The Curious Case of the Jerusalem Truck Attack: Notes on “Operation Fantasy Land”

On January 8, 2017, a resident of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber plowed his flat-bed truck into a group of IDF soldiers getting off a bus near a promenade overlooking the Old City. Or did he?

Surveillance footage surfaced showing the moment the truck slammed into the soldiers and was broadcast worldwide. When I saw that video, I was skeptical, to say the least. Don’t get me wrong: the Palestinians have more than enough reasons to want to drive over a gaggle of Israeli soldiers. But there is a wealth of evidence that most, if not all, terrorist attacks are hoaxed, especially those of recent years. And if the IDF footage of the Mavi Marmara raid is anything to go by, I had good reason to suspect hanky panky here as well.

So I put together a post with a slam-dunk case showing how and why the footage was fake, fake, fake. I was about to post it, but then…something really unexpected happened that forced me to question everything. 

But before we get to that, let me take you through things step by step, starting with the post I originally made before the story took an unexpected turn. Warning: this is a LONG post. If you want to cut to the chase, skip down to the last section.

First let’s set the scene: the event allegedly occurred at the ‘Armon Ha Natziv‘ promenade with an expansive view of the Old City (and the ginormous wall that separates West Jerusalem and unincorporated East Jerusalem). A group of soldiers who were in officer training  were being taken on a tour of the area. As a regular part of their training, tours like this are unexceptional. Being in officer school, these soldiers would have completed their basic training and qualified to become officers. Entrance to the officer training course is extremely competitive, and the training itself is no cake walk. These were not run of the mill cadets but highly driven and capable (and brainwashed to the hilt) individuals. It is not clear what stage they were in their officer training, but the four who were allegedly killed are all listed with the rank lieutenant or second lieutenant.

The diagram below gives you a sense of the layout of the area where the attack occurred. This will help as you try to make sense of the surveillance footage and other imagery:

Here is the ‘surveillance footage’ of the truck plowing into a group of soldiers. It is filming from the upper left corner of the plaza. The truck enters the scene at 0:47 (because why not?). It’s a bit gruesome, but don’t worry, it’s fake:

You might notice the camera is not steady. That’s because it’s actually a video recording of the footage played off a computer monitor. They do this a lot nowadays when they release surveillance videos of these faked events. Why we can’t get the direct footage is never explained. I guess it gives them a good excuse for the crappy resolution. Kind of like with the Apollo 11 moon landing. But even so, there’s no excuse for the crappiness of the crappy video quality we see in this case.

You can see the truck just seems to turn into some kind of giant fuzzy pixel as it goes behind the trees. It only makes sense if the trees made the truck rendering more difficult. Compare how the truck looks after it rams into the soldiers to the yellow car that passes by the bus at 0:36. Or any of the other cars that go by before that. The difference is laughable. And why is the low wall between the plaza and the soldiers so fuzzy?

But there’s more. Check out this screen cap from the UK tabloid, The Mirror:

Notice the picture on the right. In what universe does the truck cover a chunk of the pole? And why is the back half of the truck well defined one moment and then all fuzzy the next? Also missing is the red folding crane tucked behind the cab (but sticking out over it), as you can see in the overhead picture above and other pictures below. And I didn’t even have to hunt those frames down myself: the picture is published on the website of a high-circulation mainstream news source. We saw the same kinds of artifacts with the Nice footage.

There are also some funky things going on with the shadows. The angle and length is appropriate for that time of day that time of the year in that part of the world. But the shadows are too thin and one dimensional. They also don’t behave as regular shadows do. Here take a look at these three screencaps towards the end of the video where a soldier is walking by the light post. It’s at about 1:18 in the video above. I’ve zoomed in so you can see better.

