The aggressive fetishization of the red hair of Ariel and Kfir Bibas is part of an absolutely disgusting war propaganda campaign aimed at white westerners, and we need to talk about it.

Caitlin Johnstone

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

 

The aggressive fetishization of the red hair of Ariel and Kfir Bibas is part of an absolutely disgusting war propaganda campaign aimed at white westerners, and we need to talk about it.

For those who don’t know, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were two Israeli child hostages who were killed in Gaza along with their mother in the early weeks of Israel’s genocidal onslaught upon the enclave. Israel claims without evidence that Hamas murdered them with their bare hands, while common sense says it’s much more likely that they died from Israel’s scorched-earth bombing campaign along with the many other women and children who were being bombed to death every day in the same area during that time. Israel has enlisted the help of Chen Kugel — the forensic pathologist who helped promote the bogus atrocity propaganda about “beheaded babies” on October 7 — to market its version of events regarding the Bibas family.

Israel and its supporters have been forcefully hammering on this narrative that Hamas murdered these two little children with their bare hands in order to manufacture support for ending the ceasefire and resuming Israel’s daily massacres across the Gaza Strip, and lately it’s been taking an even creepier turn. In Israel and throughout the western world, the fact that these children had red hair is being aggressively pushed into public attention at every opportunity.

 

Israel’s foreign ministry has released a brazenly propagandistic video featuring an AI image of a redheaded child while a narrator says Hamas murdered the Bibas children, asserting that “from today, every redhead will remind us: Hamas murdered them, and Hamas will do it again — unless it’s wiped out.”

This is pretty standard babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda, but it’s done with a twist — a highly racialized one.

Throughout the Israel-aligned world, the color orange is being used by government leaders to mourn the deaths of these children in the most public forums possible. Landmarks like the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, and the Brandenburg Gate have all been illuminated in orange lights explicitly to commemorate the ginger Bibas children, and orange balloons have been released throughout Israel and the west in their honor.

 

Why all this emphasis on the redheadedness of these children? Why make such a big deal about a seemingly trivial detail in their lives?

Well the answer is simple but ugly: it reminds westerners that these children were not like the dark children whose deaths we’ve been told to ignore for the last year and a half. It reminds us that these children were white.

Look at any photo of the Bibas kids and you will see children who look just like the white children you’ll see in any western nation. Westerners will look at them and see their own children, or children in their own community. The propagandists noticed the potential in this long ago, which was why they began ramping up the outrage machine as soon as a ceasefire was announced, pretending they didn’t know the children were already dead and promising vengeance and hellfire if they weren’t returned alive.

This is why when Benjamin Netanyahu released a video statement in English the other day, he produced an enlarged photo of the children and spent some time pointing at them as he spoke. He wanted westerners to see that these were not the kind of children we were told to be indifferent toward as they were butchered by the thousands in Gaza. He wanted to make sure we could all see that they were white.

The idea, as with so much Israel apologia, is to generate sympathy. If you sympathize with the children, you are more susceptible to narratives saying that Hamas must be destroyed and the ceasefire must end in order to avenge their deaths. If you sympathize with Israel, you are more likely to trust its narratives about what happened and what should happen in response. The western propaganda machine has spent generations killing off all sympathy for its brown-skinned victims in the global south, but our sympathy for white children has been left intact.

Propagandists are fetishizing the red hair of two dead white kids to market the reignition of the Gaza holocaust to white westerners. Israel apologists will deny this, but that’s plainly what’s happening. They couldn’t be more obvious about it.

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Featured image is a screen grab from Israel Foreign Ministry (Fair Use).