Florida GOP Rep Totally Onto All Those Actors Moonlighting As Dead Palestinians
Nice work if you can get it?
SAG-AFTRA has been on strike since July 14, but Republican Rep. Cory Mills from Florida suspects that many actors are getting a little bit of under the table side work in the Middle East, playing the coveted roles of Dead Palestinians #1-#9,770 and Injured Palestinians #1-#23,000.
“What the mainstream media is saying about the indiscriminate fire and the actors —I mean you literally have paid actors who are pretending to be killed, pretending to be treated, that’s now coming forward,” Rep. Mills said during an appearance on Right Side Broadcasting Network. “So I ask every individual as we already do here in America, educate yourself and find good positive outsources (???) and stop trusting mainstream media that corrupts the minds of every single American at home.”
This feels like a relatively strange take given that most media outlets have, by and large, been very clearly on Israel’s side in this. The New York Times, in particular, has gone above and beyond the call of duty in this respect, and literally just pushed writers Jazmine Hughes and Jamie Lauren Keiles to resign for signing an open letter published last week by a group called “Writers Against the War on Gaza” accusing Israel of trying to “conduct genocide against the Palestinian people.”
But I digress. The source of this rumor appears to be two posts that have been circulating around social media. The first, a video of a Palestinian man in a hospital bed and a video of a similar-looking but definitely different man who is “walking around like nothing happened,” supposedly taken a day apart. The first video, however, appeared on the internet in August of this year, and, again, is of a different person. The other is a picture of a Thai child in a Halloween costume that was taken in 2021.
The only other thing I can think of is that this is a “Telephone Game” thing and that Mills heard the relatively more common assertion that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and assumed that this is what that meant.
Shockingly, no one has actually “come forward” to claim to have played a dead extra on the set of Gaza Under Fire. Even if they did, where would they come from? Who would be paying them? Because something like that would just cost an absolutely ungodly amount of money — actors, makeup artists, makeup, etc. It would also be an inordinately complex operation to get together in a very short period of time, especially for people who don’t even have access to basic necessities. Like … “Oh, there’s no water or food, but we’ve got enough theatrical special effects makeup to fill 45 Sephoras.”
Also, not to be too dark, but AI exists now and is probably a lot more efficient than full-on medical moulage.
It is understandable that when someone feels that something looks bad for them or a cause they care deeply about, they want to believe in something like “crisis actors.” People who love guns don’t want to believe that another gun lover could use one of their beloved instruments of death for the purposes of mass murder, so it’s sometimes easier for them to believe that someone went through the trouble of hiring an entire school to play witnesses, victims, parents, EMTs, etc. as part of a nefarious plot to take their guns away. Other people don’t want to believe that significant numbers of people would disagree with them without being paid to by George Soros.
I can honestly say that I would personally love it if guns and bombs didn’t actually kill people. I get the appeal! But they do kill people, and if they didn’t, no one would waste their hard-earned money on guns and bombs.
There will always be misinformation and exaggeration, particularly in times of war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, weapons of mass destruction, the burning of the Reichstag, etc. etc. To paraphrase political scientist and propaganda expert Harold Lasswell, modern people don’t actually like war all that much, so you really have to dial it up to get them on board. Propaganda — including lying, insisting the enemy is lying, insisting those who are not on the bandwagon are evil traitors who actually want bad things to happen or just hate the troops, scaring the pants off of people and ginning up patriotism to the point of tiny flag pins and freedom fries and dachshund persecution — will always be a part of it.
However … it’s never gonna be “crisis actors.”
I trust neither Likud nor Hamas, but it's rather difficult to get around the pictures and stories of individuals as relayed by journalists and the UN.
Whether some people like it or not, Palestinians are human beings. They exist. And innocent men, women, and children are dying under the IDF's assault as surely as innocent Jewish people died under Hamas' assault.
Might be nice to wish for weapons that distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Might be nice to wish that you could lock Hamas and the ultra-conservative Likudites into an arena without any innocent people. Hell, I wish Israel would spend the time and manpower to search out Hamas fighters and take them prisoner.
But reality doesn't conform to your wishes. Gazans have nowhere to go. No nation wants to accept over a million impoverished people with nothing to offer but themselves. So they are stuck in a small area of land currently being blasted by bombs and rockets and missiles and shells. And they are dying.
If you can't stomach little children being blown to pieces, maybe you should stop cheerleading war and stop voting to give the IDF more of our weapons to do it.
Every country has a right to defend their borders and to seek justice for anyone murdering their citizens, especially in a well planned terrorist attack. But that does not include dropping a dozen bombs on a packed refugee camp in Gaza because a few terrorists might be in a tunnel below the camp. Especially when the people in that camp have no place else to go to seek safety and would be shot by the terrorists if they revealed the location of the tunnel. While civilians have suffered death and destruction in several other wars in the past few years, including Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. But at least there people could evacuate, even though it was often to camps with little infrastructure or support from aid agencies. I bet every civilian in Gaza wishes they could could flee to somewhere safe and leave Hamas behind, but the civil branch of Hamas has been one of the few organizations providing services like health care and schools for residents of Gaza. Making Gaza a breeding ground for extremism.
Israel has every right to hunt down the terrorists responsible for the brutal massacre of civilians in Israel. But not at the expense of 100 dead or wounded Palestinian civilians to take out two terrorists. As almost everyone heard as a child from their parents, two wrongs don't make a right.