When his feet first enter the frame in the picture on the left, they cast no shadow. Then at some point I guess the software realized it needed to render some shadows, and in the middle pic we see the shadow starting to ‘turn on.’ But there is a weird glitch in the wall where the shadow appears to carves a hole in the wall. The ‘shadow’ actually looks like an oval shape that is supposed to be filled by a dark shadow but is only partially darkened. Then in the final frame, on the right, the shadow is much better — except that only one of his legs casts the shadow and the other doesn’t! And the shadows he does cast are much lighter than the other soldiers. I guess a different sun was shining on him. Just really sloppy CGI work.

On top of that, the pictures of the aftermath of the truck attack and the video of the attack don’t match up. Here, let’s take a leisurely stroll using the magic of google maps. I invite you to open a new window and go here with google maps: https://goo.gl/46lXuf

That’s the approximate location of where the surveillance camera would have been standing. That’s as close as I can get with google maps. Here is a screen grab:

I took a virtual stroll along the entire promenade. This is the spot. If you go to the google maps link, I encourage you to do a 360-degree spin. We would expect a surveillance camera to be standing somewhere around here, possible in the rear corner in the back. There is none. The only thing that might remotely come close is the other light post, which could possibly have a camera in it, but it is not in the correct place at all. It’s much closer to the parking lot and it’s quite impossible to get the view in the video from that other light post. Now, it’s possible that they’ve added a camera right around here since this google street view was done in October 2011. Definitely possible. In any case, there is no reason to assume that a surveillance camera is normally here. In fact, if you look up in the sky over the railing in the google street view, you’ll see what looks to be a drone hovering in the sky. It’s possible that the ‘surveillance camera’ here was just filmed from a hovering drone. But that’s not the best evidence of fakery by any means.

If you compare this view to the surveillance video, one thing that might jump out at you is that the distance between the little stairway and the far end of the parking lot (where the blue truck is) appears much, much further than in the video. You might argue that the camera messes up the perspective, and I suppose I could swallow that, but I find it highly unlikely.

But here is the coup de grace: notice in the surveillance video where the bus is standing. The tail end of the bus appears to be right up along the edge of the exit from the parking lot. It is clearly not parked down the street. See that?

OK, now look at this picture of from ‘the aftermath’:

You see how they have surrounded the area around the truck with that white plastic as if they are blocking prying cameras from seeing all the dead bodies around the truck? Although the truck is in the same orientation next to the bus as it is at the end of the surveillance video, they aren’t in the same place. Note that the bus and truck are at the far end in this picture. The back end of the bus should be flush with the driveway in this picture (the driveway would be to the left of the photographer.) But it’s not anywhere close to that. It’s 20-40 feet in front of where it should be. Do you think they moved the bus AND the truck forward 20 or more feet in order to clean up? If so, why are they all gathered around the new position and not cleaning up where all the damage occurred? Clearly things do not add up.

You can also see this in the first pic from the aerial view. We would expect to see the bus parked much further back. If you go back to google street view map and walk forward along the promenade. You will come to this little plaza with the steps. Here is a screen grab:

From the surveillance video, we would expect to see the rear end of the bus about where the front of the little grey car is. Indeed, half of it is sticking out to the left of the yield sign. But according to the aftermath pictures, the back of the bus seems to be somewhere between the two middle trees. I estimated it earlier as between 20-40 feet further forward. Is it possible for the back half of the bus to be ‘sticking out’ like that?

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Okay, so that is where I left this post on the evening of January 9th. I wanted to give it one more read-through before posting. I was also trying to think of a proper conclusion. And then after dinner my wife pulled the rug out from under me with a well-practiced tug: “Horrible what happened in Jerusalem. [Our friend’s] niece was one of the soldiers that was killed.” I stopped in my tracks like a deer caught in the headlights. My brain was shouting, “What are you talking about? That was SO fake. Here let me show you.” But my lips instead responded sincerely, “Oh my god, that’s horrible.”

