I said this during the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine but it seems important to say it again about Israel and Palestine: you should be skeptical of anything you see that’s not confirmed by multiple sources with hard evidence. Everything you see on social media should be treated as suspicious until proven otherwise. What’s happening now is the fog of war: every side of the conflict has an incentive to lie, journalists are working under dangerous conditions and with limited access, professional disinformation networks are in full swing, and people on social media are spreading falsehoods both on accident and on purpose.
However the facts may shake out with the benefit of retrospect, your default position should be to doubt anything that seems especially sensational and spectacular.
BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh has been doing daily threads to debunk false claims going around Twitter:
Anton Raphael Mengs (German, Ústi nad Labem (Aussig) 1728–1779 Rome), Portrait of Mariana de Silva y Sarmiento,
duquesa de Huescar (1740-1794), 1775. Oil on panel.
This portrait of a Spanish noblewoman—herself an artist and a member of the Academia de San Fernando—is both haunting and enigmatic. It is a version of a work that passed down through the sitter’s family and was probably painted at the time of her second marriage in 1775, symbolized by the ring she holds and the faithful lapdog whose shape is left in reserve. We cannot say with any certainty why the portrait was left unfinished and then altered, with her facial features covered as if by a veil. The final result appeals to modern sensibilities and is almost surrealist in its obliteration of identity.
After Iphigenia dies it’s a lot of where’s Iphi? A lot of where’s Dad? A lot of crawling into your mother’s bed A lot of Mom, I need you right now A lot of nothing at all A lot of clutching your brother’s small hand at the grocery store three green twenties and two eight-year-olds walk into a cereal aisle A lot of dreams hordes of deer the war on cable blaring through the house A lot of When Iphigenia was your age… A lot of I’ll do it myself When your father comes home from the war (and he will) you will leap into his soldier arms and he will tell you how much he loves you because you are his smartest, alivest daughter and even if he did kill you it would be for the love of the gods who talk to you when you’re asleep and you’d be happy to let him spill your blood for something that important especially if you got to look up at him while he did it At night you stare at the sizzling television and watch men kill each other to see his face for a half second.
ALT