After a Yom Kippur terror attack in London, Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised that the Jewish community would soon see a different Britain, one of kindness, empathy, universalist patriotism. He was wrong: The situation in Britain only got worse.

That appears to be happening all over again in Australia. In the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese pledged to take action that would show that Jews’ place in Australian society is secure. To that end, he also invited Israeli President Isaac Herzog for a visit of solidarity next week. “We need to build social cohesion in this country,” he said.

Like Starmer, Albanese has vastly overestimated his society’s ability to reclaim its humanity.

One Labor lawmaker in New South Wales, the Australian state in which Sydney is located, honked that “we should not be welcoming to Australia the head of a state engaged in an ongoing genocide.” Another carped: “I don’t think we should be welcoming someone to this country who is so heavily implicated in the actions that have resulted in the death of 75,000 innocent Gazans,” an entirely made-up number that not even Hamas is claiming. (Could the Guardian please hire a fact-checker? This is embarrassing even for a publication like the Guardian.)

These and other politicians promised to attend an anti-Herzog rally with extremist groups and were considering even joining a march on parliament to whip up public rage at the Jewish state. The Hezbollah-linked Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint with the attorney general over Herzog’s visit, a move whose only possible effect would be increased incitement.

The hate for Herzog, an Israeli Laborite who last ran for prime minister when his opponent was Bibi Netanyahu, is clarifying. Herzog is a unifying figure in politics, a centrist who uses his mostly symbolic title to forge consensus and dialogue. His grandfather was chief rabbi of Ireland, against whose memory there is currently a vicious anti-Semitic campaign. Nor does the president—who is head of state but not head of government—have any role in policymaking, regarding Gaza or elsewhere.

On what, then, could these lunatics possibly be basing their anti-Herzog rage? The answer is: a poorly crafted lie that is reminder of the need to push back against anti-Israel narratives even when they are transparently braindead claims.

In the days after Hamas’s genocidal attacks of October 7, 2023, Herzog briefed the press. One reporter asked him a question that appeared to depict Gaza as merely a place from which a few Hamas militants happened to operate. Herzog responded that Gaza was essentially more like a state with which Israel was now at war.

Israel would strictly obey international laws that govern such conflicts, but he warned not to underestimate Hamas’s terror state. “We have to understand there’s a state, in a way, that has built a machine of evil right at our doorstep.” Hamas is the (elected) government of that statelet and controls all its governing institutions. It wasn’t true, he said, that the people of Gaza had no idea what Hamas was building and what it was doing in the shadows. October 7 wasn’t a few people committing a cross-border crime; it was one government ordering its armed forces to invade its neighbor. Now its neighbor would respond.

Moments earlier, for context, Herzog had said that Israel is “invested in gathering intelligence in trying to locate the enemy separately from [the] civilian population, in evacuating the civilian population from the center of the battle, in warning citizens.”

In sum: Israel has been attacked by a terror state that is part of a coalition of foreign states, but it recognizes the existence of civilians among the population and will go out of its way to avoid harming them.

None of this is remotely controversial. But in his clumsy English, after calling Gaza “a state in a way,” Herzog called it “an entire nation that is responsible.”

That phrase was plucked by bad-faith actors seeking to manufacture a “genocidal intent” quote, even though nobody—especially the people manufacturing the smear—could find Herzog’s meaning confusing. And so, after saying Israel will separate “the enemy” from the “civilian population,” Herzog was accused of claiming there is no such thing as a civilian in Gaza. The ICC picked up the quote and added it to its “genocide” blood libel.

This sort of disinformation campaign was carried out all the time by an army of pro-Hamas social media trolls. Indeed, Herzog’s case is far from the most prominent. That award goes to the many outlets that spread the “Amalek” lie.

Early in the war, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referenced Amalek, the biblical avatars of eliminationist enemies of the Israelites, when talking specifically about Hamas. Reporters jumped on the comment and pretended Bibi was talking about all Palestinians. NPR, for example, claimed Netanyahu was referencing a line in one of the books of the Prophets about eliminating Amalek, but was forced to correct (sort of) the article when it was pointed out that Netanyahu quoted a line from Deuteronomy word for word that simply said: “Remember what Amalek did to you.”

You can see why these lies take off: No one pays much attention to the granular details of what the biblical verses actually say or mean. It sounds like nit-picking. And in politics, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

But in this week’s coverage of Herzog’s looming visit, the Guardian took the disinformation to a new level. “Herzog’s initial bellicosity resonated,” the paper claimed. “The slogan ‘there are no uninvolved’ was subsequently chanted by Israeli soldiers deployed to Gaza, even written in Hebrew on an IDF watchtower in the West Bank.”

That sentence in the Guardian story links to… Bibi’s “Amalek” comment! There is no mention of Herzog at the link. The Guardian simply invented a story about Herzog influencing soldiers’ behavior.

So to recap. Terrorists fulfilling the directive to “globalize the intifada” committed a massacre of Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney. As a gesture to the Jewish community, the government invited a ceremonial figure of Israeli consensus-building. And he will be greeted by raging anti-Semites and a few obnoxious politicians lending them legitimacy, all basing their criticisms of Herzog on a lie. We live in an era dominated by blood libels to an extent not seen since the Middle Ages.