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: “Oh yeah, another anonymous guy on the internet claiming to know somebody who knows somebody who died in one of these hoaxes. Next you’ll be telling us about your friend’s second cousin’s roommate’s kid who died at Sandy Hook.” Well, believe me, I hate being “that guy.” You are free to disbelieve me and stop reading, as I have nothing to prove. I would have been in a much more complacent place believing that this whole thing was a complete fiction from top to bottom.

My assumption had been that the footage shown on TV of all the ambulances and police and paramedics was from some drill or something. Or simply intelligence agents dressed up to the play the part. Grieving families interviewed on TV? Fake. The injured and dead? Non-existent with made-up names. Fake, too, the state-sponsored funeral of these “fallen soldiers.” A grand deception? Yes. But if the event was fake, as it clearly was, then logically it followed that the rest of it must be fake, too. Of course, most of the people attending the state funeral may very well have believed the deaths were real, but other than that: another faked, phony hoax. But with my wife’s news, I was forced to reassess.

My first question: was our friend lying to us and everyone else? He was not a close friend, more of a colleague, but still someone I knew well enough to consider a friend. But it was not just us he was telling. Mutual friends, many of whom were much closer to him, were also told of his niece’s death. No, I don’t think he was lying to all of us. I believed him to be genuinely distraught by the news and telling us all what he believed to be the truth.

But if he wasn’t lying, was he being lied to? And if so, who was lying to him? Was his sister or brother lying to him about the death of their daughter? Were they being lied to by the government? Did their daughter willingly (or unwillingly) agree to “play dead” and cut off ties with her family in order to perpetrate this hoax? I fancifully envisioned the following scenario: imagine you are 20 years old, bitter and jaded, can’t stand your parents. Someone approaches you with the following offer: “we’ll give you $20 million and a new identity in a different country. But everyone you know will think you’re dead, including your parents and siblings. You can never contact them. If you do, we will kill them first, and then take care of you.” Would you accept? What if they didn’t give you a choice? And yet, if the event was hoaxed, couldn’t they have just made up the identities of the deceased and hire actors to play grieving relatives? It seems much easier to do it that way, and indeed that is one of the guiding assumptions behind the hoax hypothesis for all these other events.

It just seemed too far-fetched. And yet, it wouldn’t be the first far-fetched idea I’ve ever embraced. But something just didn’t add up. What the hell was going on?  Was I wrong about the video and the event? Was the video real? Was the event real? I decided I needed to retrace my mental steps, starting with my assumptions and follow the process of reasoning that brought me to the conclusion that the event was fake. I might reach the same conclusion in the end, but it needed to be done. I started by going to the scene of the crime.

Seems totally nuts, until you realize that I live in Israel. (Which, I admit, is also totally nuts.) So I hatched a plan to get over to the site of the bus attack in order to get the lay of the land and see it for myself. Since I don’t live in Jerusalem, I had to wait a few days until I could find the time to get over there. In the meantime, I decided to see what others were saying about the Jerusalem truck attack. I was somewhat surprised to see that there was already a lot of good material out there.

For example Peekay Truth’s you tube channel. He always seems to have great stuff and has an amazing ability to find monkey business in videos of these hoaxed events. He had published a video the day of the attack  casting doubt on the surveillance footage. My only quibble, and it is a big one, is that he seemed to think the monitor bezel in the footage was the frame of a car door, and said it seemed like someone was filming it from a car window or something. It isn’t the first time he made the same mistake. Last year on New Year’s day there was a terror attack on a pub in Jerusalem, and the surveillance footage released was also from somebody filming a computer monitor with a cell phone held vertically. He apparently didn’t realize this and wondered how someone just knew to be standing there filming with their camera. I wrote a comment to correct him. He never responded nor did he correct himself, even though it was a really stupid but simple mistake. I found that odd at the time, and I find it odd that he did made the same mistake again here. I am suspicious when truthers make obvious mistakes like that. It’s as if they’re purposefully giving debunkers low-hanging fruit.

