[
 {
  "claim": "Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, almost all innocent civilians.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "The lie is in the last words: \"almost all innocent civilians.\" A large share of the dead were armed fighters. Before the October 2025 ceasefire the IDF had killed at least 22,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad combatants in Gaza, and the [Gaza health ministry's](/wikipedia/ministry-of-health-gaza/) raw count never separates them out from the total.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/are-almost-all-the-palestinians-killed-in-gaza-innocent-civilians/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Ashkenazi Jews aren't really Jewish: they descend from Khazar converts, not the Middle East.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "A pseudo-scientific antisemitic trope that the genetics have buried. The claim is that European (Ashkenazi) Jews descend from the Khazars, a medieval Turkic people whose elite reportedly adopted Judaism, and so have no real tie to the Land of Israel.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/are-ashkenazi-jews-descended-from-khazar-converts-rather-than-the-middle/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Black Americans are the true Israelites, and today's Jews are impostors.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "This is the creed of the extremist fringe of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement: that Jews “stole” a heritage belonging to Black people and are therefore frauds. It is false on every front. Jewish populations carry documented Levantine ancestry traced to the Land of Israel; the priestly Kohanim share a common genetic signature; and Jewish presence, language and scripture run in an unbroken line for 3,000 years, confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The “impostor” charge is an identity-theft conspiracy, a cousin of the antisemitic Khazar myth, and the ADL classifies the sects that preach it as ha",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/are-black-americans-the-true-israelites-and-todays-jews-impostors/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Palestinians are the direct descendants of the Canaanites, who were here long before the Jews.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "This is a political claim dressed up as genetics. Everyone in the region, Jews included, carries deep Levantine ancestry; a 2017 study found that present-day Levantine Arabs and Jews both descend substantially from the Bronze Age Canaanites. But the political claim of unbroken descent, standing in as an exclusive title to the land, is a 20th-century invention with no ancient continuity behind it.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/are-palestinians-the-direct-descendants-of-the-canaanites/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "There are over five million Palestinian refugees with a right to return to Israel.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "That number is the product of a rule that exists for no other people on earth. About 700,000 Arabs were displaced in the 1948 war. It is now nearly six million because UNRWA, the agency for Palestinians alone, passes \"refugee\" status down to every descendant, indefinitely.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/are-there-five-million-palestinian-refugees-with-a-right-of-return-to-is/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Arabs cannot be antisemitic, because they are Semites too.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "\"Antisemitism\" has meant one thing since the word was coined: hatred of Jews. It was popularised in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who founded the League of Antisemites for the express purpose of opposing Jews, not a vague family of \"Semitic peoples.\"",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/can-arabs-be-antisemitic-if-they-are-semites-too/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "An Israeli shell killed a little girl's whole family on a Gaza beach in 2006.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "In June 2006 a blast killed seven members of the Ghalia family on a Gaza beach; footage of the orphaned Huda Ghalia became an instant global symbol, blamed everywhere on an Israeli artillery shell. The Israeli inquiry, led by Maj. Gen. Meir Klifi, found the timing and the crater did not match Israeli fire, and pointed instead to a buried, unexploded munition. Even Human Rights Watch's own military analyst conceded the shrapnel pulled from the victims didn't match Israel's 155mm shells.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-an-israeli-shell-kill-a-family-on-a-gaza-beach-in-2006/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel assassinated the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in cold blood.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "Her death in May 2022 was a tragedy, and most likely caused by Israeli fire, but “assassination” it was not. The US Security Coordinator concluded that gunfire from an IDF position was “likely responsible”, during an active firefight, while finding “no reason to believe” the killing was intentional.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-assassinate-the-journalist-shireen-abu-akleh/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel bombed the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on October 17, 2023, killing 500.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "It was not an Israeli strike, and it did not hit the hospital building. Within days the intelligence services of the United States, United Kingdom, France and Canada independently concluded the blast came from a Palestinian rocket misfired from inside Gaza, attributed by Israeli and US intelligence to Palestinian Islamic Jihad.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-bomb-the-al-ahli-baptist-hospital-in-gaza/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel built an apartheid wall to grab land and cage Palestinians.