make anyone safer, and this genocide is unjustifiable on every level.
The images were legitimate as well. The child was starving because he needed medication and twice the food of a normal child. Both were blocked by Israel. After he was successfully ethnically cleansed from Gaza by Israel, he was able to receive the care he needed and recovered his weight. Proving the perpetrator of his starvation was Israel.
Images of a starving Palestinian boy went viral. The attention saved him.