Anyway, in that video he called for CGI experts to weigh in with their opinion. Somebody posted a request on the channel of a youtuber who goes by ‘EyeSpy.’ On Jan. 9 EyeSpy posted a video casting serious doubt on the footage. He also noticed with the aid of google maps, as did I, that there was no apparent surveillance footage. On January 21 he published another video “Monkey Business in Jerusalem Confirmed” with aerial footage from a drone from the scene of the attack. (I used a screen cap from that footage for my birds-eye diagram at the top of this post.) That footage had apparently been brought to his attention by user ‘georgka74’ who posted a link to in the comments of his first video. It comes from some nutty fundamentalist Christian Zionists (I know, I know, “nutty” is redundant) who moved to Israel and have their own channel chronicling their quest or whatever. It is unclear where they got the drone footage from. It might be from a news broadcast. Or, since they live very nearby and went down with their camera to cover the aftermath of the event, the footage might be theirs. Or it may come from some other source.

Here is eyespy’s first video on the truck attack. He’s very convincing:

My first reaction when I watched it was paranoia. Hadn’t I just written the same thing about the impossible surveillance camera, saved it here, and notified the rest of the crew via e-mail? Was someone monitoring  the back chatter here, and did they pass on the info I had just provided? One reason I thought it unlikely he would figure it out on his own is that the only reason I even thought to look for a surveillance camera is because I had been up on the promenade a few years ago, and so I sort of remembered that the only thing that should be there was blue sky. But “eyespy”? Had he ever been there, or was he just that canny? I don’t know. Maybe he just got lucky. Or maybe…

Anyway, I have no way to know, but for now I will chalk it up as a ‘great minds think alike’ coincidence.  Besides, he might have published his video before I wrote my piece. Hard to say for sure.

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So a few days later I find myself in a taxi in Jerusalem on my way up to the scene of the crime. My taxi driver is an Arab guy from East Jerusalem. We get to the parking lot, and I tell him if he waits ten minutes he’ll get another fare back to the central bus station. He readily agrees. So I start snooping around. My first stop is to check for the surveillance camera. Of course, I could see as soon as we pulled up that there was no surveillance camera where I expected one to be. Here’s a picture of the plaza where the soldiers were standing in a circle:

But wait! What’s that over on the palm tree in the corner? Could it be? Yes! A surveillance camera.

Two of them, actually:

And yet, the angle didn’t seem quite right. Could one of these cameras have captured the scene we saw? I stood in the corner of the terrace, turned my back to the camera, and took a picture. I stood up on the railing and raised my arms so I could get as close the real angle as possible. I looked at the pictures on my phone’s screen, and it just didn’t seem possible for those cameras to have filmed the scene. The angle seemed off from what I remembered. So I walked along the railing more towards the middle where I initially thought the camera would or should be placed in order to capture the scene. Then I walked around the area a bit, taking some more pictures. In particular, I wasn’t sure if there was enough room for the truck to squeeze between the parked bus and the YIELD signpost. So I checked that out and saw that there was enough room. And I also looked at the lawn where the soldiers were supposedly run over and where the truck spun around in a circle before backing up into more soldiers. I measured out various distances by walking heel-to-toe in my 12-inch shoes.

I got back in the taxi. I told the driver in my broken Hebrew, “you know why I came here?” “Yes,” he said in his broken Hebrew, “Yes I do.” I said “because of the terrorist attack.” He nodded, knowingly, realizing that it was a sensitive subject, with him being a Palestinian and me being, well, obviously not. “I came here because the video I see on the news, doesn’t look real.” “Yes,” he agreed, “it’s hard to believe somebody would do that.” He didn’t see what I was getting at. Excitedly, I tried to explain to him my discovery: “No, I mean, it doesn’t seem real. It seems fake.”  “Look over there,” I pointed at the blue sky. “That’s where they filmed it from. There is supposed to be a camera right over there. But there isn’t one.” “Well, you know, they have cameras everywhere, you never know.” “They have a camera there, in the air?” I asked. He still didn’t understand what I was getting at, but I gave him the go-ahead to start driving.  We sort of went back-and-forth on this, until I think he finally realized what I was saying. I told him “I know it sounds crazy.” “Yes,” he agreed nervously and then didn’t say another word the rest of the ride back. Here I thought I was going to turn his worldview upside-down and give him a revelation to take back to the guys in his neighborhood. But he must have thought I was either certifiable or an undercover Shin Bet agent trying to get him to incriminate himself. I wonder if he even dared whisper a word about the meshugenah passenger to his wife.