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "It is a security fence built to stop suicide bombers, and the label “apartheid wall” inverts cause and effect. About 90% of it is a wire fence; only around a tenth, some 70 km, is the concrete wall the photographs always show, and that runs through cities like Jerusalem where gunmen once fired on traffic.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-build-an-apartheid-wall-to-grab-land/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel created Hamas.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "A kernel of truth wrapped around a falsehood. The truth: in the late 1970s and 80s Israel tolerated, and at times licensed, the Islamist charity and mosque network of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (Mujama al-Islamiya), seeing the then-quietist Muslim Brotherhood as a counterweight to the secular PLO that was actually waging war on it at the time.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-create-hamas/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "On 8 June 1967, during the [Six-Day War](/glossary/history-and-statehood/six-day-war/), Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked the US Navy intelligence ship [USS Liberty](/glossary/history-and-statehood/uss-liberty-incident/), killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171. It was a grievous error, and Israel said so at once: it had mistaken the ship for an Egyptian vessel near a war zone. Israel apologised and paid full compensation, nearly $13 million, to the wounded, the families of the dead, and the US government. Across ten American investigations and three Israeli inquiries, the conclusio",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-deliberately-attack-the-uss-liberty/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel massacred hundreds of civilians in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "There was a hard battle, but no massacre. During the [Second Intifada](/wikipedia/second-intifada/) the IDF entered Jenin, a camp Palestinians themselves called the “capital of the suicide bombers,” to dismantle the cells behind a wave of bombings that had just killed 30 Israelis at a Passover Seder in Netanya. Palestinian officials announced 500 to 5,000 dead. The confirmed toll, from Human Rights Watch and the UN’s own inquiry, was 52 to 56 Palestinians, roughly half of them armed fighters, and 23 Israeli soldiers.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-massacre-hundreds-of-civilians-in-jenin-in-2002/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel massacred peace activists bringing aid to Gaza on the Mavi Marmara.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "The blockade they set out to run is legal, and the “peace activists” struck first. The UN's own Palmer Report found Israel's naval blockade of Gaza a legitimate measure “in compliance with international law,” imposed to stop weapons reaching Hamas by sea.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-massacre-peace-activists-on-the-mavi-marmara/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel shelled a UN school full of refugees in Gaza, killing 40 sheltering inside.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The story, from January 2009, was that an Israeli shell struck a crowded UNRWA school at Jabaliya, killing about 40 civilians sheltering inside. It travelled the globe as an atrocity. Weeks later the UN itself corrected it: the shelling and the deaths happened outside the school, in the street, not inside a room full of refugees.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-israel-shell-a-un-school-in-gaza-and-kill-40-refugees/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jews controlled the Atlantic slave trade.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The claim comes from one place: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a 1991 book published by the Nation of Islam, and historians of slavery reject it flatly. The Atlantic trade was a vast enterprise of European crowns and companies, Portugal, Britain, Spain, France, the Netherlands, supplied by African kingdoms; Jews, a tiny, often persecuted minority in those empires, owned a marginal fraction of the ships, voyages and plantations.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/did-jews-control-or-run-the-atlantic-slave-trade/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Even ultra-Orthodox Jews oppose Israel, which proves Zionism isn't really Jewish.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "The black-hatted Jews paraded at anti-Israel rallies, burning flags or shaking hands with Iran's president, are almost always Neturei Karta, a sect of roughly 100 people worldwide. They are a fringe of a fringe, condemned and shunned by virtually the entire Orthodox world, including other anti-Zionist Haredim, for consorting with Holocaust deniers and the Iranian regime.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/do-ultra-orthodox-jews-oppose-israel-proving-zionism-isnt-jewish/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel deliberately bombs hospitals, a war crime against protected places.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "A hospital is protected until it is used to make war, and then the law itself lifts the shield. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention (Article 19), a hospital loses its protection when used “to commit acts harmful to the enemy”, which is precisely what Hamas does.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/does-israel-deliberately-bomb-hospitals/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel never holds its own soldiers accountable for killing Arabs.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "It does, and it built the case law to do it. The clearest example is **Kfar Qasim, 1956**: Israeli Border Police shot **49 Arab-Israeli civilians**, among them 23 children, returning home unaware of a last-minute curfew. Israel court-martialled the officers, convicted eight of murder, and the trial produced a doctrine still binding in Israeli law: a soldier must refuse a \"manifestly illegal\" order, one over which \"a black flag flies.