“No one checks because ‘Israel Bad’ drowns out all other considerations.”
Jerusalem, February 19 – Failure of a restaurant customer’s attempt to con the establishment into a free meal has led him to acknowledge he underestimated the effort necessary to establish a convincing case because years of Western media and NGOs taking blatant fakery by Palestinians at face value misled him into believing he could get away with the scheme despite being caught on camera inserting the bug into the food.
The man, unnamed in news reports, told journalists Wednesday that his attempt to defraud the Burgers Bar franchise in the Mahane Yehuda market went sour because the ease with which transparently false Palestinian propaganda efforts wind up as matter-of-fact reports in the media caused him to think security camera footage of him putting the cockroach in his burger would not matter.
“The whole Pallywood phenomenon told me people don’t care about fake news, and I went with that,” he admitted. “If the media weren’t so credulous about never-ending libels – photoshopped images, pictures of suffering or destruction from other places, wounded Palestinians getting up off stretchers and running, terrorists dressed as medics or journalists – I never assumed the presence of a surveillance camera at the burger joint would make a difference.”
Footage provided to reporters showed the man removing a cockroach from foil in his pocket and placing the insect in his burger, then photographing the sight with his phone and approaching the staff with his complaint and demand for a free meal. Burgers Bar complied, but later review of the camera recording prompted them to press charge against the fraudster and to alert the media.
Observers lamented the deleterious effect the “Pallywood” phenomenon has had on fraud attempts. “Since the whole Muhammad al-Durrah affair everyone’s gotten so sloppy,” remarked a police Fraud Crimes Unit inspector, referring to a 2001 incident in which media blamed Israel for the shooting death of a Palestinian boy in the Gaza Strip, based on tendentious, incomplete video footage. “People think they can make the flimsiest claims and adduce such obviously fake evidence, just because the media at large continue to swallow Palestinian claims hook, line, and sinker. It gets worse when the military conflict intensifies and Palestinian attempts to paint the IDF as monstrous child-killers get into high gear, but it’s always there, and plain folks get entirely the wrong idea how much work it takes to engineer a convincing con job.”
“Look at this,” he added, pointing to an image on Twitter of homeless refugees in Greece labeled “Gaza.” “A simple reverse image search reveals the fake, but no one checks because ‘Israel Bad’ drowns out all other considerations. It’s having a pronounced negative effect on the quality of the fraud we have to investigate, and that’s unfortunate.”
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