When I got back home and put the pictures on the computer, my opinion changed. I cropped the picture from the corner, standing on the wall, and it suddenly looked very similar to the view from the surveillance camera, while the picture from the middle part of the terrace didn’t look right. Here is another aerial diagram of the area pointing to the surveillance camera and the two spots from where I snapped my pics.

Here are 3 pics for side-by-side comparison (click to enlarge). The left pic (#1) is from the corner (in front of the surveillance cam); in the middle (#2) is a screencap from the surveillance video; and on the right (#3) is the picture from the center of the plaza (ignore the fence they put up around the grass after the incident). On the whole, I was surprised by how well picture #1 from the corner near the surveillance camera matched up with the video screenshot (though I had to crop it first). One thing to compare is the perspective. The stairs in pics #1 and #2 appear relatively narrow compared to #3. Also the angle of the cars in the video is more similar to number #1 than to #3.

And yet, neither location seems quite right. The key thing to notice is how the lamppost lines up with the “knob” at the end of short wall behind it (the one that extends from the steps). In the surveillance video, the knob is directly behind the light pole. In the picture on the left (from in front of the surveillance camera), the knob is to the left of light pole. And in the picture on the right (from midway at the plaza), the knob is to the right of the light pole. I knew this discrepancy could only mean one thing: another trip to Armon Ha Natziv. Oy.

This time I was able to take my car to bypass the awkward silence with a confused and terrified taxi driver. When I got there, there was a group of border police just hanging out there, apparently on a break. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by snapping pics, though I didn’t really have anything to fear. I stood against the railing between the two spots where I had taken the previous pictures at a point where the light post lined up with the knob. I was standing there, looking at the light post and knob, lost in thought, and I leaned back. And when I leaned back, I saw that the light post moved to the left relative to the knob. I looked over at the surveillance camera and realized that the tree it was on was actually several feet beyond the plaza wall. In that case, the view from the surveillance camera would cause the light post to move to the left relative to the knob. Classic parallax. This meant that as much as I tried to line up pic #1 with the surveillance camera, I would have had to lean out several feet in order to fully approximate the perspective, in which case I believe the light post and the knob would have lined up, as they do in the screencap from the video. My conclusion: the perspective in the video does line up with the perspective of the surveillance camera. Don’t get me wrong: that doesn’t mean the video is real; it just solves the mystery of the missing airborne surveillance camera.

The existence of a surveillance camera doesn’t solve the problems I brought up earlier about the video. It also leaves us with that huge question mark about why the bus seems to be parked much further forward. Here is a screencap from the video, followed by another aerial drawing where I show the location of the yield sign and the line of sight from the surveillance camera.

I understand how parallax works, but is this even possible? And even if it’s theoretically possible, would we actually see such a huge parallax given that the yield sign is so close to the bus? I really don’t think so. The bus in the surveillance video looks to be much further back than in the aerial image, or for that matter than in any of the aftermath pictures and videos. I thought maybe they just moved everything forward. But even in the pictures where they brought in a crane to lift up the flat-bed truck, which would have been prior to any move, you can see they’re in this position.

