The PR Jihad
We have seen an avalanche of headlines and news articles over the last two years, and moreso over the last month, indicting Israel for famine, for genocide, for shooting people trying to get food, and more. “Israel is Committing Genocide in Gaza, Leading Scholars’ Association Says,” was the Washington Post’s headline on September 1, 2025. “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say,” was a BBC headline on the same date. These are mainstream and trusted news sources by many standards among liberal Americans and Brits. But there’s a problem. The cited association, The International Association of Genocide Scholars, is an organization with widely accessible membership open to the general international public and for just $30, anyone can join—without credentials, without vetting, without scrutiny, and every single member has the ability to vote on resolutions, including the resolution indicting Israel’s defensive war against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as meeting the legal definition of genocide.
The public, our elected officials, our media, our academics, our non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are the primary targets of this highly organized and concerted campaign that a brilliant Israeli lawyer named Gal termed, PR Jihad. It’s been powerful, overwhelming, and incredibly effective.
PR Jihad began decades ago and its manifestation can be traced back to the year that the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), comprised of 57 Muslim-majority countries, was formed in 1969. The OIC was given permanent delegation status at the UN on October 16, 1975. Less than a month later, on November 10, 1975, under the leadership of former Nazi Kurt Waldheim, the UN General Assembly passed the “Zionism is Racism” resolution that was later rescinded in 1991. These events mark the UN’s turn against Israel that we still see today.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) membership criteria was exposed on X by Salo Aizenberg of Honest Reporting. Soon after, people began joining under fake names, real names, their pets joined, and even “Adolf Hitler” joined. Actual genocide scholar, Professor Mia Bloom, Ph.D., one of the founding members of IAGS, and others, exposed the voting process as a sham vote without transparency, without the standard debate, and any dissent was blocked.
Dr. Bloom echoed urban war expert Colonel John Spencer’s statement that Israel’s war in Gaza was, in fact, NOT a genocide. Also interesting, according to Aizenberg, the IAGS had approximately 150 members prior to October 7, 2023 and the membership on September 1, 2025 was just over 500, despite the fact this association formed back in 1994. Additionally, Aizenberg found about 80 members are based in Iraq. Only 120 of the 500 members voted on this resolution.
In response to this exposé, the IAGS deactivated their X account, deactivated the new members, and issued a statement admitting to their open membership, including to activists, and respected news organizations published this farce of a resolution without a shred of due diligence or vetting of the group.
Another recent PR Jihad campaign revealed by media insiders on X consisted of two NGOs, Reporters without Borders and Avaaz. Founded in 2007 by combining the forces of Res Publica and Soros-backed MoveOn.org, Avaaz formed as a global activist organization that mobilizes to push their particular narrative to elected officials and the media. Their narrative has consistently demonized Israel. These two NGOs created a toolkit and distributed it to newsrooms around the world and 150 of those agreed to a coordinated campaign to “protect journalists in Gaza.” The news outlets were given guidelines on messaging, hashtags, graphics with the suggestion of an all black front page displaying only their unified message, “At the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed.”
The United Kingdom’s The Guardian decided to go with a graphic of Gazan “journalists” who’d been killed for their front page. In that graphic, at least 14 were identified by Salo Aizenberg as employees of Al Aqsa TV, a designated terror group in the United States, and smack in the center of the graphic was Abdallah Aljamal, the journalist with Al Jazeera and Seattle, Washington-based The Palestine Chronicle, who held three Israeli hostages in his home and was killed during their heroic rescue by the IDF. Shlomi Ziv, kidnapped from the Nova Festival and one of the three hostages rescued from Aljamal’s home, had to witness a major international news outlet obscenely mourning the death of his captor and torturer.
