Does Ms Rachel Spread Hate? How a StandWithUs Campaign Lies With True Facts

A pro-Israel nonprofit told 2.2 million followers that a children’s educator spreads lies and fuels hatred. Two of its three charges are technically true, and each is a half-truth. Each one reaches a false conclusion by leaving out the piece that changes its meaning. Researchers have a name for that: paltering.

Ms Rachel (Rachel Accurso) makes videos that teach toddlers their first words, letters and colors.[3] On 15 October 2026, StandWithUs, a Los Angeles nonprofit with 2.2 million Facebook followers that describes itself as “Fighting Antisemitism and Supporting Israel,”[2] posted an “ACTION ALERT” about her. It accused her of using her platform “to amplify lies, misinformation, and voices associated with deeply troubling rhetoric about Israelis and October 7.”[1]

The image speaks first: her logo, a child’s hand, and four wooden blocks spelling H-A-T-E under the headline “Children deserve better.” The caption makes three charges, asks her brand team to “say no to antisemitism,” and asks Meta to “take appropriate action.”[1]

This article reads the post one claim at a time, checks each one against the record, and names the propaganda techniques it uses.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.[4] Israel rejects the finding. A finding can be disputed, but that takes an argument. The post offers none. It replaces the evidence with a label.

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis listed this as the first of its seven devices in 1939: name-calling, “giving an idea a bad label and therefore rejecting and condemning it without examining the evidence.”[5]

The collaboration happened. In July 2025, Jewish News reported on it and on Azaiza’s past posts.[6] The same outlet’s headline records what happened next: Ms Rachel deleted the collaboration.[6] In a statement reported by The Jewish Chronicle, she said:

The post, published fifteen months later, mentions neither the deletion nor the condemnation. Both facts come from British Jewish outlets that were critical of the collaboration, not from her defenders.

The post doesn’t name the child. The best-known case of this claim is Mohammad, the toddler whose photograph NPR revisited in August 2025. The condition is real: “His doctors say Mohammad has muscular dystrophy,” which makes him “extra vulnerable to malnutrition.”[8] But his primary doctor, Dr. Suzan Marouf, also told NPR: “He was suffering severe malnutrition.”[8]

On 22 August 2025, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate, the first famine ever confirmed in the Middle East.[9][10] A congenital condition and starvation are not alternatives. A child with a muscle-wasting disease, in a famine, is more at risk, not less.

Leaving out the famine is decontextualization, a technique already in our framework: the event is reported without the humanitarian context that would change its meaning. Robert Entman’s classic definition of framing explains why it works: what a frame omits “may be as critical as the inclusions in guiding the audience.”[15]

Two of the charges against Ms Rachel share a structure. Each states something true, and each reaches a false conclusion by cutting off the fact that changes its meaning. In a 2017 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Todd Rogers, Richard Zeckhauser, Francesca Gino, Michael Norton and Maurice Schweitzer named this third form of deception, alongside lying by commission and lying by omission.[11]

The researchers also found a cost. Once people discover paltering, they judge it about as harshly as intentional lying.[12]

The caption never says Ms Rachel teaches children hate. The image does: a child’s hand builds H-A-T-E beside her logo and her smiling face, under “Children deserve better.”[1] The Institute for Propaganda Analysis called this transfer: the feeling attached to one symbol is carried over to something else, whether approval or, as here, disapproval.[5] The picture can imply what the text would have to defend.

It isn’t the first such request. In April 2025, the account StopAntisemitism publicly called on the US attorney general to investigate Ms Rachel for allegedly promoting “anti-Israel propaganda,” and asked followers to file a Foreign Agents Registration Act complaint.[13]

John Henry Newman named this move in 1864: poisoning the well.[14] Discredit the source before the audience hears the argument, and nothing it says will be believed. A post that cannot refute a children’s educator’s appeals for Gaza’s children asks a platform to review her instead.

So, does Ms Rachel spread hate? Restore what the post removed (a UN finding, her condemnation of Hamas and October 7, and a child’s severe malnutrition during a confirmed famine) and the post can’t show it.

Paltering works because each sentence survives a true-or-false check. That is why it needs a different question: what happened next, and what was left out? Asked of this post, that question leaves only the picture standing. That is the media literacy lesson of this case: misinformation does not always need a false sentence.

Children do deserve better. Including the children of Gaza.