Facts and fiction

Sometimes being old-fashioned is spot on. Here’s the thing. These days, it seems it’s acceptable to say whatever comes to your mind about someone on social media. If you make people look bad or say something that humiliates or upsets someone, what are they going to do about it? Are they going to press charges against you? For the most part, it’s unlikely, and you may get away with it. Why wouldn’t you, when so many in the social media world do? I’m often outraged at the things people say to one another and get away with. Social media is a cesspit of the worst kind.

Being old-fashioned, I loved the days when people would be in front of you or at least on a telephone to tell you their thoughts. They thought twice before saying the things said on social media today.

And in this morass of ugliness, groups of people launch campaigns to harm others. Often, they can be strategic in the harm they set out to cause, or they can just be a gang of bullies out to do damage in whatever way they can.

In the bigger picture around the world, the anti-Israel lobby does well in such campaigns. It puts out all sorts of misinformation, be it a picture of a starving child who may or may not be anywhere near Gaza. The picture may or may not have been taken in the past five years. It grabs numbers that are thrown about by Hamas, which rarely have anything to do with reality, and spews them out. The possibilities are endless, yet most of those who have taken what they believe to be a moral stand against Israel won’t question them for one minute. No matter what is said about Israel, if it’s hateful and makes Israel look appalling, it’s accepted and shared with emotionally-charged wording added by the sharer. What gets to me is that if it fits what they want to believe, they never question it. I just wish some of these “sharers” would check for the truth before sharing. For the most part, they are supposedly thinking people, and in many cases even journalists, but this is their Achilles’ heel. If it fits their narrative, checking is apparently unnecessary.

A woman I know, who calls herself my friend on social media, shared a post that read: “Israeli official investigation concluded that an Israeli military helicopter killed revellers at the Nova rave on 7 October and that Hamas did not know about the festival.” She wrote above it, “They did it to their own people. It was never about Hamas.”

Find me that investigation and that report. You can’t, and neither can she. However, it’s easy to find hundreds or more of the revolting videos sent out by Hamas about what its henchmen did to the “revellers” at the Nova festival. I’m sure she wouldn’t believe an Israeli investigation anyway, so why even share it now?

But the very terrorist organisation that she seems to want to exonerate, was the one which made known the horrors of what its members did on 7 October 2023. It made no secret of it. It so proudly destroyed, raped, burnt alive, and worse as many Jews as possible, and sent the proof out to the world. But now, this woman, and all those who share such rubbish, just accept it because it makes the Jewish state look bad. And she, and so many others, will tell you how much they really like Jews, just not Jews who want to maintain the Jewish state. They like those Jews who spit on Israel and say disgusting things about the rest of us. Those are “good Jews” to their minds.

The SA Jewish Report this week become the focus of some of these people. Another “old friend” is putting out a warning to people against advertising in this publication. She demands that they don’t do so because it’s a “fascist rag” that is “accountable to no-one and is in the business of peddling viciously dangerous lies in the active service of genocide”. She goes on, saying, “It’s a shame and disgrace to advertise there where your revenues go towards a literal South African propaganda base for the ongoing Nakba, genocide, aggressive colonial war, and annexation, apartheid and settler colonialism”.

Wow! I had no idea we were all this. But then, those of us on this publication deal with facts not fictitious, hateful lies. We’re old-fashioned journalists who work with facts. We don’t go out to harm others. We don’t make it our business to make people look bad. We certainly do not go out to destroy people or businesses.

The fact is that this so-called “fascist rag” is accountable to the South African Jewish community. We make it our business to tell the truth and inform this community of what is happening that affects it. And all this money we supposedly get from advertising is certainly not going anywhere other than to pay for the real and huge costs of producing this publication. The only thing that’s shameful is that someone who has nothing to do with this community feels the need to run this newspaper down and spread lies about us and what we do. There’s no bearing of truth in what she is saying, and it’s quite sad that she feels the need to spend her time trying to prevent people from advertising in the SA Jewish Report.

The only thing journalists on this publication make every effort to do is to give the truth. Why do you think she wants to stop this newspaper’s advertising? Is she threatened by the truth? We don’t buy into the popular narrative, because as old-fashioned journalists, we take seriously the role of getting all sides of the story and attaining the truth before publishing. That clearly bothers this woman. We don’t spew out nonsense that purposely makes Israel – or anyone – look bad. It’s our old-fashioned way. That’s how we learnt to be journalists back in the day.

We certainly didn’t learn to accept lies and share them. We also didn’t get taught to cause harm for the sake of it. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Unfortunately, growing antisemitism has hit all of us in some way or another. For this reason, this publication has a place in ensuring that we give our community important information and the facts they need to know about what has an impact on them.

As a community and publication, we won’t let our haters destroy us no matter what!

Shabbat shalom!

Peta Krost

Editor