\" That is the opposite of impunity.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/does-israel-hold-its-own-soldiers-accountable-for-killing-arabs/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel is an apartheid state.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Apartheid is a specific crime in international law: an institutionalized regime of racial domination. Israel does not fit it. Its two million Arab citizens (a fifth of the country) vote, run for office, sit in the Knesset, and serve as judges, including on the Supreme Court that overrules the government.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/does-israel-meet-the-legal-definition-of-apartheid/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel persecutes Christians and is driving them out of the Holy Land.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "Israel is the one country in the Middle East where the Christian population has grown, from about 34,000 at the founding in 1948 to roughly 185,000 today, a more than fivefold increase while every Christian community around it shrank. Iraq's Christians fell from over a million before 2003 to under 250,000 now.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/does-israel-persecute-christians-and-drive-them-out/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel steals Palestinian water and hoards it for itself.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "It is the opposite of theft: Israel makes its own water, and has more than it needs. About 80% of its drinking water now comes from the sea, desalinated at five plants along the Mediterranean (the Sorek plant was the largest of its kind on earth), and it recycles close to 90% of its wastewater for farming, the highest rate in the world by a distance.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/does-israel-steal-palestinian-water/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Genocide is not a synonym for war, or even for many civilian deaths. It is a specific crime: acts done with the intent to destroy a people, as such. No court has found that Israel meets that bar. The ICJ ordered provisional measures but made no finding of genocide, and the merits are years away; the 2025 \"genocide\" declaration came from the Pillay commission, a UN political panel, not a court, and was rejected by the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. The ICC itself indicted Israeli leaders that same period, but for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide. And the conduct ",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/has-israel-been-found-guilty-of-genocide-in-gaza/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel has occupied Gaza for decades.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005, uprooting 21 settlements. From then until the current war, no Israeli forces governed inside the Strip; Hamas seized it by force in 2007 and ran it. Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade afterward.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/has-israel-occupied-gaza-for-decades/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel is deliberately murdering journalists in Gaza.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "War in a dense city is lethal to everyone in it, journalists included, and every such death is real. But “deliberately murdering the press” is a separate and unproven charge.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/is-israel-deliberately-murdering-journalists-in-gaza/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel is deliberately starving Gaza by blocking humanitarian aid.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "Israel did not block the food. Enormous quantities entered throughout the war: by mid-2025 more than 30,000 aid trucks carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of food, medicine and fuel had been cleared, and Israel coordinated a UN polio campaign that vaccinated over 560,000 children; at points 600 to 800 trucks a day were crossing.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/is-israel-deliberately-starving-gaza/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jerusalem has always been an Arab city, and the Temple Mount was always Muslim.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Jerusalem was the capital of Jewish kingdoms a thousand years before Islam existed. The Temple Mount is the site of the First and Second Temples; the Western Wall is their surviving remnant. Islam arrived in the 7th century CE, and the Dome of the Rock (691) and Al-Aqsa Mosque (705) were built on the existing Jewish holy platform.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/was-jerusalem-always-an-arab-city-and-the-temple-mount-always-muslim/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jesus was a Palestinian.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Jesus was a Jew of Judea and the Galilee, and the sources for his life say nothing else: born in Bethlehem of Judea, circumcised on the eighth day, teaching Torah in synagogues, addressed as rabbi, keeping Passover in Jerusalem, and executed by Rome under a placard naming him King of the Jews.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/was-jesus-a-palestinian-or-a-jew/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The creation of Israel in 1948 was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.",
  "verdict": "CONTESTED",
  "rating_1to5": 3,
  "summary": "Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced in the 1948 war, and whether to call it “ethnic cleansing” is genuinely argued by historians. Here is what is not argued. It was a war the Arab side started, rejecting the UN's two-state partition plan and invading the day Israel was declared.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/was-the-creation-of-israel-in-1948-ethnic-cleansing/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The October 7 rapes and atrocities were fabricated propaganda.",
