Is Hamas Beheading Babies?
Evaluating reports of war atrocities
Francisco Goya print “The Disasters of War.”
Mainstream CBS news professional Norah O’Donnell has unfortunately, but understandably, passed on the rumor that Hamas has beheaded infants and children in Israel, thereby lending her credibility to the report. It is very important to figure out whether this rumor is correct.
https://twitter.com/norahodonnell/status/1711810783309406555
The goal of this post is to share skills as a professional historian to help in evaluating early descriptions of the Israel-Hamas war.
Historians are unanimous in thinking that there is no harder thing to evaluate than early war reports. Even video can be presented in a way that is utterly misleading and out of context. Of course, I give full credit to the videos sent by Hamas to the relatives of their victims, but to my knowledge, these depict what must be called “usual atrocities”—the commonplace and sorrowful criminality that occurs in many wars.
Historians agree that we must be very suspicious of official reporting when it comes to war. Israel has strong reasons to color what it tells the world and so does Hamas. The best early source of information in a conflict is generally a war reporter with a long record of accuracy who gets on the scene and tells us what’s going on. As far as I know this has not happened yet in the Israel-Hamas War. Generally speaking, armies don’t want this kind of reporter around. Everything I know about the Israeli army makes me think that they would not encourage such a presence (neither has Ukraine).
Thus, we come to the widespread rumor that Hamas beheaded babies and children during the October 7 attack on Israel. I’ve made some feeble attempts to find these pictures on the Internet, but my laughable Internet skills and my underlying lack of desire to see the pictures has not led me to success.
Before we directly address the issue of Hamas beheading babies, let us take a side tour and examine two very prominent rumors regarding Nazi atrocities against Jews in WW II.
Hitler had two goals for the Jews of Europe: kill them outright or work them to death. Since Germany is famous for its devotion to efficiency, we find that the SS, the organization charged with running concentration camps, managed to kill 97% of the Jews of Poland. They did not take many detours along the way.
The rumor that Nazis were making soap out of the bodies of Jews first emerged in Poland in 1942. At that time, the Nazi government actually investigated the rumor to make sure that the bodies of Jews were being disposed of appropriately, namely buried or burned. So, making soap out of bodies of Jews was never an SS procedure. Admittedly, at some point during the war one German academic institute did make some soap from Jewish bodies as a depraved lark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpses
Think about the inefficiency of trying to make soap from dead humans. It would be much less efficient than extracting lard from the bodies of cows or pigs, because the whole body of an animal can be used commercially. There has never been a rumor that the nonfat portion of Jewish bodies was used for commercial purposes, say, animal feed or fertilizer. Of course, most soap is made today from vegetable oil, which is much less subject to spoilage than animal fat.
The rumor that the skin of dead Jews was made into lamp shades has been reliably connected with only a single Nazi, the wife of a concentration camp commandant. All historians agree that this was an isolated incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampshades_made_from_human_skin
And So . . .
Given the tendency for war to spark sensationalist rumors, I must conclude that the report that Hamas has beheaded babies and children is highly suspect. It may be true. And in six months or a year we may know one way or the other. Hamas terrorists went to southern Israel with modern weapons to murder and kidnap, not with heavy swords that would only slow them down.
Currently, the rumor is based on the testimony of one anonymous soldier who spoke to one Israeli television journalist:
But in her TV reports, one journalist from the Tel Aviv-based news channel i24 said a soldier had told her they had "witnessed… bodies of babies with their heads cut off."
https://news.sky.com/story/its-important-to-separate-the-facts-from-speculation-what-we-actually-know-about-the-viral-report-of-beheaded-babies-in-israel-12982329
If the rumor is false, either the soldier or the journalist has become one of the most influential bearers of false witness in world history. My guess is that 98% of the population of Israel now believes that babies were beheaded.
Note that a group of journalists who were invited to go to Kfar Aza kibbutz to witness the removal of bodies did not report any decapitations.
https://news.sky.com/story/how-the-pretty-homes-and-green-gardens-of-an-israeli-kibbutz-became-the-scene-of-a-massacre-12982035
Bottom Line
The opening two weeks of a war is a time to tread very lightly before swallowing rumors whole. If this rumor is false, it is another instance in a very long history of people attributing new and unthinkable crimes to their enemies. It's part of the dehumanizing/demonizing process that contributes to the cycle of violence that we are trying so hard to figure out how to end. The Hamas terrorists are horrible— but did they do this?
But what I really hate most about this rumor, it is that it may inspire future Islamic terrorists to make baby beheading a regular part of their repertoire when it wasn't before.
Recently, I rented the old Exodus movie on Netflix and was shocked by a scene leading up to the Arab attack on the kibbutz where a Nazi official orders the Arabs to attack the Jewish settlers under the orders of the Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini. It was like watching the evil Nazi scenes in the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Was there possibly a link between Palestinian Arab hatred of the Jews and fascism? A quick Google opened my eyes.
Amin al-Husseini was a high ranking Muslim cleric empowered to issue fatwas, judicial orders, under Sharia law. While the British appointed him as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to keep the peace, he became hostile to plans for allowing Jews to return to the region. After he lead an uprising against the British occupiers, he escaped ending up in Italy and Germany meeting both Mussolini and Hitler. During the war he did extensive propaganda broadcasts in an attempt to unite the Arab countries against the British and Allies. He was sympathetic to European fascist's treatment of the Jews and vowed to do the same in the Middle East.
"When Husseini eventually met with Hitler and Ribbentrop in 1941, he assured Hitler that "The Arabs were Germany's natural friends because they had the same enemies... namely the English, the Jews, and the Communists". Hitler was pleased with him, considering him "the principal actor in the Middle East" and an Aryan because of al-Hussaini's fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini
On return to the Palestine territories after the war he established a harsh brand of Islam in Jerusalem and backed terrorist organizations to attack Jews in the region. The British and King Hussein of Jordan drove him to exile in Egypt where he collaborated with the leaders of the new radical Muslim Brotherhood which provided the groundwork for Islamofacists of today - Al Qaida, ISIS, IS, Taliban, Hamas, etc.
Coming from their Nazi roots and witnessing other gruesome atrocities by other Islamist groups, I do not doubt decapitating babies and other heinous acts against Jewish civilians occurred. Hamas did not just pop up on the scene, it was preceded by years of sanctioned Islamofascist rhetoric and hatred of Jews echoing from the WWII Holocaust times. This is what we are witnessing today and helps explain the illogical hatred of the Jew and refusal to collaborate with them on a solution. The only one acceptable to Hamas is the "Final" one.
Something is weird here, Kathleen. I couldn't delete my misplaced comment. And then I posted it under Cromwell8 and it showed up under your response to him. But you understand now that my question was for Cromwell8.