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By the time of my Bar Mitzva, I had known for years not to trust the mainstream media’s reporting on Israel and that when Israel was accused of a crime, the accusation was likely a lie.

In 2000, at the beginning of the Second Intifada, the New York Times published a photograph the Associated Press captioned as depicting an Israeli police officer standing over a beaten and bloodied Palestinian Arab. In reality, the photograph depicted Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish American citizen who had been beaten by a mob of Arabs and rescued by the police officer standing over him.

In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, British media such as the Guardian and the BBC published false reports of a massacre allegedly committed by IDF forces in Jenin. So-called human rights NGOs like Human Rights Watch enthusiastically echoed and spread these lies about a nonexistent massacre. In fact, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed in Jenin because the IAF did not bomb it before they entered the refugee camp.

These two incidents taught me as a child to have a very healthy skepticism for reports of Israeli wrongdoing, a skepticism that continued to be justified in my teenage years and into adulthood. That makes it all the more frustrating that there are so many who are incapable of seeing what is obvious to a small child, no matter how many times this skepticism is proven correct.

Hardly a day seems to go by in this war without some new lie about Israeli crimes. In October, it was claimed that Israel bombed the Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, killing 500 people. Nearly every detail about this incident was a lie designed to tarnish Israel’s reputation, and yet it was eaten up by a media that never learned or wanted to learn to treat anti-Israel accusations with the skepticism they deserve. It was quickly proven that Israel had not bombed the hospital, that the blast was caused by a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that struck the parking lot, and that the death toll was a small fraction of what had been claimed.

You would think the media would have learned its lesson after the Baptist Hospital Libel, but some refuse to ever learn.

More lies were told about the IDF’s March operation at the al-Shifa Hospital, where it was claimed without evidence that soldiers raped Palestinian Arabs. This lie was designed to distract from the horrific sexual crimes committed against Jews on October 7 and against the hostages held in Gaza, and from the extraordinary IDF accomplishments at al-Shifa, where hundreds of terrorists were killed or arrested and not a single civilian was killed.

The most recent lie is the claim that Israel is training dogs to rape Palestinian Arabs. This follows a long line of claims of Israel using animals for various nefarious purposes, from using sharks to attack Egyptian divers, dolphins and birds as spies, and pigs to destroy crops, among others. Wikipedia, a site that has become more and more likely to publish antisemitic lies about Israel as if they are true as its recent decisions on who is considered a reliable source on Israel demonstrate, has an article dedicated to conspiracy theories involving Israel and animals.

It does not matter how outlandish or obviously false the accusations against Israel are. There will be always be those who are so blinded by hate that they want desperately for the accusations to be true. Briahna Joy Gray, for instance, who was fired from the Rising political talk show after she displayed her utter contempt for the sister of one of the Israeli hostages, attempted to spread the lie about the dogs by claiming it needed to be investigated - as if it had any credibility.

After her firing, Joy Gray went on Candance Owens’ podcast, where the two bonded over their shared hate for the Jewish State. Owens, who has spent the last nine months peddling lie after lie against Israel, suggested that AIPAC was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. One wonders if she is knowledgeable enough to know that JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy was assassinated by a Palestinian Arab, Sirhan Sirhan.

Given her claims that the Arab Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem is so named because that is where Arabs are forced to live, probably not.

Like other left-wing antisemites, Owens has parroted the claims of a genocide in Gaza and has made the most outlandish claims on the death toll in Gaza of them all, suggesting that Israel is prepared to kill a million people in order to save a few hostages. Even Hamas hasn’t thought to tell a lie that big.

For months and months, the media, the UN, and NGOs have been peddling lies about an imminent famine in Gaza. To make this argument the UN deliberately undercounted the amount of aid and food going into Gaza, a lie that was not questioned by the media despite the real figures being readily available and the absence of any evidence of starvation in Gaza.

The latest report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification stated outright that there was no famine in Gaza, that the amount of food available in Gaza has increased since March, and reduced the number of people in Gaza who fall under the highest rankings of its famine scale.

Will this report make a difference on International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants again Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He is seeking to charge them for “causing starvation as a method of war.” Surely it is relevant that said starvation never occurred, right? Unfortunately, it will almost certainly have no impact, because Khan’s decision was not based on facts or evidence, but on the feelings of activists who believe Israel is always guilty even when proven innocent.

The starvation libel is central to the genocide libel, a libel that is easily debunked by any analysis of the IDF’s conduct and the casualty figures in Gaza, which shows a civilian to combatant ratio of just about 1:1. In a world where nine civilians are killed for every combatant in the average war, this is as far from a genocide as it is possible to be. Some try to claim that every single Gaza fatality is a civilian, pretending Hamas and Islamic Jihad don’t exist, to reconcile their lies with reality.

The UN, an organization that rushes to believe every lie Hamas has ever told, has revised its casualty figures for women and children down by about half, because the figures supplied by Hamas were lies, as they usually are.

But it does not matter how many times false claims about Israel are proven to be lies.

News organizations are supposed to provide their audiences with the truth. But when it comes to Israel, ideology always seems to trump the truth. A serious news organization, one with a shred of self-awareness, would treat the claims of a genocidal terrorist organization like Hamas with a lot more skepticism that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, and many others treat the constant flood of anti-Israel claims. No mater how many times the boy cries wolf, they always believe in the wolf and are unfazed by there being no wolf even after a hundred times.

-The truth does not matter to the masses calling for Intifada and chanting ‘From the River to the Sea.’

-It doesn’t matter to the mobs that attack synagogues in Los Angeles or threaten Jews on New York subway cars.

-It doesn’t matter to members of the fourth estate who always unquestioningly parrot every lie Hamas tells without scrutiny no matter how blatantly untrue or how many times they get burned for publishing the same lies from the same people over and over again.

-The truth doesn’t matter to people like Briahna Joy Gray or Candace Owens for whom reality is more like a choose-your-own-adventure children’s book. \

-And it certainly doesn’t matter to the UN, which will continue to support Hamas in its crusade to destroy the Jewish people, refuse to do anything about UNRWA’s involvement in terrorism, and to employ antisemites like Francesca Albanese.

They say the truth hurts. To an antisemite, nothing is more painful than the truth.

Gary Willig is a member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.