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So where does that leave us? Is the video fake or not? Is my friend’s niece dead or not? The short answer is, I don’t know. But I think the longer answer is more interesting:

I believe that eyespy’s analysis of the video artifacts is correct. In addition to many anomalies he points out, there is simply no reason the truck should look so pixellated, especially when compared to the cars that drive past the trees earlier in the video. There is actually an interesting exchange in the comments to EyeSpy’s first video between Greg McKee and Peekay. Greg is apparently a CGI and VFX guy who has worked on many film productions, including the most recent Mad Max movie. (Here is a link to his website.) This makes him either an expert on these issues or a spook shilling for the MATRIX, depending on your point of view. Anyway, here is what he says:

The CCTV footage is at slow frame rate and highly compressed and simply shows the TYPICAL result of high compression on motion blur and swirling dust. The lookout has cctv cameras on poles along it’s length, not visible in the google images taken in 2011. If you want people with CGI experience I’m the ONLY VFX expert posting here, with Oscars awarded for my work on Babe, HappyFeet and Fury Road amongst many others.

[And later:]

The video in question of the jerusalem attack simply has a low frame rate and slow shutter speed being a cctv video camera rather than taking fast sequences of digital stills and the blurred images it takes are highly compressed resulting in the extensive “macroblocking” of the image. Your stoner sounding eyespy chum here obviously knows nothing about CGI or video artefacts.

First off, why does he assert that the lookout has CCTV cameras on poles all along the wall there? How would he know? And how would he know they weren’t there in 2011? Weird. It sure seems like he’s making shilly claims simply to debunk the video. And although he’s right that there are some cameras there, they are not “all along” the wall.

What about his other claims regarding motion blur and swirling dust? Well, as for motion blur: we saw the yellow car drive past with no motion blur — or at least nothing resembling the truck. As for the dust: what dust? That’s not a dusty area. There is concrete and grass. I don’t know exactly what it would look like to drive a truck at high speed onto a grassy field, but for sure it wouldn’t kick all the dirt and grass up into the air like dust. So both of those claims fail. It also doesn’t address other problems EyeSpy and I pointed out, such as parts of the truck disappearing in certain parts of the video.

But at the same time, peekay is one of a long list of youtubers who have posted something on this video. I agree it’s a bad video and easy to poke holes. And yet…something doesn’t smell right. Especially since some of them make the same statement about the “window frame” that is actually (and obviously) a computer monitor bezel. All the videos talk about “Isra-hell” fabricating a video and a fake terror attack. Some of them link it to a revelation from a few days before of a “candid” video of an Israeli embassy official talking about meddling in British elections.

It feels like we’re being set up with two opposing views: one is the consensus one that there really was a terror attack (defended disingenuously by people like Greg McKee). On the other hand are the people jumping up and down shouting “fake fake fake!” And I was almost one of them. But being so close to an alleged casualty, I find it more difficult to join that bandwagon this time. And it makes me suspect that that the bandwagon as being driven by the masters of the matrix. And if so, to what end? Why would they make the hoax so obvious and then invest a lot of energy in showing us it’s a hoax?

I think there is a big psyop afoot to lead truthers off into fantasy land. They lead us on with all kinds of (obviously) fake footage and apparently faked events. Sandy Hook being probably the one that really exploded. What I’m suggesting here is that it did not explode because they messed up. I think they wanted to make it obviously fake. They wanted to catch a whole mass of people in that deception, which they were then able to misdirect into pinning the blame on Obama and his alleged gun control agenda.

We see the same thing with faked NASA imagery. They are using that imagery (and, I now suspect, deliberately creating obviously fake imagery) in order to misdirect people into the Flat Earth fantasy land. Just because some NASA footage is faked, doesn’t necessarily mean that all footage is faked. And even if all footage is faked, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Earth is flat or that NASA can’t even so much as launch a satellite into space. In those examples, it’s very easy to see how the conclusions do not follow from the premises. But in other cases, it isn’t because the inferential leap is much smaller and usually more logical.

