fomoke-dasein

What happened today on the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv? I dismantle the Israeli narrative.

I watched Netanyahu’s UN speech again, this time with an open transcript. The October 7 passage is about ten seconds long and there is no doubt that it was written by someone who knows exactly which of the atrocity stories from that day have collapsed under scrutiny and rigorous fact-checking. That is why he never repeats the unfounded claims. He says things that sound like them, so the claims are held up without being spoken. Let’s walk through these: 1) “They burned babies alive in front of their parents.” There was one infant killed on October 7. Her name was Mila Cohen and she was ten months old, horrifically shot in her mother’s arms in Be’eri while gunmen tried to get through the safe room door. Nobody burned her. The burned babies story was spread by one Col. Golan Vach, who said that he had found eight of them in Pessi Cohen’s house located in Beeri. 2) That is not true. People did die in that house, thirteen of them, including a pair of 12-year-old twins. Israel’s own victim list has 14 kids under ten. None was burned alive. The closest case is the Siman Tov children in Nir Oz, 5, 5 and 2, who died of smoke in a safe room after their house was set on fire, next to parents who had been shot through the window. That is the horror he is drawing on, and he still had to change every detail to get “burned babies alive in front of their parents.” Reality was bad enough without adding horrors. 3) People were burned on October 7. The question is who did the burning. In November 2023 Israel quietly dropped its October 7 toll from 1,400 to 1,200. Netanyahu’s adviser Mark Regev explained why on MSNBC on November 16: “There were actually bodies that were so badly burnt we thought they were ours, in the end apparently they were Hamas terrorists.” And the Cohen house? It burned after Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram told a tank crew, in his own words, “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.” Fifteen hostages inside. Thirteen dead. 4) So who burned the Hamas fighters? What were they burned with? That day 28 Israeli attack helicopters fired “all of the ammunition in their bellies,” hundreds of Hellfire missiles and 30mm rounds, in the words of Air Force Col. Nof Erez. Southern Command ordered that “not a single vehicle could return to Gaza.” Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman counts 70 vehicles destroyed by aircraft and tanks, everyone inside killed. Lt. Col. A., commander of the 190th Squadron later admitted they could not tell who they were firing at: “Even if you do see people, what do you do? Fire at them? You don’t know who they are. Maybe it’s the kibbutz security team or the intervention team. You just don’t know anything.” 5) “They beheaded our men.” Notice where he puts it. Right after the babies. He knows everyone paying attention can remember the “40 beheaded babies” report which appeared on i24 on October 10, 2023 and was picked up by several Western media outlets and that Biden repeated before having to walk it back. It was never substantiated. Even the Israeli government told CBS it could not confirm it. 6) Ask for a name and the one name Israelis give is Sgt. Adir Tahar. He was killed by Hamas in an attack involving an RPG and three grenades at Erez. His body came back without its head. His father says it was cut off and taken to Gaza. The army, by the father’s own account, first told him it was destroyed in the blast. Either way, it happened after he was dead. Chen Kugel, head of Israel’s forensic institute, showed an LA Times reporter a decapitated 12-year-old girl and said: “I don’t know if it was done before death or after death. I think after, but I cannot tell.” Whether it’s a soldier’s corpse or a girl’s, when the prime minister says “beheaded” two seconds after “babies,” it is meant to convey something else. 7) “They brutally raped our women, and then they murdered them.” That second clause is doing a lot of work. The UN’s Patten mission did not talk to a rape survivor from October 7. Not one came forward. They went through 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video and wrote that there were “no tangible indications of rape.” Three Be’eri allegations were found to be unfounded. The pregnant woman story was false. When Patten was asked about the government’s “hundreds if not thousands” of cases she said, “I have not found anything like that.” So why “and then they murdered them”? Because it explains, in advance, why there is nobody to ask. 8) That does not mean rape did not occur. Amit Soussana went to the New York Times on March 26, 2024 and described being sexually assaulted by a guard in captivity in Gaza. And it is possible that women raped on October 7 were then murdered and never got to tell anyone. There are photographs of women’s bodies found undressed or partly undressed, some with hands or feet bound. The UN Commission of Inquiry called these “indications of sexual violence.” But binding is what you do to someone you are taking hostage, and on a day when Israel ordered that “not a single vehicle could return to Gaza,” a bound body tells you she was a captive, not who killed her or what was done to her. The best-known image, Gal Abdush in the black dress, anchored the New York Times’s “Screams Without Words” story, and her own family disputed that she was raped. 