Genocide Blog 47 - A new word in English – Gräuelpropaganda (pronounced groyel-propagannda)
04.06.2024
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock seems to have been caught in a lie. A dangerous lie.
She told this premeditated lie, over a microphone, raising her voice to drown out protesters, even ticking them off for interrupting her on the sensitive issue of rape. But she was blissfully unaware of the sensitive issue of the “atrocity propaganda” she was using against her enemy, “the terrorists”?
What she told is no ordinary lie. It is part of a Western campaign of spreading Israeli-invented “atrocity propaganda”. Israel needs this invented “atrocity propaganda” for two reasons: to distract from Israel’s military humiliation of 7 October, and to justify Israel’s genocide following 7 October, and maybe even predating 7 October by up to 76 years. Though, nothing in god’s earth could ever justify the killing of 36,439 Palestinians and injuring 82,627 while corralling the people around the Gaza Strip and starving them to death, since 7 October. So, it is dangerous lies that are being resorted to by a woman with power, by the woman who is the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel for the genocide it is committing against the Palestinians.
We have to dismantle these lies one-by-one. It seems there is no other way. We always need to check for the facts. We have to seek out the evidence. We have to differentiate the truth from the lies. Especially during a genocide.
This resorting to “atrocity propaganda” to justify genocide brought us full circle to a German word that the Minister of Foreign Affairs Ms. Baerbock already knows. We checked out the word, after hearing Ali Abuminah refer to it on the Electronic Intifada website.
It is “Gräuelpropaganda”. It is pronounced something like “groyel-propagannda”, I hear on the internet via my computer speakers.
It was one of the forms of propaganda that Joseph Goebbels was responsible for in Nazi Germany. It means using invented atrocities to justify real ones that you are committing. The Nazis invented Polish “atrocities” just before going to war. The word Gräuelpropaganda might join the list of words imported direct into English because we need it so as to describe accurately just exactly what Minister Baerbock, and other Western leaders like Joe Biden, are doing when they spread these lies.
The German Minister claimed she “saw” rape being committed by a “terrorist” on film taken by himself or by another “terrorist”. She saw it. But, this rape does not exist on film. It does not exist ‘tukur’. The invented film of the invented rape was supposed to show a Hamas fighter raping an Israeli woman on 7 October. Untrue statements like hers are “groyelpropaganda.”
It took a Turkish media outlet Anadolu, to call the Minister’s bluff for her appalling lie. The journalist politely asked an Israeli top spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Avichay Adraee at a later Press Conference to confirm what she said. The spokesman replied that he cannot confirm it! That means it is a lie. We can rest assured that a top Israeli mouthpiece like this one would be shouting about it from rooftops had the film of rape existed. In fact, the two most credible sources – given Israel allows no investigations of its war crimes from the outside – actually find there is no such film. The most reasonable of the mainstream press in Israel, Ha’aretz,could not find a single rape having been committed on 7 October, despite looking for one, let alone a rape on film. UN Special reporter Pramila Patten, a Mauritian by the way, could not find one either, despite her also looking for one, during the course of what she describes accurately as her non-investigation in Israel of gender-based violence during the conflict. She, too, found the existence of no evidence at all, including after her team viewing loads of film. She admits that her “visit which was carried out at the invitation of the Government of Israel” and seems to have designed for use by the USA and Israel at the Security Council, whenever their backs are against the wall. Even she could not find evidence.
The German Minister Baerbock, a pro-Israeli hawk, who has been to Israel not less often than once a month since 7 October, told the lie while speaking at the 75th Anniversary of the German post-Hitler Constitution, during an event called a “Democracy Festival”. It took place on 26 May, and could better have been called a “Lie-telling festival”. Ali Abunimah of the excellent “Electronic Intifada” investigative website said how, during the previous German regime, just before the regime Annalena Baerbock was celebrating, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda was called "Gräuelpropaganda" or “atrocity propaganda”.
Max Blumenthal, journalist from the media outlet Grayzone, another vital investigative site, said US President Biden, too, was again up to his habit of parading lurid lies and Gräuelpropaganda, himelf. As well as having trotted out invented claims of “decapitation” at least three times in public, now Max Blumenthal reports on his X page on 20 May that US President Joe Biden claimed at his Morehouse College’s commencement speech that he ‘saw pictures [sic] of [a Palestinian] tying a mother and a daughter in a rope, pouring kerosene on them, burning them and watching as they died’. I went and listened to Biden at Morehouse on YouTube. A little research shows the “pictures” he talks about do not exist.