  "verdict": "FALSE",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "It is among the most self-documented atrocities in history, because the killers filmed it themselves. A UN mission, Israeli forensic teams and hundreds of survivors all confirm sexual violence occurred on October 7 and in captivity afterward.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/were-the-october-7-rapes-and-atrocities-fabricated/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "‘From the river to the sea’ is just a call for freedom and equality.",
  "verdict": "MISLEADING",
  "rating_1to5": 2,
  "summary": "The river is the Jordan; the sea is the Mediterranean. Between them lies the entire state of Israel. The tell is the timing: the slogan was coined by the PLO in the mid-1960s, before the 1967 war, when Israel held neither the West Bank nor Gaza, Jordan and Egypt did.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/claims/what-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-actually-mean/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Auschwitz used to say four million dead; now they say one million. They admit they inflated it.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "This one has a real kernel, and we will not dodge it. The old Soviet-era plaque did claim four million, a propaganda figure. But serious historians always estimated between one and one and a half million, and the museum corrected the sign to about 1.1 million. That is scholarship refining a number, the opposite of a cover-up, and 1.1 million murdered in a single camp is no victory for denial. It barely moves the six million either: most victims never saw Auschwitz. They died in the Reinhard camps, the ghettos, and the mass shootings in the East.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/auschwitz-used-to-say-four-million-dead-now-they-say-one-million-they-ad/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "If six million really died, where did they go? They emigrated after the war.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The arithmetic is merciless. Europe held roughly nine million Jews before the war; two of every three were dead by the end. Post-war emigration to Israel, America and elsewhere is fully documented and accounts for a small fraction of the missing.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/if-six-million-really-died-where-did-they-go-they-emigrated-after-the-wa/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "It all rests on survivor stories, and survivors contradict each other.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The case does not rest on survivors at all. It rests on the perpetrators: the Wannsee minutes, Goebbels' diaries, and Himmler standing before SS generals at Posen in 1943, calling the murder of the Jews \"a page of glory in our history that has never been written.\"",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/it-all-rests-on-survivor-stories-and-survivors-contradict-each-other/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "It was wartime internment, no different from the Japanese-American camps or the British ones.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The United States interned Japanese-Americans; it did not gas them, shoot them into pits, or build factories to render their corpses. No internment in history selected an entire people, infants included, for total elimination as stated policy. The comparison is not an argument. It is a way to change the subject.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/it-was-wartime-internment-no-different-from-the-japanese-american-camps-/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "People died of typhus and starvation in the chaos of war, not deliberate gassing.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Typhus was real and it killed; it was also separate. New arrivals were sorted on the ramp: those fit to work were registered, and those who were not, the elderly, the sick, the children and their mothers, were sent straight to the gas, never registered at all. Disease among the barracked does not account for the people who were murdered before they ever entered a barrack.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/people-died-of-typhus-and-starvation-in-the-chaos-of-war-not-deliberate-/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The crematoria could never have burned that many bodies.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The SS engineered the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria for mass throughput and documented their capacity in internal memos as running into the thousands of bodies per day. And at the Operation Reinhard camps, Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec, where roughly 1.7 million Jews were murdered with almost no survivors, there were no crematoria at all: the bodies were burned in open pits. Deniers who argue about oven arithmetic are quietly skipping the camps built to kill without ovens.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/the-crematoria-could-never-have-burned-that-many-bodies/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The Leuchter Report scientifically proved the chambers could never have worked.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Fred Leuchter was not a chemist or an engineer; he built execution equipment and held a humanities degree. He chipped samples from 45-year-old walls, ignored that cyanide bonds far more in a delousing room than in a chamber used for minutes, and produced a paper that the Kraków Institute of Forensic Research took apart point by point.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/the-leuchter-report-scientifically-proved-the-chambers-could-never-have-/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The Nazi confessions were tortured out of them by the Allies.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Hundreds of perpetrators testified across five decades, in German, Israeli, Polish and American courts, and in voluntary filmed interviews with no interrogator present: the SS doctor Hans Münch, the Treblinka guard Franz Suchomel. Their accounts match one another and match the documents. Not one has ever recanted.