Fact-checkers get it wrong on HAMAS atrocity

Yesterday afternoon Donald Trump, Jr., son of the former President, shared graphic video of an atrocity in progress in Israel. Fact-checkers – not the professional debunkers Facebook uses, but individual users thinking they could catch the younger Trump in a lie – insisted that the video was of an incident that happened eight years ago. But later, other reviewers concluded that the younger Trump was correct and the fact-checkers wrong.

A young Trump v. the fact-checkers

The dust-up began on October 10, 2023 at 3:29 p.m. EDT with this post on X by the younger Trump:

At first someone appeared to have deleted the video. The Wayback Machine captured it soon after Donald Jr. shared it. According to Jim Hoft at The Gateway Pundit, the video depicted seven men whom someone was killing, gangland execution style. It even shows the executioner firing several rounds into a body after it moved an arm. Definitely not for the faint-of-heart.

Almost at once, someone left a Community Note – which also has disappeared by now. It read:

Video is not from the current conflict and can be traced back to 2015.

The picture in Jim Hoft’s article shows a link to another post on X by one Keith Woods. That worthy has borne mention before, as one suggesting that no one should believe any account of atrocities in the Fourth Arab-Israeli War. His thesis is that the Islamic Resistance Movement (Arabic Harakah al-Muqāwamah al-Islāmiyyah, abbreviated HAMAS) are doing nothing more nefarious than reclaiming territory that the United Nations promised the Arabs in 1948, and that the Israel Defense Forces and their apologists worldwide are creating “atrocity propaganda” in real time. Keith Woods is an Irish influencer who in fact led with cartoons from the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Apparently he thinks the Israelis have a modern Oliver Cromwell to lead them. (Cromwell famously suppressed the Irish Rebellion in brutal fashion, after using cartoon images of Irish rebels slaughtering innocent people.)

WIRED Magazine says: sorry, it’s real

Now enter WIRED Magazine. In a story timelined October 11, 2023, 3:39 p.m. EDT, they state that they researched the video independently.

According to an independent OSINT analysis published on Wednesday, the video Trump Jr. posted is real. It was recorded during Saturday’s attack and does show Hamas fighters shooting Israelis, the analysis found.

Three different kinds of people sympathetic to HAMAS rely on such fact-checks to support their denial that HAMAS commits atrocities. They are:

1. HAMAS’ fellow Muslims,
2. Leftists who perpetuate the narrative of Israel as another Oppressor Country, and
3. Rightists who, sadly, regard the Jews as the enemies of Christendom and of decent (Gentile) taxpaying Americans.

For days after the Fourth Arab-Israeli War began, members of these three groups sought to deny the atrocities. This is further evidence that they are undeniable. Tellingly, the Iranians – despite their denial of any role in the attack – are now taunting the victims. This they would not do if the atrocities were not real.

WIRED offered these details:

In the case of the Trump Jr. video, the Community Notes user linked to a video posted on the Iranian social media platform Wisgoon as evidence that the video was from years ago, not this past weekend. In the post, the upload date on the video is in Persian, which, when translated, reads “15 Mehr 1402,” a date in the Persian calendar. This date translates in the Gregorian calendar to October 7, 2023—the date Hamas attacked Israel.

An open source intelligence researcher tells WIRED that they confirmed the video’s veracity by tracking the original video, which was broadcast by a Gaza civilian on a Facebook livestream on Saturday morning.

CNAV has verified the date equivalency using the Fourmilab Calendar Converter.

Why the original fact-checkers would make such elementary mistakes is not clear – unless they knew they were lying and hoped no one would notice.

Update

The author updated this article with information that the graphic video, missing and feared deleted, has reappeared.