Reprise: The Hamas PR machine

Another look at how the Iran-backed Palestinian Jihadist terror group turned lies into the mainstream narrative.

Hamas has had great success controlling of the Western media.

To provide everyone with some holiday reading, in addition to new essays, I am re-publishing a few of my most popular stories from 2024. Moral Clarity’s readership has expanded rapidly to have readers in 56 countries, and many newer subscribers may not have read some of these.

This story, first published on March 20, looks at how Hamas has controlled the PR narrative around the Israel-Hamas war and dominated newspaper headlines around the world.

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Hamas has had great success controlling the Western media narrative about the Israel-Palestine conflict, despite most of it being outright lies. It is worth analyzing how they achieved this.

As someone who has held senior leadership positions in some the world's most prestigious newsrooms, and who works as a media strategist to global Fortune 500 companies, I am in awe how successful the Hamas PR campaign has been.

Hamas’ PR strategy has been highly effective because it has turned mainstream media, policymakers, and corrupt UN officials into spokespeople and campaigners for an Islamist terror agenda.

Here is how they have achieved it.

They built on 1500 years of anti-Semitism. Hamas correctly identified that anti-Semitism was only dormant in the West, and that they just needed to wake the sleeping monster. They knew this because there were clear tells. These were the international media's fixation on Israel, the overreporting of the country, and the Pavlovian way the conflict becomes newsworthy only when Israel responds to an attack.

Hamas stuck to what has worked throughout history. The blood libel trope was modernized into accusations of genocide and deliberate starvation, while the trope of Jews being responsible for their persecution was updated with the notion that Israel had turned Gaza into an open-air prison.

They leveraged their numerical advantage. With more than a billion Muslims globally, Hamas knew it had a huge virtual army it could activate on social media to reach a global audience. Hamas flooded social media with lies to exploit the Repetition Bias, a heuristic in which repeated information feels more true than new or unrepeated information. Social media repeated these lies exponentially, aided by extensive use of AI-generated “photographs”.