How Propaganda Becomes “Truth”

Genocide was once a term used sparingly. We all understood what it meant. Maybe not legally, but most people connected the word to the Holocaust or Rwanda. It was a particular kind of evil—darker and more grotesque than other evils. Even mass killing in war, as horrendous as that is, was not genocide by definition.

Yet today, the word genocide—in reference to the war in Gaza—is freely being used by those who should know better.

How did we get to a point where politicians, media organisations and even human-rights organisations freely use such a word to describe a war initiated by one of the most barbaric Islamist terror organisations on the planet?

A defensive war in which Israel has gone out of its way to minimise civilian casualties, vaccinate the enemy population, and coordinate more than two million tonnes of humanitarian aid into an active war zone still controlled by the enemy it is fighting. Aid on this scale, under those conditions, is almost unheard of in war. To then slap the term genocide on top of that defies all logic and reason. The absurdity of it is mind-boggling.

It has gotten to the point where your average person on the street, with very limited knowledge about what is actually going on in Gaza, has nevertheless heard that there is a genocide happening there. For some, this has already been proven—an open-and-shut case.

Many such people attend pro-Palestine marches believing they are standing on the side of humanity. But pull them aside and ask a few basic questions, and it quickly becomes obvious that they know and understand very little. Enough people were saying the same thing, so they began treating it as established fact, even though the reality tells a very different story.

How does this happen?

What are some of the mechanisms that allow such a catastrophic spread of falsehoods—especially when they seem to carry the weight of institutions people instinctively default to, like the United Nations?

Put simply, it is facts by consensus, not evidence.

But that consensus is reached through an echo chamber that absorbs flawed claims, thin evidence or outright lies and then sends them through a process of citation. Those citations give the appearance of authority, which is itself cited elsewhere, and so the process continues.

By the end of it, flimsy “facts” can be transformed into robust, institutionally backed realities that take an enormous amount of work to disprove. In the meantime, people use those citations to move the needle in their own countries, shape public opinion and force policy changes.

The horrifying thing is how little resistance there seems to be against this process once it begins.

Appealing to authority is a legitimate way of proving your point or changing policy, especially when paired with other forms of evidence. Imagine, however, that you had a way of manipulating the system itself—of making your voice the voice of authority that others appeal to.

Step lightly into the river of conspiracy for a moment.

Imagine you were an authoritarian country, or a coalition of authoritarian countries, that hated the West and understood that UN resolutions, recommendations and the like were far more likely to be adopted, internalised or enforced in democratic countries.

Why?

Because democratic countries are self-critical. Politicians are at the mercy of voters, who themselves can be influenced through public opinion. That public opinion can be shaped by “soft law” from entities like the UN, which can eventually crystallise into hard law in democratic countries—even when the ideas underneath it are deeply demoralising.

Democratic countries are substantially more affected than authoritarian ones, whose rulers are not at the mercy of voters and can simply ignore international criticism.

If such a system could be manipulated, it would be a game-changer for the enemies of the West.

This is not just about Israel. The system I want to narrowly describe here is one that can be used, in a much broader sense, against the Western world.

If you read this and come through the other side with a healthy scepticism of the UN and everything that orbits it, then I have done my job well. Without being able to critically analyse the way these institutions function, you can be pulled into all kinds of twisted corners.

The crime of all crimes

Genocide is tightly entwined with intent: acts designed to destroy a people in whole or in part because of their religious identity, ethnicity, race or nationality.

It is a legal term, not something that can simply be slapped onto anything you believe is bad. Even horrific war crimes and mass killing do not necessarily fit that description unless you can establish the specific intent required for genocide.

The Nazis had a plan to remove Jews from the face of the earth and created the architecture to make that happen. Death camps were built for one purpose.

The Tutsis were dehumanised, called cockroaches and killed because of their ethnicity. More than 800,000 human beings were murdered.

Genocide is not a term to be thrown around lightly. It is the crime of all crimes, and reaching that legal bar is understandably difficult. As it should be. The gravity of such a thing must remain sombre. To accuse a country of committing such a crime is to inflict upon it one of the harshest moral and diplomatic condemnations imaginable.

Which brings us to Francesca Albanese.

The UN Rapporteur

Francesca Albanese, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, wrote a report in 2024 titled Anatomy of a Genocide.

She claimed there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel had already met the threshold for genocide in Gaza. In subsequent reports, however, she hardened her stance. What began as “reasonable grounds to believe” increasingly became something treated as established fact.

In 2025, she went even further, calling it a “full-fledged genocide.” By 2026, she was writing that “the genocidal intent is apparent.”

These statements are important, not just because she failed to convincingly demonstrate intent, but because of the political weight a Special Rapporteur carries.

Rapporteurs are supposed to be impartial. They are independent experts rather than ordinary UN employees, but they inevitably carry the logo, the title and the authority that comes with it. To the average person, that distinction barely matters. They simply see UN expert says genocide, and that carries enormous weight.

The problem becomes even more serious when you examine what Albanese leaves out.