Next we visit the PR Jihad famine campaign. The accusation of famine started at the very beginning of the war, but we saw a major push of this narrative twice since the war began—just prior to Israel’s Rafah incursion (where two more hostages were rescued) in May 2024 with the tagline, “All eyes on Rafah,” and today, as Israel is about to undergo a major operation in Gaza City. We will see an increase in these manufactured tragedies in the coming weeks as Israel’s operation in Gaza City goes forward. In June of 2024, UN officials made unsubstantiated claims that children in Rafah were dying of famine. On July 10, 2024, The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee, a UN-affiliated committee, issued a report projecting 495,000 would face catastrophic acute food insecurity by September of 2024. While there is difficulty in certain parts of Gaza in accessing food, these numbers did not come close to materializing. Meanwhile, the UN and their affiliates like the World Food Programme (WFP) have pallets filled with tonnes of food in warehouses and in outdoor lots both inside Gaza and at the border, but they’re refusing to cooperate with the IDF or the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to distribute it, calling it “a death trap,” which we’ll address shortly. At the same time, TikTok, Snapchat, and Telegram are being flooded with images of Gazans eating in restaurants, shopping at markets overflowing with fruit, and featuring grand openings of cafes throughout all of Gaza. An account on X that goes by the moniker @imshin regularly culls these social media apps for this content and publishes them on X providing location and timestamp.
The first casualty in the PR Jihad famine campaign is truth. The IPC’s July 2024 report utilized a less precise method of measuring food insecurity and it also conducted its study via phone surveys of only 1,365 respondents. The shocking numbers listed were merely projections and the IPC admitted there was no famine occurring at the time of the report.
The PR Jihad famine campaign was pushed to major media outlets such as the horrifying image of a skeletal 10-year old Yazan al-Kafarne in a hospital bed in a March 2025 New York Times story. Yazan died in Rafah and the New York Times called him, “the face of starvation in Gaza.” However, this is misleading. Yazan had cerebral palsy and could not swallow or digest food properly. While his condition was exacerbated as a result of this war, and his death was most certainly another tragedy of this war, Israel did not starve this child. Medically vulnerable people will always suffer during any war. Yazan’s parents and siblings are all healthy weights. Yazan’s vulnerability could not overcome the conditions that any war would present and to portray him as “the face of starvation in Gaza” is irresponsible and misleading. His situation was not widespread for the majority of the population, who do have access to food.
Then months later, the July 25, 2025 front page of the New York Times again published an image of an emaciated child. This time it was 18-month old Mohammed Zakaria Al Mutawaq in the arms of his mother. The article stated that he was “diagnosed with severe malnutrition.” However, the paper neglected to vet this child’s complete medical condition, which includes muscular dystrophy and hypoxemia according to an NPR report. They also chose a photo that did not show the healthy older brother in the background. Once again, the New York Times misled the public to push a certain narrative. When the New York Times issued its appended Editors’ note to the online version of the article, it published this addition on its @nytimespr X account with only 89,000 followers versus its main account with over 55 million followers.
The BBC also published a blatantly false report featuring an emaciated woman named Marah Abu Zuhri who was evacuated from Gaza to Italy for treatment but unfortunately died. They claimed she died of malnutrition. She actually had an aggressive form of leukemia and died as a result of the cancer. The BBC also had to correct their story, but the subsequent correction is insufficient to overcome the damage the original story did.
The New York Times also published an article claiming unnamed Israeli military officials stated, “No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole UN Aid.” The caveat here is two-fold: unnamed Israeli military officials and the use of the word “routinely.” This is a non-story. There are no verifiable sources and no categoric denial that Hamas stole UN aid.
How did these major newsrooms fail on such an epic level? We can point to the inner workings of these major brands and how they operate vis a vis this episode of the Honesty podcast. In this episode, Nellie Bowles discusses her tenure at the New York Times and the rampant activism that pollutes newsrooms (at approximately 26 minutes in). I can only surmise that journalism school no longer focuses on impartiality based on this testimony and the outcomes.
Which brings us to the PR Jihad campaign to push the accusation that Israel is shooting civilians attempting to obtain food and aid from the GHF. These reports started with videos of people running, people on the ground, and gunfire sounds from guns that don’t match IDF-issued firearms. With an abundance of fully charged phone cameras in Gaza, not a single one has ever captured an American contractor or an Israeli soldier firing a gun at someone lining up for food, as evidenced by this video and this video.
