A perfect example of the warfare employed by anti-Israelis and in broader term antisemites. How they manage to convince well-meaning people to hate Israel and the Jews. This is a great example for what Sartre described more than 70 years ago.
On November 9, 2023 Jackson Hinkle posted a Tweet with some totally ludicrous text.
It might not be obvious to most people, but Barib Yariel is not an Israeli name. It is probably more obvious that there is no such thing as 100% success rate. The whole second sentence is just a plain blood libel as if the goal of the Israeli snipers was to shoot Palestinian kids.
I assume that for most of the intelligent and well-meaning people, if they invested some energy in it, it would be clear that this is totally bogus.
Yet when I looked at it on November 10, 2023, just 1 day after the post, Twitter reported 5,600,000 views, 107,000 likes, 29,000 re-shares, 2,000 bookmarks, and 7,300 comments.
Clearly it went viral.
A short note by this "MAGA communist" generated a lot of echo. It is pretty clear to me that the author himself knows how ridiculous his Tweet is, but it does not bother him. His followers echoed it around the world. Maybe even they know at some level that this is bogus, but they enjoy it.
Many Israelis, Jews, or just sane people in general had to rush and explain why this is a lie. They managed to attach a community note explaining why this is not correct, but I doubt it has a lot of impact on the followers of this "MAGA communist".
So with a small effort he manged to create a viral blood-libel and made a lot of good people waste a lot of time refuting him, instead of creating nice things for the world.
Not so obvious lies
You, as an intelligent and well meaning person will probably think: Well, this is just a stupid post and we see a lot of these going on in the American and global politics.
You might even think, this is so stupid no one will believe in it. I am not so sure about it, but the point is not even whether they believe it or not. This reinforces their view of Israel.
However, what I really wanted to show is the mechanism of how this works. It is important to understand as the very same mechanism is used with posts in which most people won't be able to tell if they are true or false. For example, all the posts about the number of dead Palestinian children. Even the well respected news outlets repeat the numbers that Hamas (via the UN) feeds them. Or the claim that there is a genocide, or ethnic cleansing, or apartheid.
Sometimes they use statements that might might be true, but out of context mean something totally different. I'll give a few examples later in separate posts.
Each one of these will be then echoed by tens of thousands of people. Some of these will be Palestinians. Many will be Muslims from around the world who were indoctrinated with Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred. Many will be misguided social justice warriors. People who think they are liberal, but can't tell the difference between good and evil. Oh, and I bet many will be bots run by Russia, China, Qatar, or Iran.
Then if we want to fight it we need to spend enormous time refuting these claims. Again and again.
What can be done?
We are clearly outnumbered. What might help is explaining this mechanism to people, like I am doing now, and hoping that from now on you will be able to see the posts more critically and you might even explain it to others who trust you.