Albanese managed to write reports accusing Israel of genocide while barely grappling with Hamas’s tactics of fighting from civilian areas, operating around civilian infrastructure, wearing civilian clothing in an attempt to maximise civilian deaths, and constructing an enormous tunnel system throughout Gaza.

Her 2024 report briefly condemns Hamas for October 7, then states that those crimes fall outside the geographical scope of her mandate. From that moment on, Hamas all but disappears from her analysis.

That would be like trying to analyse a boxing match while one of the fighters is completely invisible.

And this matters enormously when you are trying to prove intent.

If you are attempting to determine whether Israel is deliberately trying to destroy Palestinians as a people, rather than trying to destroy Hamas during a brutal urban war, then Hamas cannot simply disappear from the equation. Its tactics, tunnels, use of civilian areas, failure to consistently distinguish its fighters from civilians, and the broader military environment Israel is operating in are all central to understanding why civilians are dying and buildings are being destroyed.

Civilian casualties and destruction cannot simply be presented in isolation and then used as evidence of genocidal intent while the enemy Israel is actually fighting fades into the background. This is beyond insane.

Yet these reports carry the prestige of the United Nations.

And this is where things become particularly concerning.

The authority cascade

The funnel can begin with a flawed or biased Rapporteur report.

NGOs such as Amnesty International amplify such a report and cite it in their press releases. The media then report on those statements, sometimes flattening the distinction until the public simply hears that “the UN finds…”

The claim reaches politicians, who cite the media, NGOs and the UN, using that collection of authority either to push through policy or change the narrative on the ground. Another Rapporteur or international body may later come along and cite previous reports, NGOs, media coverage or the growing political response, building more scaffolding on an already shaky foundation.

As UN Watch has documented in its critiques of Albanese’s work, she has even cited her own previous reports in later reports.

The cycle continues, gathering momentum until, from the outside, it begins to look like bulletproof evidence.

Amnesty and other NGOs may conduct their own investigations into the so-called genocide while also citing previous UN experts, reports and organisations that exist within the same evidentiary ecosystem. Others then cite Amnesty. Newspapers cite those NGOs. Politicians cite the newspapers. Academics cite the reports. Podcasts, television programmes and other media repeat the conclusions.

Soon you have an enormous body of material—articles, reports, interviews and commentary—each citation borrowing legitimacy from another.

And all of it can be built, at least partly, upon assumptions or claims that were never as solid as the sheer volume of repetition now makes them appear.

This cascading effect of citation and borrowed legitimacy refracts in ways that become almost impossible to follow. Before you know it, the conclusion has entered universities, schools and the psyche of ordinary people, shaping public opinion.

What began as a disputed claim becomes something everybody simply “knows.”

The information war

If you have ever wondered why it feels like Israel is fighting an uphill battle in the information war, this is a large part of the reason.

Now add to that the roughly two billion Muslims in the world, with support for the Palestinian cause deeply embedded across much of the Muslim world, alongside millions of communist sympathisers, revolutionary leftists, anti-Western activists and people deeply suspicious of Western power. Very different ideological movements somehow converge around “Free Palestine.”

Look at the Democratic Party and parts of it are transforming into something increasingly anti-Israel, openly socialist, defensive of Islamist movements and hostile towards the broader Western project. Even the Republican Party has been deeply marred by growing hostility towards Israel.

Different ideological roads increasingly seem to arrive at the same destination.

The older hatred

But when you step back and look at the entire picture, there are many ways you can describe what you see.

There is no denying that one of the dominant colours is the same ancient, shape-shifting evil of antisemitism—Jew-hatred. There are simply too many lies, too many distortions and too many things that do not add up. At some point, ordinary misinformation stops being a sufficient explanation.

Different ideological movements, some of which despise one another on almost everything else, have converged around hostility towards the only Jewish state. Islamists, communists, revolutionary leftists, white nationalists and conspiratorial sections of the right arrive there through very different ideological routes, yet somehow end up at the same target.

Attempting to brand Israel’s war against Hamas a “genocide,” while Israel fights one of the most barbaric and openly genocidal terrorist organisations on the planet, may go down as one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of our lifetime.

As Netanyahu has said, Israel will continue to win because it has no other choice.

But the bigger story here is that Israel is not the only thing on the chopping block. It is simply an easy victim.

The larger target is the Western world.

The same echo-chamber process can become a weapon—whether intentionally or unintentionally—against democracies precisely because these are countries with freedoms, countries willing to criticise themselves, and countries whose journalists can investigate their governments, citizens can protest them and politicians can be removed at the ballot box.

That is one of our greatest strengths.

But it is also a double-edged sword. Our openness can be exploited, our willingness to listen can be manipulated, and our institutions can mistake consensus for truth. Our instinct to scrutinise ourselves can become destructive when we stop applying the same scrutiny to the people doing the accusing.

Our greatest strength may, in time, also prove to be our greatest weakness.

So the next time you read about a UN report, or hear one cited as though the blue logo itself settles the argument, keep your critical-thinking cap on.

The important question is not simply who said it.

The important question is:

What is the evidence underneath it?