Two Years Ago Today, A Bari Weiss Led Smear Campaign Led To The IDF Murder Of Refaat Alareer.

Two Years Ago, A Bari Weiss Smear Campaign Led To The Murder Of Refaat Alareer.

Exactly two years ago, the beloved Palestinian poet, professor, and commentator Refaat Alareer was killed by a targeted IDF strike along with, “his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and three of her children, and a neighbor when his sister’s home was attacked”.

As the Electronic Intifada documented after his murder, Alareer was best known for his “wicked sense of humor, continuing to crack jokes even amid what he called the indescribable terror of relentless Israeli bombing and shelling and the pervasiveness of death”, the fact that he “continued to speak out even knowing that Israel was systematically targeting journalists, doctors and other intellectuals for extermination” and for the fact that he “encouraged and nurtured hundreds of young writers in Gaza”.

When the genocide in Gaza began, Refaat Alareer not only exposed Israel’s crimes to the world but also debunked the atrocity propaganda used to justify them.

Alareer was one of the first people to call out the Israeli mass rape hoax used to justify the genocide in Gaza, correctly stating that “Israel uses rape lies/accusations against native Palestinians to demonize them and justify the Gaza genocide”.

Refaat Alareer was also one of the first people to report on Israel’s use of the “Hannibal Directive” to kill their own people on October 7th, saying, on October 7th of 2023, “Israeli warplanes target and kill some of their own Israeli captured soldiers as they are transported into Gaza. This is called the Hannibal Directive”, something that was later confirmed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and later by then Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant.

Alareer also used dark humor to mock Israel’s most cartoonish and absurd propaganda used to demonize Palestinians, such as the ridiculous claim that Hamas “baked a baby in an oven”, which was soon debunked by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as a “false claim”, and “not true”.

Alareer mocked the fabricated claim, saying, “With or without baking powder?” in response to it, a joke clearly intended to mock how absurd the propaganda claim was.

But Bari Weiss- the editor of the Free Press and CBS News, and self-described “Zionist fanatic”- who clearly took issue with Refaat Alareer’s factual debunkings of Israel’s pro-genocide propaganda, took the joke out of context to make it look like Refaat Alareer supported baking a baby.

On October 30th of 2023, Weiss took a screen grab of the tweet and wrote, “Here is Refaat Alareer joking about whether or not an Israeli baby, burned alive in an oven, was cooked ‘with or without baking powder’”- without mentioning that the atrocity propaganda claim had been fully debunked- even by Israeli media.

Following this smear, Bari Weiss’s followers in the IDF began sending graphic rape and murder threats towards Alareer and his family, saying things such as, “Send me your address, we are going to wipe you out in Gaza”, “When we get to Gaza I will personally rape rawdog your mother”, and “I’m going to expand your mom wife and child recktom in from of you”.

Refaat Alareer shared the graphic IDF threats and wrote :

If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss and her likes.

Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them.

Bari Weiss’ smear campaign began to spread, with the pro Zionist British tabloid, Daily Mail, publishing an article titled, “Palestinian professor previously published by the New York Times makes sick joke about claim Hamas BAKED baby in an oven” that repeated the smear.

As journalist Ra Page noted in the Electronic Intifada, “Even The Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik joined the pile-on against both Refaat and The New York Times. In a video she posted on 11 November 2023, Bialik described Refaat as ‘a *New York Times’ writer’ (falsely implying he was a regular contributor) and repeated the lie about a baby baked in an oven. She said that ‘when finding out that a baby was found in an oven […] he made a joke about what they baked the baby with. That was something he thought was appropriate to do; he made a joke about that.’”

When Reefat Alareer was murdered by the IDF two years ago, evidence shows that it was a targeted strike against him, using Bari Weiss’ smear campaign as justification.

The NGO Euro Med Monitor noted that:

Refaat al-Areer was killed in his sister’s home in al-Sidra neighborhood in al-Daraj area in Gaza city along with his brother Salah and one of his children (Mohammed); his sister Asmaa and three of her children (Alaa, Yahia, and Mohammed); and a neighbor..

The airstrike surgically targeted the apartment on the second floor where Rafaat was in a 3-storey building, and not the entire building; indicating the apartment was the target and not possible collateral damage.

Journalist Richard Silverstein reported that, “A well-informed Israeli security source e-mailed me this confirmation: ‘because of the joke (the tweet taken out of context by Bari Weiss) , the war cabinet decided that Alaeer is an ‘Amalekite’, and ordered Shabak & IDF to find and kill him.’”

Following his murder, in April of 2024, Israel killed Refaat Alareer’s daughter, baby grandson and son-in-law in a targeted strike in Gaza City, which killed Shymaa Refaat Alareer, her husband Muhammad Abd al-Aziz Siyam and their 3-month-old son Abd al-Rahman.

Because he told the truth about the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the propaganda used to justify it, Bari Weiss put a target on Refaat al-Areer’s back with a smear campaign that culminated in the IDF targeting and murdering him, along with several members of his family.

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