Fantasy land. Yes. That’s a good name for it: “Operation Fantasy Land.” They want us to think everything is fake — a made-up fantasy. We’ve seen it here in the comments on this blog: people jumping to the conclusion from faked footage in the Vietnam war that it was all faked and the soldiers were convinced it was real with some combination of LSD and loud explosions over the horizon. Or that WWII was faked. Operation Fantasy Land.

Let’s take the case of the Jerusalem truck ramming video: if the video is fake, does it necessarily follow that the event itself is fake? The answer to that is clearly, “no.” It is possible the event was real even though the video is faked. I know it sounds like apostasy, but hear me out: when we conclude from faked imagery or crisis actors or CGI that something never happened, we are drawing an inference. It is a logical and sensible inference, but one that does not follow necessarily from faked evidence. All we can really conclude is that we have no evidence for it, one way or another. They may fake the evidence to hoax an event out of whole cloth, which I believe they do in most cases. But there may be other reasons for fakery.

Take the Mavi Marmara case as an example. There we saw two sets of footage: one from the IDF and one (allegedly) from the passengers on the ship. If we take the IDF footage as fake and the other footage as real, then what that means is that even though the IDF faked their footage, the event itself was real — there really was a raid. If that is so, then why would the IDF fake the footage? Propaganda. To convince Israelis (and others) that the IDF soldiers were attacked first and to show the perfidy of the other side. They wanted to shape the narrative of the raid to suit their purposes.

I suspect the same thing might be happening here. There may have actually been a truck ramming, and the aftermath pictures are possibly genuine. But the government wanted to make more hay out of it. They wanted to get their side riled up: angry, anxious and afraid. They wanted to show the heartless brutality of the other side. What better way to do that than to whip up a video of this event? But, on the other hand, wouldn’t the surveillance camera I found have filmed the event if it happened? Why the need to fake it? The answer: Operation Fantasy Land.

The fake video serves their propaganda needs, since the vast majority of people will just accept it. But for the truthers who don’t, it’s easy to see that it’s fake. And if it’s fake, then “obviously” nothing happened. And there is a ready-made narrative to explain why the Israeli government faked it (to distract from the meddling allegations). In that case, the truth community has been led off into a fantasy land where nothing is real and there’s nothing to get hung about.

Maybe. Or maybe the whole thing really was faked and my friend’s niece is sipping pina coladas on her yacht moored off some tropical paradise. Or maybe the soldiers died in some training accident, and this story was concocted to cover it up. Or maybe my friend is lying to everyone. I don’t know for sure. But I do know one thing: we have to be careful not to get smug and complacent, acting as if we know when some event is “obviously” fake. It’s tempting to infer a hoax from fake imagery. It is a sensible inference, and most of the time it’s probably correct. But I believe they are parading a long line of faked events past us in the hopes of lulling us into a false sense of security or self-satisfaction. They can now get away with just about anything, and then produce fake imagery of the event to misdirect critics into fantasy land. Don’t fall for it.

We like to think that we’ve pierced through the fog and can see things clearly for what they are. But pride cometh before the fall. The governors are masters of deception, and they are constantly at work trying to stir our brains no less than everyone else’s, to confuse us and misdirect us away from the truth. What better way to do that than layer fake imagery over real events to confuse even the most observant critics. We need to remain aware of and be careful about the assumptions and inferences we’re making, and to remember that just because the evidence is fake, it doesn’t necessarily mean the event itself was a complete hoax.

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Addendum, Feb 8, 2017:

Vexman sent me something a few days ago that I think is worth sharing. It is basically a chart of the different paths for fakery, outlining the various scenarios in this (and possibly other) psyop hoaxes. The goals or purposes I think are open to debate, but the reasoning here is sound. I found it helpful to clarify my thoughts. Thanks, Vex!

Also, as a side note, I think there are parallels or points of overlap between what I’m suggesting with “Operation Fantasy Land” and the “reality is an illusion” project that Miles Mathis has talked about in several places, mainly at his science site but also in papers like this one.