Medieval sacrilege claims rested on hearsay yet were deployed as propaganda

Evidence

With his own eyes, he tells us, giving us to expect some horrible sacrilege committed in his presence, with his own eyes he has seen not, it turns out, the atrocity itself, but only the place where it was said to have been committed. ‘These filthy Muslims’, he said, “polluted and profaned not only the Temple of the Lord, but even the Sepulchre of the Lord, and all the holy places in that region, and innumerable holy … This irresponsible reliance on gossip was both calculated war propaganda (it was intended for the eyes of the Fathers of the Council at Lyons) and the revelation of a state of mind. — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 628

Categorization

• XREF: Humbert passing off secondhand gossip as eyewitness atrocity parallels the modern moral-panic technology in the vault (Cohen’s moral panics, Islamophobic ‘no-go zone’ claims).