In the suburbs of Chicago, Hanan Shaheen and her young son Wadea Al-Fayoume were enjoying another peaceful Saturday morning at home. With the busy week over, the two sat down together as they ate breakfast, looking forward to what else the weekend would bring for them. Hearing a knock on the door, Shaheen saw her landlord Joseph Czuba outside and welcomed him into her home.

Czuba began arguing with Shaheen about the Middle East, rudely interrupting her quality time with her son. He had already made up his mind, refusing to consider the viewpoint of his tenant, and his explosive anger only continued to escalate. Shaheen pleaded, "Let's give peace a chance."

He refused to give her a chance. Brandishing a 12-inch military knife, Czuba began violently attacking Shaheen and Al-Fayoume, a six-year-old boy who had no idea about what exactly the landlord was yelling about. As Shaheen tried to defend herself and Al-Fayoume, the landlord stabbed her over a dozen times before taking hold of the little boy. Covered in blood, Shaheen escaped to safety, locking herself inside the bathroom as she called the police for help.

"The landlord is killing my baby with a knife," she told the 911 dispatcher. When the police arrived, they found Al-Fayoume lying shirtless on a bed and bleeding heavily from 26 stab wounds. He and his mother were both rushed to the hospital – Shaheen is still recovering from both the physical and emotional wounds, but her baby boy was not so lucky. Al-Fayoume died, only a week after his sixth birthday, unable to survive the attack.

Wadea Al-Fayoume, celebrating his birthday.

Shaheen knew Czuba as “an angry man”, but she and her family had no problems with him as a landlord. Czuba even built a treehouse for Al-Fayoume, long before he cruelly stole all the years that the boy had ahead of him. What could possibly motivate someone to viciously attack an innocent woman and her little boy, seemingly out of nowhere?

Czuba is known to regularly listen to right-wing talk radio and follow media coverage of current events. On the day that he went on his murderous rampage, October 13th, he told his wife that he wanted Shaheen – a Palestinian Muslim woman – out of the house that she has been renting from him for the past two years, believing that she was going to call up her Palestinian friends to attack him. Czuba’s paranoid delusion was fueled by his increasing concern over what he had been hearing in the media about Israel and Palestine, particularly a “national day of jihad” which was rumored to occur on that day. The thing about that national day of jihad? Well, it never happened.

By way of deception...

The old motto of Mossad, taken from Proverbs 24:6, can be translated into English as "by way of deception, thou shalt make war." Although Israel's intelligence agency has since changed its motto, the original principle remains. Conservative mainstream media in the United States gladly participates in this deception, regurgitating Zionist propaganda to their audiences, leading many to believe that Hamas is not only committing atrocities in Israel but also that Hamas "sleeper cells" will put average Americans in danger at home. Besides the jihad panic of October 13th, what else had Czuba likely heard about in the news?

Shortly after Gaza began its retaliation against Israeli occupiers, several media outlets repeated the claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies, citing anonymous Israeli sources. President Joe Biden claimed to have seen images of the mutilated infants, after which a White House spokesperson clarified that neither Biden nor any US officials have seen any evidence for this alleged atrocity. The Grayzone has since identified David Ben Zion, Deputy Commander of Unit 71 of the IDF, as the source of the unverified "40 beheaded babies" story. Lack of evidence aside, Zion is hardly an unbiased source; earlier this year, the extremist settler incited race riots against Palestinians, and in an October 10 interview he described Palestinians as "animals" who "don't have any heart."

Numerous other reports of Hamas committing atrocities can be seen all over western media, especially claims of sexual abuse. So far, not one report of Hamas committing sex crimes has been confirmed, but there is plenty of evidence that Israeli authorities regularly engage in sexual torture of Palestinian detainees – including men, women, and children. When the media ignores all this well-documented evidence in favor of unverified rumors, it is blatantly obvious that they see sexual abuse as nothing but a useful tool in creating atrocity propaganda and they do not genuinely care about victims of such horrific crimes.

In their coverage of the hostages taken by Hamas, the media continues its faux concern for human rights, reporting on the horrors that these hostages are supposedly facing at the hands of their captors. Some of the hostages have been freed now, including Yocheved Livshitz, an 85 year old woman who was interviewed after her release. Livshitz said that she and the other hostages were treated well by Hamas after the initial kidnapping: a doctor made sure that those who had been taking medications in Israel were given the same medications or a close alternative, paramedics treated their injuries, everyone was provided with food and hygiene products, and the captors were friendly and kept the place clean. CNN ignored all this, instead choosing a headline that fits in line with the Zionist narrative: