TEL AVIV – How much fake news can Chelsea Handler include in a single tweet? Lots, apparently. The comedian managed to blast U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as disseminate a plethora of misleading information — all in under 160 characters. 

“Nikki Haley is on tv talking about Hamas being responsible for the Palestinians protesting yesterday. These people had no weapons. They had tires to burn. There was a dead baby. While Netanyahu celebrates,” Handler posted on her Twitter account Tuesday.

The post was shared 5,700 times and received a whopping 17,880 likes.

Let’s begin with the most grievous of accusations, the dead baby. Handler is referring to Layla al-Ghandour, a Palestinian baby of eight months who according to initial reports (that were later disputed) by Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, died of IDF tear gas inhalation during the violent riots on the border with Israel. Putting aside the perturbing question of who on earth brings an infant to a violent and bloody protest, who really killed the baby?

Well, the answer is we don’t know. But it looks increasingly like Israel is definitely not to blame, and that much has been admitted by Palestinian doctors themselves.

The New York Times describes how tragedy in the terrorist-run Gaza Strip is cynically exploited for political ends:

The day after Layla died, her father strode from a centuries-old mosque after funeral prayers, his daughter’s body wrapped in a Palestinian flag and held aloft, as a crowd jogging behind him chanted slogans about Israeli blood lust. Officials with Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, circulated a photograph of the smiling child.

…

The rules of grief in Gaza, where private pain is often paraded for political causes, kicked in. The next morning the secular Fatah movement erected a funeral tent outside the family’s home, and hung a banner with a photo of the infant beside an image of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority.

Mariam, the baby’s 17-year-old mother, told AFP, “The Israelis killed her.” Yet Mariam withheld one crucial detail, namely that her daughter was sick with a congenital heart disease often described as a hole in the heart.

On Tuesday, a Gazan doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters that Layla had a medical condition and he did not believe her death was caused by tear gas. The doctor spoke on condition of anonymity, the report said, because he was not authorized to disclose medical information to the media. And probably because Hamas would kill him for ruining a perfectly spun propaganda yarn that tugged at all the right media heartstrings.

A day later, director of public relations for the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra admitted that the cause of Layla’s death was not known.

They’ve certainly proved in the past they have no problem executing their own civilians in cold blood.

This isn’t the first time that Hamas has lied and assigned the guilt of the deaths of babies to Israel. And by the way, it’s worth noting that this is a separate issue from Hamas’ sick “dead baby strategy” — a term coined by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz that refers to Hamas’ tactic of causing as many civilian casualties as possible by firing rockets from schools and densely populated areas or, as is the current case, encouraging (nay, pressuring) people to bring their children and babies to the riots. 

In 2012, 11-month-old Ahmad Mashrawi became an accidental symbol of alleged Israeli aggression around the world. The image was heartrending. The expression of sheer grief on the face of Ahmad’s father Jihad as he held his dead son limp in his arms was chilling. Jihad was a BBC photographer and the BBC at the time reported that his son “was killed when an Israeli missile hit his home. A pointless, terrible tragedy.”

Four months after the image went viral, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report saying that Misharawi’s son was actually “killed by what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel.”  By that time, of course, it was too late. Mashrawi’s death was old news and the circumstances surrounding his death no longer mattered.

 

Hamas uses babies as shields, blames the death of babies on the IDF, and fakes deaths altogether.

Handler, meanwhile, also points the finger at Ambassador Haley for pinning the blame for the deaths on Hamas. Haley was on TV saying Hamas was responsible for the protests, she said. Haley did indeed say this. As did Hamas itself. In any case, even with other organizers no one can stage a mass protest in the Gaza Strip without Hamas’ express permission. Why does Chelsea Handler think otherwise? Probably because people have been led to believe that these are civilian-led peaceful protests. Yet even Hamas officials have admitted that the term “peaceful resistance” is a farce. Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahhar this week admitted on Al Jazeera that the term “peaceful resistance” was coined to “deceive the public.”

So, we have a peaceful protest where women and children are called to the front lines as human shields because the “army won’t kill them.” A peaceful protest that includes swastika-emblazoned bomb-carrying kites, knives, Molotov cocktails, explosive devices,  guns and terrorists storming the border with the express intent of liberating “Palestine.” And while Gazans are encouraged to bring their weapons to the riots, they’re told not to kill Israelis but instead try to capture them because Israel will do anything to rescue one of their own. A peaceful protest where the overwhelming majority of the dead are confirmed by Hamas to be members of its terror group.

But Ms. Handler knows better: “These people had no weapons.”

Right on.

And she wasn’t done. Handler continued her Twitter tirade with these bizarre logical fallacies (in which she couldn’t even get the term “West Bank” correct).

Ms Handler should stick to comedy, she’s clearly very good at it.