1/ Isaac Chotiner was one of the most consequential disseminators of the mass rape lie used to justify genocide.
(Thread 1 of 2 on this New Yorker article by Chotiner.)
2/ A few weeks before Chotiner helped PHRI spread the "Palestinians are mass rapists" propaganda, the Israeli government ran a focus group for genocide propaganda.
"Raped civilians" polled the best.
Then @IChotiner published their propaganda.
thegrayzone.com/2024/03/06/lea…
3/ Chotiner's own interview revealed enough to know PHRI's report was pure propaganda.
The PHRI official Hadas Ziv said multiple times that they had not interviewed anyone or collected evidence.
4/ Did Chotiner expose PHRI for attempting to dehumanize Palestinians with unverifiable claims of mass rape, to push genocidal propaganda?
Did Chotiner even investigate?
No.
Instead, he introduced PHRI's report like this. Everything highlighted is a lie.
5/ Two days after Chotiner published PHRI's calculated mass-rape propaganda, Lana Tatour revealed in @Mondoweiss:
"Palestinian staff at PHRI urged not to publish this report with no evidentiary threshold, only to be silenced and ignored by Jewish staff."
mondoweiss.net/2023/12/how-hu…
6/ Lana Tatour's Mondoweiss piece is worth reading in full.
Arun Gupta conducted an interview with the same Hadas Ziv from PHRI for @yesmagazine. Unlike Chotiner, Gupta did actual journalism.
Chotiner posted no correction.
yesmagazine.org/social-justice…
7/ We now know the PHRI report was pure propaganda. This thread won't repeat Gupta and Tatour's research.
These 2 threads are only about what Chotiner wrote himself.
I want to point out this reference by @arunindy to what I am pretty sure is @ichoitner's propaganda interview.
8/ We are going to debunk the lies in just the first 2 paragraphs of Chotiner's piece today. It's going to take two threads.
First sentence: "The Israeli government presented evidence at the United Nations about rape and mutilation committed by Hamas militants"
9/ The people Chotiner called "the Israeli government presenting evidence about rape by Hamas" included:
- Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta
- US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
- Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
There was nothing a journalist could call "evidence."
10/ Which gets us to Chotiner's second sentence, where Chotiner pretends there was evidence.
Chotiner said Simcha Greinman saw a woman with nails hammered in to her vagina.
Chotiner's "evidence" from the Israeli presentation at the UN Is Greinman.
Who is Simcha Greinman?
11/ Simcha Greinman is a liar.
Simcha Greinman also claimed Hamas booby-trapped corpses and beheaded babies and pregnant women. Just made up whatever.
Chotiner called Greinman's lie "Israeli government evidence presented at the UN."
12/ @IChotiner repeated Simcha Greinman's lies as if they were fact.
Greinman has been asked for evidence by actual journalists. His response:
"I don’t have one picture in my phone. It’s enough to suffer for the rest of my life from what I saw."
timesofisrael.com/amid-war-and-u…
13/ Which gets us to Chotiner's third sentence, the final one for this thread.
(Our next Chotiner thread will tackle the lies in the second paragraph.)
Let's talk about Chotiner's "saw girl's with broken pelvises from 'repetitive rape'."
14/ Chotiner is citing an Israeli police superintendent named Yael Richert, oddly from the corruption unit.
Richert claims the very detailed "broken pelvis from repetitive rapes" came from an "eyewitness" from NOVA.
The source is a random unnamed attendee from the festival.
15/ Does @IChotiner believe this unknown music festival attendee, cited third-hand, can diagnose broken pelvises? And determine it was rape?
X-ray vision?
It's insane. Even more insane is someone else told the *exact* same "broken pelvis" story later. Shari Mendes.
16/ Some of Shari Mendes's other famous lies included a baby cut out of a pregnant woman. She said the mother was also beheaded. And that she saw genitals cut off. And beheaded babies.
She wasn't the one Chotiner cited though. Mendes was at Shura base, not the music festival.
17/ Chotiner published her "Girls with broken pelvises from repetitive rape" lie as fact, despite it clearly being sloppily disseminated Israeli propaganda.
Why did Chotiner publish a forensic assesment disseminated from 2 different nonsensical sources? Is this journalism?
18/ We made it through the lies Chotiner published in the first 3 sentences of his article.
These lies Chotiner disseminated were used to dehumanize Palestinians, to justify genocide.
Chotiner was one of the most influential journalists in spreading the lie of mass rape.
19/ Since Chotiner published these lies, we learned "Hamas mass rape" was Israeli focus-group tested genocidal propaganda.
It was effective. Israel ethnically cleansed most of Gaza & justified it with propaganda Chotiner disseminated.
Does @IChotiner even care?
20/ Our next Chotiner thread will address his second paragraph. Every single sentence in it is basically a lie as well, just like the first paragraph.
We now know Israel has a systematic rape policy. Hamas did not.
Does @IChotiner even care?
</thread>
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