The terrible thing is that this kind of lie about “pictures” that don’t exist has two linked aims: to hide Israel, and the USA’s, humiliating military failure on 7 October, and to “justify” Israel’s very real slaughter of Palestinian children and their families, now living in tents in Rafah, and actually being burned alive by American bombs dropped by Israel. On 28 May, 45 Palestinians were massacred by two US bombs dropped by Israeli airmen on Rafah.
Let us summarize the German-USA-Israeli gräuelpropaganda, or atrocity propaganda?
It was, first and foremost, lies about atrocities committed on babies.
This is designed to produce revulsion in us when we hear it, so much so that we do not fact-check it. Denying it would be too serious.
There was the invention of the first hideous lie, the one about “40 decapitated babies”. Other media, even the BBC, later lied about 20 children “tied together and burned”. (Note the repeating of “babies”, and the repeating of “tied together”. Then there was the story of the “babies burnt in an oven”. This may have been an outright lie, or it may have been confusion around body-parts of adults burnt in a car set alight when Israeli hell-fire missiles from an Apache Helicopters counter-attacked against Hamas and other fighters.
In reality, the Israeli social security total list of victims of 7 October show the death of a baby called Millie Cohen. She was killed, in her mother’s arms, by a bullet.
And when all these baby-killing-stories were exposed as hideous concoctions from some propaganda department, new stories had to be spread, starting all over again. This time it was stories on another sensitive subject.
This time the emphasis was on, and still is on, Hamas men supposedly committing “mass rape” on Israeli women on 7 October. This “mass rape” claim is completely false.
It is a fact that not one rape has been reported by a survivor. Not one rape has been reported by a credible witness. There is no forensic evidence of rape at all.
Why is atrocity propaganda about “babies” and why about “mass rape” and victims tied together?
It is because these three allegations make us feel the most angry and irrational. The victims are helpless. The crimes unbearable.
Such lies were notoriously utilized to fuel past wars, like WWI and even before then, and certainly since.
Which is why we need to expose the lies one-by-one. Otherwise, when there are real atrocities, why will be believe it? Did Israel not decapitate a baby with its bomb on Rafah? Are we already desensitized to this by all the inventions we have, at first, believed, then found out we were duped by?
We need to remember that there are two things to dread about rape, especially in colonial situations. There is rape, itself. Which is the ultimate crime of patriarchy. Remember, however, that the endemic rape is committed by the males of the oppressor group against women of the oppressed group. And then there is the lynching that accompanies rape, or that accompanies a story of rape, when the victim is a woman of the oppressor class. This kind of story leads to, and is intended to lead to, real atrocities.
Atrocity propaganda is what incites people to lynching. And, as we have witnessed, it incites people to genocide. And remember genocide is, in addition to actually committing genocide, “inciting” genocide by atrocity propaganda, which constitutes genocide. Genocide is also “colluding with genocide”, which constitutes genocide, too.
So, both Ms. Baerbock and Mr. Biden would do well to check their facts before embarking on Gräuelpropaganda. Better still they should stop arming the perpetrators committing the genocide. And stop funding them. And stop using vetoes at the UN to shield them. And stop, while they are about it, using Mafia tactics against officers of the International Criminal Court.
The fact is there were 695 Israeli civilians killed during the Hamas-led incursion into Israel on 7 October. That is a lot. We do not know if it was Hamas men responsible, other resistance fighters, or the dozens of gang-members that went amongst the hundreds of Palestinians who ran through, and motorcycled through, all the gaping holes in the Israeli Wall. But 700 civilian deaths is a big number. Investigations for war crimes for these deaths must go ahead. The Hamas-led fighters killed over 300 Israeli soldiers and security officers that day, as well as some non-Israeli civilians. The total number of deaths that day according to Israeli Social Security and published by Ha’aretz newspaper, name by name, is 1,139. Over 700 may be war crimes. So, why do the Israeli leaders, American and German leaders, go to the lengths of spreading all those lurid stories? What for? Is the truth not bad enough for them? Or do they have a death-wish, to discredit themselves? Or do they want to cause ordinary people in their countries to become so suspicious of atrocity lies that they end up not believing the real-life genocide that Israel is perpetrating before their eyes? When children are burnt alive? Where a baby is decapitated? When a state intentionally starves people to death? When Israeli former top General Giora Eiland expresses genocidal intent this way, on 19 November last year: “The international community warns of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from it. Severe epidemics in the south of the Strip will hasten victory.”
What are people like Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken and Ms Baerbock waiting for to stop supplying arms and geopolitical cover for the genocide?
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
(edited 5 June 2024)
