Stop Listening to Fake Experts and Pretend Historians on the Middle East by Seth Mandel
The propaganda campaigns against Israel rely on an industry of manufactured “expertise.” Without the ability to appeal to the authority of such “experts,” the campaigns collapse. For anyone who’s been paying attention in the past few days, the collapse is everywhere you look.
First there was the Sky News anchor hectoring Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon over Israel’s strike on a tunnel system beneath a Gaza hospital to eliminate senior Hamas officials, notably its de facto leader Muhammad Sinwar, brother of Oct. 7 architect Yahya Sinwar. The anchor insisted Israel was wrong to say there were tunnels underneath the hospital and surrounding area because “our experts”—a phrase she repeated in the vain hopes it would sound convincing—said so.
You’ll never guess what happened next. That’s right—Hamas confirmed that the targeted area was indeed the site of a tunnel system, and added more context. It was, Hamas said, destroyed by the IDF in the 2014 Gaza war and since rebuilt. It was there that Israel attempted to take out Sinwar.
Then yesterday, along with reports of another Sinwar’s elimination (Mohammad’s brother Zakaria) came reports that Muhammad Sinwar’s body was indeed found in the tunnel system targeted by the IDF.
Who are Sky News’s “experts”? One of them is Corey Scher, who was a key “expert” behind a 2023 Associated Press story that claimed “The Israeli military campaign in Gaza, experts say, now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in history.”
Experts say! As I noted at the time, that claim is obviously false. But Scher’s research depended on radar readings that were mostly mysterious to Scher as well. As a separate article on that study noted, “the researchers said they were able to detect the number of buildings damaged, but were not able to determine how badly the buildings had been affected.”
The research also based its findings on the assumption that any change in the echoes of radar waves was from Israeli bombing.
And so by reading the actual article, one learned that this study was childish nonsense. Now its leading researcher is back to say that the IDF lied about tunnels, only to be immediately contradicted by Hamas itself.
Sky News, the Associated Press, ABC News—where else will these “experts” show up? The answer is: wherever they’re needed to lend an academic gloss to rank speculation and conspiracy theories.
The lesson here is a very important one: These news organizations and their activist researchers are children playing with toys they don’t understand. Calling them experts does not make them experts.
But what if we call them “historians”?
In the May issue of COMMENTARY, I wrote about the anti-Semitism circling throughout the right-wing “manosphere,” a collection of popular social-media influencers and YouTube personalities. Among them was Darryl Cooper, a podcaster who appears as a guest on Joe Rogan’s show and Tucker Carlson’s show to pose such challenging queries as whether Winston Churchill or Adolf Hitler was the real villain of World War II.
Cooper is known as a “historian,” presumably because he has read books. One of the authors he relies on is David Irving, perhaps the world’s most famous Holocaust denier.
Over the weekend, Cooper got himself into a spot of trouble yet again, thanks to his reliance on discredited figures. This time it was Trita Parsi, an infamously dishonest activist who echoes Iranian regime propaganda about Israel. Parsi tweeted a video of a young Gazan girl who was clearly suffering. Parsi claimed “Israel starved her to death two days ago.”
Cooper was outraged on the girl’s behalf, and declared that Israel’s counteroffensive against Hamas is a “Gaza Holomodor.” When asked how he knew it was real, Cooper responded: “Because I trust” Parsi.
But as Eitan Fischberger pointed out, the girl in the video was clearly suffering from an unmentioned medical condition. The journalist who took the video posted by Parsi had, in fact, mentioned this on his own feed: She was flown to the United Arab Emirates for treatment.
Contra Parsi, the girl wasn’t dead, nor was her condition a result of a food blockade. Parsi eventually deleted the tweet, leaving Cooper out on that limb all by his lonesome.
These are the “historians” accusing Israel of world historically evil crimes. Like the “experts” doing the same, they are just making stuff up.
Meanwhile, you’re better off trusting Hamas than trusting these “experts,” because Hamas sometimes eventually admits the truth. The “experts” will tell you that Israel is conducting a massive ethnic cleansing campaign that amounts to genocide. Hamas’s own numbers, however, will show that twice as many babies were born in Gaza during the war as the number of civilians killed (somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000, once natural deaths and combatants are accounted for in Hamas’s casualty statistics).
Lesson: Experts aren’t actually telling you that Israel is committing genocide and other war crimes. Those claims are coming from people who pose as experts, because that’s what their friend Joe Rogan calls them or because they are conducting their activism from a university campus or because Sky News anchors woke up on the crabby side of the bed and needed someone willing to spout nonsense they could dress up as “expertise.”
These are not experts, they are not historians. They are just people on the internet. And they are making fools of Israel’s critics.
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