As a writer who chronicles how the anti-Israel propaganda industry devoured and replaced the mainstream media and political establishments, I am eternally grateful for Bernie Sanders’s latest op-ed. The socialist senator has produced an agglomeration of misinformation from a variety of key sources that, together, reveals an entire ecosystem of fraudulent institutions.

Honestly, aside from the blood libels and Sovietesque Jew-baiting, I almost wish I’d written it myself.

Let me demonstrate with a good old-fashioned fisking.

Sanders opens the piece by saying Hamas started the war and Israel had a right to defend itself but has gone too far. “Many legal experts have now concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”

And who are these “legal experts?” Sanders begins with the International Association of Genocide Scholars, which has concluded that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.”

Ah, the International Association of Genocide Scholars. It’s an authoritative-sounding name but it turns out the group’s sole criterium for membership is the membership fee itself. So it’s actually a playground for anonymous trolls and made-up names. Barely a fifth of the members voted on the genocide resolution after opposition was shut out of the process. The end result was that only a small minority of the organization’s membership supported the “genocide” accusation.

Moving on. Sanders makes sure to name-check Amnesty International, which acknowledged having to essentially change the definition of genocide to make the crime fit the suspect. Its local researchers were frozen out of the process, ensuring the organization had no input from the actual conflict zone. And the Israeli branch of Amnesty International disavowed the conclusion drawn by Amnesty’s report.

Here we have the race to be wrong: Once someone, somewhere accuses Israel of genocide, the other so-called human-rights groups rush to add their names to the list, quickly producing shoddy reports starting from the conclusion—Israel is committing genocide—and then cherry-picking their way backward to the beginning.

Until this week, the UN felt left out. So, as Sanders writes, “yesterday, an independent commission of experts appointed by the United Nations echoed this finding.”

The word “independent” is doing a lot of work here. An example of someone on this commission is Navi Pillay, whose own UN rights council has in the past amplified the medieval blood libel that doctors in the Jewish state steal the organs of Palestinians. These commissioners are, therefore, neither “independent” of the UN structure nor are they experts in anything but spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Sanders then pivots to his own case for genocide. He begins by reciting statistics that are unequivocally false. “Israel has now killed some 65,000 people,” he writes, misreading Hamas’s own numbers. It’s true that nearly half of those killed in Gaza by the IDF were combatants, but the overall number is wrong, too. Included in that number are those the terror group itself has killed, those who died of natural causes, and those killed by other armed groups in Gaza, for example. Sanders’s statement, therefore, is patently untrue. But it’s instructive in that it shows how Westerners parrot Hamas’s propaganda uncritically.

Sanders then references a “leaked classified Israeli military database” that “indicates that 83% of those killed have been civilians.” The senator is referring to an article in the Guardian that does not, in fact, say anything of the sort. The list is of only known members in only the military wings of only two terrorist groups in Gaza, and those whose death Israel can confirm. The comparison to the wider population of Gaza is entirely fabricated.

Sanders then claims that “Gaza is now gripped by man-made famine,” presumably referring to an IPC report that changed its criteria and excluded a significant chunk of the data. When the full range of data was added, the numbers showed unequivocally that there was no famine in Gaza.

Sanders does not include reference notes with his op-ed, so it’s not always possible to know from where exactly he gets his assorted smears. But there are times when he can’t plausibly blame it on the source anyway, because he is falling for some truly insane stuff. For example: He writes that “Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than have been killed in any previous conflict.”

Set aside for the moment that these “journalists” tend to be extensions of terror groups (especially Hamas) who are simply wearing a PRESS vest. Because even if all of those included in this group were actual journalists, is Sanders aware of how many people have died in previous wars? It is not possible for this statement to be true. It takes a truly blinkered mind to even entertain the claim. When European Jewry was wiped out by the millions and the Nazis purged France and Poland of all opposition, does Sanders think somehow the only people the Nazis saved were the journalists? Again, it’s just a crazy thing to say and a U.S. senator should be embarrassed to put his ignorance on such display.

What Sanders has done with this op-ed is not make a strong accusation of genocide but rather highlight the collapse of a global civil-society infrastructure—NGOs, humanitarians, journalists, educational institutions. To that list we are in danger of having to add: the United States Senate.