Mocking Gaza's murdered babies on national TV

A nauseating case study into the dehumanisation of Palestinians

Every genocide depends on the dehumanisation of its victims. And here is just one nauseating example.

A respectable commentator, joking about the mass slaughter of Palestinian babies, on national television, and then getting raucous laughter from a studio audience. This is a sickness, an example of anti-Palestinian racism being mainstream, acceptable and indeed respectable.

Van Jones is a US political commentator and CNN host who is often described as a classic example of ‘Progressive except Palestine’. He is vociferously pro-Israel and appeared on a show presented by Bill Maher, also vehemently pro-Israel.

Van Jones claimed that younger people have turned against Israel because of a “massive disinformation campaign” waged by Iran and Qatar on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.

To make his point, Van Jones said - to laughs and cheers from the audience:

If you are a young person, you open up your phone and all you see is dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby. That’s basically your whole feed!

What do you even say? What is going on these people’s heads? It is a fact that Palestinian babies have been massacred by the Israeli state. According to the official death toll, approaching 1,000 Palestinian infants under one year old have suffered violent deaths at the hands of the Israeli military - and all the evidence shows that these statistics are drastic underestimates.

They have been blown apart by missiles, suffocated under rubble, burned alive in explosions, and yes, beheaded by Israeli weapons. Others have starved to death. Not only spreading the warped conspiracy theory that this is disinformation - but mocking and laughing about dead Palestinian babies speaks to the level of dehumanisation which has made Israel’s genocide possible.

If someone had something like this about Israeli children - whether it be the 1 baby killed on 7th October, 8 month old Mila Cohen, or the 35 other children killed that day - what do you think would happen? The audience, firstly, would have been beyond shocked and repulsed, and that person would be fired immediately from every job they have essentially instantaneously. They would become a social pariah, despised, unemployable.

Indeed, so many people have suffered dire consequences not for saying heinous things about children, but for simply opposing Israel’s genocide and treating Palestinians as human beings. They’ve been abused, fired, threatened, beaten up by police officers, arrested and indeed deported in what is the biggest assault on free speech in the Western world since the heyday of McCarthyism seven decades ago.

But what about Van Jones? No such consequences here. Yes, there was a backlash online,, but Van Jones rode it out with a completely pathetic pseudo-apology. Let me just read it out:

Yeah, I messed up on this one. And I’m sorry. I was trying to raise awareness about foreign adversaries creating chaos online - which is undermining democracy everywhere. But what I said was easily misunderstood, and the way I said it was flat-out insensitive. Babies are dying every day in Gaza. Nobody should dispute that fact or make light of it in any way. To the people living in fear and burying family members every day, of all ages — I apologize.

As Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen said in response to this:

I’m glad Van Jones apologized for his sick joking about dead kids in Gaza.

But the problem goes deeper: he spread Netanyahu propaganda that the mass killings of civilians in Gaza—including 20K+ kids—is Iranian fake news.

It’s not the students and young people who are fooled. It’s Van Jones.

And this is a really crucial point. Mainstream media outlets have airbrushed the truth about Israel’s genocide - whether that be broadcasters or newspapers. They’ve failed to report multiple atrocities, failed to show the horrific consequences, repeatedly regurgitated Israeli lies about their war crimes - despite Israel’s objective record of constant deceit, we could go on.

But Palestinian journalists - who have suffered the biggest slaughter of journalists in human history - used social media to show the world the truth. New technology has enabled us to see what mainstream media outlets refuse to show. In the words of Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh - who was on South Africa’s legal team prosecuting Israel for genocide last year - this genocide is “the first in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real-time, in the desperate but so far vain hope that the world might do something.”

And here’s what is even more perverse. There were actually lies about atrocities committed on 7th October, and specifically lies about Israeli babies being beheaded, which never happened. Those lies were shared by President Joe Biden and mainstream media outlets. There has been outrage over those fictional dead babies then there has been about hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian babies who have actually, really been murdered en masse.

And here’s another thing. Rather than the objective reality of Israel’s genocide being invented by disinformation campaigns waged by foreign powers, the truth is that social media companies are censoring that reality. Human Rights Watch has covered how Meta has systematically censored Palestine content on Instagram and Facebook, while even the BBC covered how Palestinian news outlets were censored on Facebook.

Meanwhile there has been huge amounts of censorship on Tiktok, X and YouTube.

And indeed TikTok is a really striking example. Pro-Israel cheerleaders are angry with TikTok because people have been able to see the truth about what Israel is doing - from the atrocities committed by the Israeli state against Palestinians, to IDF soldiers gleefully posting their own war crimes on the platform.

Despite claims that the push to ban TikTok was about national security because it was Chinese-owned, last May, Republican Senator Mitt Romney said support for banning TikTok was down to the “overwhelming” volume of “mentions of Palestinians” on the platform.

Safra Catz, a former Oracle CEO and a top executive leading the planned $14bn takeover of TikTok’s US operations told the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in 2015 that they had to “embed the love and respect for Israel in the American culture.”

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s executive chairman, previously inquired about now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s loyalty to Israel before he agreed to commit $3 million for his presidential campaign in 2015, and did so when he was reassured Rubio “will be a great friend to Israel.”

They will now have control of the TikTok algorithm.

Benjamin Netanyahu - the Israeli prime minister who is a wanted man with an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity - has openly boasted about how important the TikTok sale is for Israel. TikTok, he says, is the “most important” in Israel’s fight. “Weapons change over time… the most important ones are on social media,” he says.

This is so brazen. The leader of a state committing genocide and heinous war crimes boasting about how the TikTok sale will help Israel manipulate public opinions.

Israel’s cheerleaders are panicking because public opinion across the West - which Israel depends on - is shifting dramatically against the state. Half of Americans now believe Israel is committing genocide, compared to 35% who disagree. 60% disapprove of Israel’s military action, 32% disapprove.

Amongst Jewish Americans, 61% believe Israel has committed war crimes against Palestinians, and nearly 4 in 10 believe Israel has committed genocide.

The reason for this isn’t because of disinformation and misinformation - but because you can’t force people to love a state they know is committing every war crime under the sun.

Van Jones is an utter disgrace - but he’s one manifestation of how Palestinians have been completely dehumanised during Israel’s genocide. The real disinformation comes from Israel’s cheerleaders - and more and more people see through it every single day.