Debunking Benjamin Netanyahu’s Lies To Congress

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress this Wednesday was replete with distortions and outright lies, all used to drum up support for his stated goals of continuing the assault on Gaza, continuing its occupation of the besieged territory and pushing the US to go along with a policy which will lead to a war with Iran. All of this was met with continuous rounds of applause from US elected officials.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress made history for the largest number of standing ovations ever received by a foreign leader and also made him the only foreign leader to make four speeches there, outdoing a record previously held by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The amount of applause given to the Israeli Prime Minister was rather startling, even when compared to his previous speeches to Congress, which was punctuated by a key moment in which he had to say “no no, don’t applaud, listen“.

The Israeli Premier then went on to continually attack pro-Palestinian American demonstrators and lambasted them as “Iran’s useful idiots”, statements that were also given standing ovations. Despite the fact that just under half of elected Democratic Lawmakers did not show up, overall the event was widely seen as an embarrassment, due to the fact that a foreign leader — who stands accused of war crimes and repeatedly attacked Americans for exercising their First Amendment rights — was heaped with so much praise.

He uses our family members to build support for himself as he abandons them over and over and over again. pic.twitter.com/qjmx49y016

— We Are All Hostages (@AllHostages) July 24, 2024

Netanyahu’s Forty 9/11’s

In the corporate media it has been a mixed bag of reporting on Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, while Right-wing American news outlets heaped praise on the speech uncritically, and other outlets have attempted to portray the address to Congress as having represented the Israeli PM’s isolation in United States. Although the stance of many American Democratic Party elected officials could be interpreted as such, the reality of his reception is impossible to ignore and this is why it is important to debunk his most outrageous lies.

Before we get into the lies, however, the Israeli PM argued that October 7 was like “forty 9/11’s” proportionate to population size. Not only does this minimize the suffering that took place on September 11, 2001, where all the casualties were civilians (unlike was the case on October 7 when around 400 of those killed were Israeli soldiers and armed combatants) it is also a convenient manipulation tactic. So, just for a point of reference, if we take the official Gaza death toll which stands at around 40,000 killed (just under 70% women, children, and the elderly) it would mean that, proportionate to population size, it would amount to the murder of around 6.16 million Americans, or, two-thousand and sixty-nine 9/11’s. To take this example further, this would mean that Israel has committed about 930 more 9/11’s than the total number of Israelis killed on October 7, which is 1,137. Or, it would be like the US enduring a 9/11 every single day for five and a half years straight.

However, playing these rather numerical games is not productive and the only reason I have done so above is to demonstrate that the scale of Palestinian suffering in the Gaza Strip, purely on the basis of death toll statistics, is not even comparable to the suffering on the Israeli side. If you want to play that game, then this is the response. Yet playing such a game only works to create a competition out of human suffering.

Netanyahu’s Lies

CLAIM: “They burnt babies alive”

REALITY: Only one baby was killed on October 7, 10-month-old Mila Cohen who was reportedly shot dead during Hamas-Israeli crossfire. Although this incident is horrific and cannot be justified, there wasn’t an incident of any baby being burned alive by Hamas fighters. This also debunks the photos of “burned babies” published on the Israeli Prime Minister’s X account shortly after October 7.

CLAIM: Netanyahu told a story in which Hamas raided an Israeli families home, where they murdered the parents and then found a secret hatch in the attic where two babies had been hidden, “then they murdered the babies” he said.

REALITY: No such incident ever occurred, as mentioned above there was only one Israeli baby killed on October 7 and that was Mila Cohen in Kibbutz Be’eri. This story is simply a figment of Benjamin Netanyahu’s imagination and had never even been told before. Reading into why this lie was told, it is likely that the Israeli PM said this in order to invoke the memory of Anne Frank who hid from the Nazis in an attic. Like the talking point about October 7 being the equivalent to forty 9/11’s, this story tugs on the heartstrings of Americans who read the Diary of Anne Frank in high school and are sensitive to the idea of a Jewish child hiding in the attic.

CLAIM: After telling the story of babies murdered in the attic of their parents home by Hamas gunmen, he says “those protesters stand with them, they should be ashamed of themselves!”

REALITY: The pro-Palestinian protesters, most of whom are simply calling for a ceasefire and Palestinian freedom, couldn’t possibly stand with the people who committed this act, because it never happened. Furthermore, there are many demonstrators that support Palestinian armed resistance, yet there is no evidence of anyone saying they support the killing of babies. Even amongst those who express support for Hamas, they do so on the basis of supporting an indigenous armed resistance and not in support of any specific incidents that may, or may not, have happened on October 7. If there are people out there who are supporting the murder of Israeli babies, they are yet to present themselves publicly, and should be condemned by all sides.

CLAIM: The Israeli PM claimed, that according to the US Director of National intelligence, “Iran is funding and promoting anti-Israel protests in America, they want to disrupt America”.

REALITY: Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, had indeed stated that the Iranian government was using online bots posing as activists and was backing online groups to encourage protests, in the wake of the upcoming election, but did not provide any information on the actual funding of demonstrator groups who organize in the United States. A piece written for the Associated Press is written in such a way that appears to suggest that groups linked to Iran have offered financial compensation to “protest groups”, yet there is no evidence of this, it is extremely vague, and no such groups were actually named.