On the other hand, Hamas issued a warning to Gazans that they are forbidden from getting aid from GHF. A Gazan resident tells an IDF soldier that Hamas is shooting at anyone attempting to get aid from GHF in this recording, and even the Palestinian Authority admits that “death squads” from Hamas’s Al Sahm unit are hunting Gazans seeking GHF assistance.
Former US Green Beret and former GHF contractor Anthony Aguilar has been at the center of spreading the lie that Israel is shooting at Gazans seeking aid. Aguilar has appeared on MSNBC, Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan, France 24, Democracy Now, and was interviewed by the BBC and a multitude of other media outlets spreading his narrative to anyone who would give him the opportunity. He claimed that he witnessed the IDF shoot and kill a little boy named “Amir” with whom he’d just been speaking at a distribution site. He claimed he quit GHF in protest. However, it turns out that Aguilar was actually fired by GHF, begged to stay employed as evidenced by text messages shared by his superiors at GHF, and vowed revenge if they did not keep him on. US Army Special Forces Veteran, ex-law enforcement officer, and podcaster Matt Tardío interviewed Aguilar on his Speak the Truth podcast. After that interview, Tardío investigated Aguilar’s claims, weighed them against available evidence, and concluded that Aguilar was lying about almost everything he’s been promoting. On a subsequent episode of his podcast, Tardío provides a meticulous deep dive outlining the claims, the evidence, his analysis of Aguilar’s story, and his ultimate conclusion that Aguilar lied to him and to the public.
Since Tardio’s investigation into Aguilar, it has been revealed that “Amir,” whose name is actually Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamden (nicknamed Abood), is alive and well and had been in hiding for fear of Hamas retribution. Aguilar putting a spotlight on this child put his life in grave danger. GHF put their own lives in danger by searching for and ultimately finding “Amir,” who has been brought to safety with his family by GHF.
There are many more examples of narratives being promoted by mainstream news outlets that have been half-truths, mischaracterizations, and partial information being driven by the PR Jihad machine.
What’s the source of this PR Jihad? Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the loss of the world’s last caliphate, and the loss of the Levant to Jewish self-governance, extremist factions within the Muslim world have mourned this new reality. In 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in Egypt to promote the goal of caliphate building and employing the most violent and supremacist interpretation of Islam. After centuries of a mostly peaceful version of Islam practiced, the 20th century saw a resurgence of the type of extremism and barbarism the Islamic world exhibited during the Islamic conquests. Israel is the outlier in a Muslim-dominant Middle East and there are contingents within the Muslim world, with the Muslim Brotherhood at the helm, marshaling the movement to destroy Israel.
The coalition between jihadis and the far left has been a solid partnership for decades as evidenced by the red/green alliance displayed during the 1979 revolution in Iran and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) founding by the KGB in 1964. We are now seeing the far left Marxists in the West aligning with their revolutionary counterparts in the Muslim world with a shared disdain for the Jewish people. Hamas doesn’t have a Navy or an Air Force and it can’t win a kinetic war against Israel, but it has exceptional PR skills, and promoting manufactured outrage and propaganda is the only tool it can wield against a powerful military. The international media, the academics, and the NGOs are the equivalent of Hamas tanks and fighter jets in this war and many well-intentioned Westerners are willing participants.
One of the most egregious examples of the PR Jihad partnership between Western NGOs and Hamas is the toolkit that was disseminated to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) to choreograph a specific response to the October 7, 2023 attacks that I’ve covered previously. One can logically conclude that SJP at Columbia University had fore knowledge of the attacks based on their actions and the toolkit was quite obviously designed ahead of the attacks.
The specifics contained herein are to provide a complete picture of the manipulation coming from once trusted sources, such as academics, journalists, elected officials, and human rights NGOs, who are unwittingly, and in some cases wittingly, participating in a Goebbelsesque campaign against Israel. Until our legacy media finds its lost integrity and journalistic ethics, the only people getting a full picture of what is actually going on in the world are those who are also on social media (which has its own set of issues). The legacy media alone can no longer be trusted as a source of accurate information and discernment is key. The blood libels we see today against Israel are the same blood libels spoken about Jews for millennia—evil child killers who gleefully exact cruelty for our own amusement. Israel is the Jew of countries.
“Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” — Jonathan Swift