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/the-nazi-confessions-were-tortured-out-of-them-by-the-allies/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The Red Cross only counted 271,000 dead in the camps, so that is the real toll.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The figure is real and it proves nothing. 271,301 is the number of deaths written into the camp registration books, the Death Books, that survived the war and reached the International Tracking Service at Arolsen. It counts only the people the SS bothered to register.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/the-red-cross-only-counted-271000-dead-in-the-camps-so-that-is-the-real-/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The six million is a made-up, round number that nobody can support.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "It is not a slogan; it is arithmetic. Demographers compared the Jewish population of each country before and after the war; the totals cluster between 5.7 and 6 million. Yad Vashem has now recovered more than 4.8 million victims by name, one at a time, and the work goes on. The Nazis' own Wannsee Protocol of January 1942 tabulated roughly 11 million European Jews marked for death.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/the-six-million-is-a-made-up-round-number-that-nobody-can-support/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "There was no master plan, and Hitler himself never knew.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The plan is on paper. Heydrich gathered fifteen senior officials at Wannsee to coordinate it. Himmler described it aloud to his generals. And Hitler had promised it in public: in the Reichstag in 1939 he foretold \"the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe\" if war came. War came, and he kept the promise.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/there-was-no-master-plan-and-hitler-himself-never-knew/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "There were no gas chambers. The whole thing is physically impossible.",
  "verdict": "FALSE, Holocaust denial",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The gas chambers are in the SS's own construction files: blueprints, work orders, an invoice for gas-tight doors, and one Auschwitz memo that slips and names a room a Vergasungskeller, a gassing cellar.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/denial/there-were-no-gas-chambers-the-whole-thing-is-physically-impossible/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "AIPAC is an all-powerful foreign lobby that buys America's Middle East policy.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "AIPAC is influential, and it is also a domestic American lobby: it takes no money from Israel and is not a registered foreign agent. Its funds come from US citizens. On registered lobbying it spent about $3.3 million in 2024, a rounding error beside the National Association of Realtors ($86M) or the US Chamber of Commerce ($76M). Its campaign spending is larger, and worth naming honestly: AIPAC's PAC and its super PAC put in over $100 million in 2024. But that is a sliver of the $15.9 billion spent across that election, and every dollar is publicly disclosed. Meanwhile genuine foreign influenc",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/aipac-is-an-all-powerful-foreign-lobby-that-buys-americas-middle-east-po/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "All Jews are white Europeans.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Most Jewish Israelis are [Mizrahi](/glossary/hebrew-and-heritage/mizrahi/) or [Sephardi](/glossary/hebrew-and-heritage/sephardi/): families from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt and across the Middle East and North Africa, many of whom were expelled from those countries after 1948.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/all-jews-are-white-europeans/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Hebrew is a fake language that Israel invented.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Hebrew is over 3,000 years old, the language of the Bible, used continuously in prayer and study. It was revived as an everyday spoken language in the late 1800s, largely through Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/hebrew-is-a-fake-language-that-israel-invented/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Israel is an apartheid state.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Apartheid was a legal system of racial caste. In Israel, Arab citizens vote, sit in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, and practise law and medicine. The disputed West Bank measures are a security response to a territorial war, not a race law, and they don't touch 'Israel proper' at all.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/israel-is-an-apartheid-state/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jews and Arabs have always hated each other.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "For long stretches of history, Jews and Arabs lived side by side, most famously during the \"Golden Age\" of Muslim Spain. Both are Semitic peoples with deep roots in the same region and an intertwined heritage. The relationship cycled between genuine coexistence and documented persecution, never a fixed, ancient hatred that made today's conflict inevitable.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/jews-and-arabs-have-always-hated-each-other/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jews are a single race.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Jewish identity is peoplehood and religion, not race. Jews include Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian (Beta Israel), Indian and converts of every background, bound by shared history, faith and culture, not a single bloodline.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/jews-are-a-single-race/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jews are colonizers in Palestine.