9) There are also eyewitness accounts from Nova and Route 232, some anonymous, some that shifted between tellings. On that basis the Patten mission found “reasonable grounds to believe” rape and gang rape occurred at Nova, Route 232 and Kibbutz Re’im. Keep in mind what that mission was. Patten said herself it was not an investigation. She went at Israel’s invitation, worked from material Israeli institutions gave her, and met no survivors. This is the same UN envoy who told AFP in 2022 that Russian soldiers were issued Viagra to rape, a claim she never substantiated. Her report called on Israel to let the UN Commission of Inquiry investigate. Israel refused and called the Commission antisemitic. The Commission then wrote that it had “not been able to independently verify” any rape allegation, citing “the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities.” There is no forensic evidence, there is no survivor, and the one body with the power to investigate was kept out. That is where the evidence stands, and it is not where his sentence puts it. 10) “Proportionately, this is equal to 40,000 innocent Americans slaughtered.” The math is not mathing. The 1,200 killed that day, by Israel’s own count, include 274 soldiers, 57 police and 38 security guards. Only 764 were civilians, and some of those were armed members of kibbutz security squads. An unknown number, including the hostages in the Cohen house, were killed by Israeli fire. Run his own formula on the civilians alone and you get about 26,000, not 40,000. And here’s the thing that bugs me most: 40,000 divided by 2,977, the 9/11 death toll, is 13. He said 16. They did not bother to do simple math. 11) The number of dead in Gaza meanwhile makes for a far more stark comparison. So let’s do the division for Gaza. 74,016 dead according to the Health Ministry, out of a prewar population of 2.23 million. Put that on the United States and it’s 11.3 million people killed. Almost 3,800 September 11ths. Among the named dead are more than 21,600 children. Israel lost 38 children on October 7. And the Health Ministry count is the lowest estimate there is. A Lancet Global Health household survey counted 75,200 violent deaths by January 2025, when the ministry had 49,090. The Economist put it at 93,000 by May 2025. The Max Planck Institute put violent deaths alone at 100,000 to 126,000 as of November 2025, a quarter of them children under 15. A July 2024 letter in The Lancet applied the usual ratio of four indirect deaths for every direct one and got 186,000, and that was two years ago. 12) He’s been here before. On October 10, 2023, on the phone with Biden, he said Hamas “took dozens of children, bound them up, burned them and executed them.” There are no bound, burned children anywhere in Israel’s records of October 7. Three years later, “dozens” has quietly disappeared. So has “bound.” He can use the word “burned” because houses were set on fire on October 7 and people died in them. If a journalist ever asks, he can point to those fires and say that is what he meant, even though the only infant killed that day was shot, and the children who died in those fires died of smoke, beside their parents. He mostly avoided out and out lies in this speech. Everything he said has something real underneath it. A baby who was shot. A 2-year-old who suffocated in a safe room. A house the IDF shelled. A soldier’s body mutilated after he was already dead. An allegation no witness ever made. But look at what he does with them. He picks the words that match the stories that collapsed, “burned babies,” “beheaded,” “raped,” and puts them in the order the world first heard them. That way the base can continue to pretend this is all true, even after being thoroughly debunked and the way he phrases it shows he knows it was all debunked. Still, the listener hears forty beheaded babies and bound children burned alive without him ever saying so. If challenged he can retreat to the real case behind each word. But the words do something the cases don’t. They turn a massacre into ritual torture, Freddy Kruegers going house to house burning babies for their parents to watch. The real cases are killings, many of them brutal, some of them by Israel’s own guns. None of them is the sadism he describes. That image is the point, because sadism is what makes anything done to Gaza afterward look like justice. The delegates who walked out were never the audience. The clips were cut for American television, for viewers who heard the 2023 stories once, never saw the corrections, and will hear this as confirmation.