Netanyahu then weaponizes this distorted point to state that: “For all we know, Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests that are going on right now outside this building – not that many, but they’re there – and throughout the city. Well, I have a message for these protesters: When the tyrants of Tehran, who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair, are praising, promoting and funding you, you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.”

While it is not possible to know whether Iran gave funds to a group or individual activists, there is simply no evidence of this and it is simply inaccurate to try and paint all or most pro-Palestinian protesters as being controlled by Iran. As an example, groups like Codepink, a liberal feminist and anti-war organisation based in the US, has been labelled as “Iran-linked” in the past for having accepted an invitation to travel there.

At the very best, this is a distortion of reality.

CLAIM: After talking about the Holocaust, Netanyahu claimed that calling Israel Genocidal is meant to “demonize Jews everywhere”.

REALITY: The most prominent case of Israel being accused of committing Genocide is at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has ruled that Israel is plausibly committing a Genocide in Gaza. South Africa, which brought the allegation against Israel at the ICJ has explicitly condemned not only anti-Semitism, but also the October 7 Hamas-led attack.

Furthermore, what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing here is deliberately equating all Jewish people with the policy and actions of the Israeli government. This, in and of itself, is incredibly anti-semitic as it ties every Jewish person in the world to the actions of the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. He then went on his speech to say “no wonder we have witnessed an appalling escalation in anti-Semitism”. Yet, when Israel’s PM is conflating the actions of an Apartheid State with all Jewish people, this will indeed convince many people that the two are the same and that all Jews are represented by the actions of Israel, hence generating anti-Semitism.

CLAIM: “If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it. It’s because Hamas is stealing it.”

REALITY: All the relevant organs of the United Nations, as well as all major human rights organizations, have confirmed that there is now famine across the Gaza Strip, and that Israel is deliberatly blocking aid or facilitaing the blocking of aid by armed settlers. Even Israel’s top human rights group, B’Tselem, has accused Israel of “Manufacturing Famine“. Even the US President, Joe Biden, has stated that he had to pressure the Israelis to let in aid, and despite this there is still a famine and children are dying of malnutrition.

CLAIM: “Remember what so many people said? If Israel goes into Rafah, there’ll be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of civilians killed. Well, last week, I went into Rafah. I visited our troops as they finished fighting Hamas’s remaining terrorist battalions. I asked the commander there, “How many terrorists did you take out in Rafah?” He gave me an exact number: 1,203. I asked him, “How many civilians were killed?” He said, “Prime minister, practically none. With the exception of a single incident, where shrapnel from a bomb hit a Hamas weapons depot and unintentionally killed two dozen people, the answer is practically none.”

REALITY: To begin with, Israel did not launch its full-scale invasion of Rafah, but displaced over a million refugees who were sheltering their, primarily in tents.

Between May 6, when Israel began its invasion of Rafah city’s surrounding areas, and the time that Benjamin Netanyahu gave his speech to Congress, over 4,300 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes and ground assaults, and this number is leaving out those under the rubble or whose bodies cannot be reached. The United Nations even called Rafah “hell on earth” after the invasion.

CLAIM: Netanyahu says that Israel goes beyond what International Law dictates it must do in avoiding civilian casualties and has the best civilian to combatant ratio in history.

REALITY: For anyone with access to the internet, it is clear by the videos of dead civilians every single day that Israel is committing mass murder. However, to put this issue to bed, consider the following:

At the height of the ISIS reign of terror in Iraq, over the span of two years, the terrorist group killed 18,800 civilians according to United Nations figures. In over 9 months, Israel has murdered around 40,000 Palestinian in the Gaza Strip according to the official death toll number provided by the Gaza Health Ministry and published by the UN — with these numbers being called ‘reliable’ by the Israeli army and ‘accurate’ by Israeli intelligence. These numbers do not include over 10,000 who are still buried under the rubble and the statistic for those missing hasn’t actually been altered in many months, with some reports indicating it could be in the tens of thousands. Also, according to the recent Lancet medical journal report on the true Gaza death toll, it could be as high as 186,000 according to conservative estimates. For the sake of argument, let’s just go with the lowest possible 40,000 figure, roughly 70% of them are women, children, and the elderly, which rules them out from being fighters. This information doesn’t need explaining any further, Israel has committed mass murder on a scale many times higher than ISIS did in its peak years.

Going to war for Israel

On top of his egregious lies, many of which were just debunked above, the most alarming parts of Netanyahu’s speech were to do with forming an Arab-Israeli coalition to confront the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was encouraging a policy that leads to a destructive regional war across West Asia, that would be a disaster for the United States. Yet he is given countless standing ovations by the majority of the members of Congress while lying through his teeth repeatedly.

He told Congress that the US had to go and get Saddam Hussein, drumming up support for that illegal and disastrous war, he has been lying about Tehran getting a nuclear weapon for decades, he now wants to lie the United States into yet another war with Iran.