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Colonization is a foreign power planting settlers in someone else's land. Jews are indigenous to this one, three thousand years, the Hebrew language, a liturgy that faces Jerusalem, the archaeology in the soil. The land was largely purchased, and the state created by a 1947 UN vote the Jewish side accepted. A return home is the opposite of a colony.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/jews-are-colonizers-in-palestine/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jews claim Israel because God promised it to them 3,000 years ago.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "It is a strawman. Israel's founders were secular, its Declaration of Independence would not name God, and the documents the state actually rests on, San Remo 1920, the Mandate for Palestine, UN Resolution 181 and UN membership in 1949, contain no scriptural argument at all.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/jews-claim-israel-because-god-promised-it-to-them-3000-years-ago/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-21"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jews secretly control the banks, the media, and world governments.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "One of the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theories, used to justify persecution for centuries. Jews are roughly 0.2% of the world's population and hold no collective control over any institution. It is a recognized hate trope, debunked again and again, whose modern template is a document proven a forgery over a century ago.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/jews-secretly-control-the-banks-the-media-and-world-governments/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Jihad just means a peaceful inner struggle.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The hadith that jihad is mainly the 'greater,' inner struggle is graded weak to fabricated by hadith scholars. The classical jurists, Ibn Khaldūn among them, treated it as a religious duty of armed expansion, 'to convert everybody to Islam by persuasion or by force.' The inner meaning exists; it just isn't the primary classical one.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/jihad-just-means-a-peaceful-inner-struggle/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Judaism is just Christianity without Jesus.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Judaism predates Christianity by more than a thousand years and has its own theology, law (halacha), calendar and practice. It is a distinct, complete tradition, not an incomplete version of another faith.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/judaism-is-just-christianity-without-jesus/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "People get paid $7,000 a post to defend Israel online.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "If only. The overwhelming majority of people posting in support of Israel are unpaid: students, volunteers, and ordinary people who simply care. The number comes from misreading a disclosed US foreign-agent filing for one small, publicly acknowledged Israeli government ad campaign, then stretching it to cover every pro-Israel voice online.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/people-get-paid-7000-a-post-to-defend-israel-online/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The anti-Israel surge on campus is a purely organic, grassroots awakening.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Much of the student feeling is sincere, and campuses are also not neutral ground. The money is documented: Qatar is the largest foreign funder of US universities, ahead of Germany, China and Saudi Arabia, and a national organizing network, sympathetic faculty and foreign cash all shape what looks spontaneous.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/the-anti-israel-surge-on-campus-is-a-purely-organic-grassroots-awakening/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The keffiyeh is Palestinian, and Jews who wear it are appropriating it.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Jews wore the sudra, a near-identical woven head-scarf, for two thousand years; it is described in the Mishnah and was still worn by Yemenite Jews into modern times. Then, after the 7th-century Arab conquest, dhimmi dress codes barred Jews from turbans and head-scarves as \"crowns of the Arabs.\" Fourteen centuries of Arabs policing what Jews could wear, then a cry of \"appropriation\" when a Jew wears the scarf of his own ancestors. The charge is exactly backwards.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/the-keffiyeh-is-palestinian-and-jews-who-wear-it-are-appropriating-it/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The Nazis invented antisemitism.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "Persecution of Jews stretches back millennia. Expulsions, blood libels and pogroms long predate the 20th century. The Shoah was the genocidal extreme of a very old hatred, not its beginning.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/the-nazis-invented-antisemitism/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "The Talmud commands Jews to hate and kill non-Jews.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "The shocking 'Talmud quotes' that circulate are forged, mistranslated, or stripped of context, traced to 19th-century frauds like Pranaitis. 'Best of the gentiles, kill' isn't in the Talmud; 'gentiles aren't human' misreads a technical purity-law word. The Talmud grounds all human dignity in one shared Adam, so none may say 'my father is greater than yours.'",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/the-talmud-commands-jews-to-hate-and-kill-non-jews/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 },
 {
  "claim": "Yiddish and Hebrew are the same language.",
  "verdict": "MYTH",
  "rating_1to5": 1,
  "summary": "They're different languages. Hebrew is Semitic. Yiddish is Germanic, written in Hebrew letters with Slavic and Hebrew elements, spoken by Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe.",
  "url": "https://wiki.ilroot.com/myths/yiddish-and-hebrew-are-the-same-language/",
  "date_published": "2026-07-12"
 }
]