The Slatest

Trump’s Favorite Slur Is Catching on Across the Globe

“Ever wonder what ‘fake news’ is?” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asks in a new video. Probably not, but he’s going to tell you anyway.

The prime minister is upset about coverage of a new statement issued by Hamas last week. He says:

Last week, headlines in CNN and Al Jazeera and the Guardian said that Hamas now accepts a Palestinian state along 1967 lines. The New York Times headline calls this “moderation.” The intimation is that Hamas now accepts the State of Israel. Great news, right? Well, except for one small detail. This is a complete distortion of the truth.

He ends the video by dramatically dropping the Hamas document in a recycling bin.

Like most internet commenters, Netanyahu is just responding to the headlines, not the articles below them. Every one of the articles he cites notes that the new document does not recognize Israel or give up the goal of “liberating all of Palestine.” The Times headline actually states that Hamas has moderated its “talk on Israel” in a bid for international recognition and notes in the first sentence that the group is “built around violent resistance.”

The video comes a few days after Donald Trump met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House and suggested he plans to take an active role in facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. It seems likely that by using the president’s favorite term for information he doesn’t like and taking aim at some of his favorite media targets, Netanyahu is trying to impress on Trump that Hamas, even with somewhat more moderate rhetoric, is not a group he can do an “ultimate deal” with.

Also this week, a prominent senator in the Philippines allied with President Rodrigo Duterte—who Trump recently invited to the White House—described reports that thousands of people have been killed by police as part of his government’s crackdown on drugs as “alternative facts”—deploying the infamous phrase coined by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway in January.

We really do all talk like Trump now.