Images have power, and dead bodies, Hamas understands, make for a powerful story.
In the world of journalism, if it happened yesterday, it’s old news. And if it happened a month ago, it’s ancient history.
So it’s no surprise that what happened on October 7 in Israel, as horrible as it was, has already become a dot in journalism’s rearview mirror. It’s time to move on, time to cover the new story — the one about supposed “war crimes,” and “genocide.” And if what we’re witnessing now were a movie instead of a real-life horror story, the writer, producer and the director would come from the ranks of Hamas.
For openers, why did Hamas launch such a horrific attack on October 7? What was its goal, besides, obviously, to kill as many Jews as possible?
Retaliation was its goal — furious, lethal retaliation.
Jews had suffered pogroms before, but this was different. And so if what happened on October 7 was different, Israel’s response would also be different. It would be overwhelming. And that’s precisely what the Hamas plot called for: death, lots of death, civilian deaths — the more the better.
Images have power, and dead bodies, Hamas understands, make for a powerful story.
Hamas’s storyline was ambitious, if not downright absurd. It was, crazy as it sounds, to turn the perpetuators of mass murder … into the victims. But here’s what Hamas knew even as it planned the October 7 massacre: that its story would actually take hold — and not only in the Arab world. Hamas knew that its story would turn much of the world against Israel, and much of the world against Jews in general.
Hamas knew that videos showing the bodies of children carried through the streets of Gaza City would make for what is called “good television.” Those videos would be seen in homes all over the world. Hamas knew that images of dead civilians in Gaza would mean that the support Israel had on October 7 would dissipate quickly. That also was part of the storyline.
And right on cue, last week, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres issued a statement that said, “Misery is growing by the minute. Without a fundamental change, the people of Gaza will face an unprecedented avalanche of human suffering.”
Hamas had to know that the UN — whose Human Rights Council has condemned Israel dozens of times over the last ten years — would play a part in its story. It had to know that there would be demands for a ceasefire — a ceasefire that would stop Israel from retaliating and give Hamas time to regroup and launch more attacks on Israel.
Hamas knew that once pictures of destruction in Gaza started spreading around the world, that demonstrations would break out, not only on the Arab street, but on the streets of cities far beyond the Middle East — and that much of the world would sympathize not only with Palestinians but also with Hamas, especially on American college campuses. The terrorists had become the victims, just as the writer, producer and director from Hamas had planned it. Supposed atrocities committed by Israel was now the story journalists were covering.
Last Friday, Israel tried to combat Hamas’s story by telling its own story. It showed a 46-minute video that documented in graphic, lurid detail the atrocities of October 7. As reported by journalists and others who viewed the video, it shows Hamas terrorists cheering when they see the dead body of a teenage girl.
It shows them arguing over who would get to decapitate a man they had shot — and yelling “Allahu Akbar” (meaning “God is great”) with each whack at his neck.
It shows them shooting defenseless civilians. It shows them continuing to fire round after round into dead bodies.
NBC News reported that, “At the musical festival near Re’im, revelers are seen hiding, fear and shock on their faces. A person stares horrified into the camera of what appears to be a mobile phone as bloodied bodies lie around them. Image after image shows men, women and children, including an infant, dead, bloodied and burned.”
Israel didn’t release the video publicly, but even reading a description can make you sick. It’s a story Israel needed to tell. Too bad it became old news in no time flat.
The story now is about moral equivalence, about how what Hamas did may have been wrong but what Israel is now doing is also wrong. Reporters are asking questions about whether Israel is violating the laws of war, but very little, if anything, about how Hamas turns civilians into human shields. That was a story a long time ago. Now it’s old news. Israeli “war crimes” and “genocide” are what journalists and other opinion influencers are talking about today.
That’s the kind of news that produces empathy for one side and contempt, if not outright hatred, for the other side.
The storytellers at Hamas managed to turn terrorists into heroes and victims into villains. You can’t make this stuff up.
But that’s exactly what Hamas did. They made it up. And it’s the story journalists are now telling the world, just as Hamas knew they would.
Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Substack page. Follow him @BernardGoldberg.
