Ms Rachel with Rahaf, a three-year-old war amputee in the US for medical treatment. Image from Democracy Now, August 13, democracynow.org
Ms. Rachel, as she’s known to many, is the stage name of Rachel Griffin-Accurso, part of a new generation of children’s educational programming creators that have moved off of television and onto streaming services. Stars like Blippi and shows like Cocomelon appeal to children who haven’t entered school yet, and these shows appear to have wide interest as streaming services like YouTube continue to reshape the media landscape. Griffin-Accurso’s rise has led to a deal with Netflix to license her YouTube channel “Songs For Littles” as a “curated compilation” of her videos, according to Business Insider. Her story is however much more humble. As a music teacher and early childhood educator Griffin-Accurso had turned to YouTube as a home in 2019. Six years later, as of August, 2025, she has 16.5 million YouTube subscribers (which nets her an estimated monthly earnings of $99,000 to $1.6 million, according to social media tracking website Socialblade).
A notable part of Ms. Rachel story’s is that Griffin-Accurso’s videos focus on supporting language learning with children by employing songs and sign language. According to a Washington Post profile, when Griffin-Accurso’s son was diagnosed with a speech delay she decided to make the quality content that she felt lacking in children’s media. The early videos have a very clear “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, with flat digital backgrounds and animations, stains on the performer’s shirts, and bad hangnails in closeups. This is in part because Griffin-Accurso has a unique story about how her videos and channel took off during the 2020 COVID lockdown. A recent Post article on YouTube content creators explains that while early videos were simple, she now has a professional team that helps give the show polish. Newer episodes (like the potty-training special from May) have fully choreographed songs, full sets, and new cameras. These are the kinds of productions that helped her secure collaborations with Sesame Street’s Children’s Television Workshop and Australian children’s music group The Wiggles.
In May of 2024, Griffin-Accurso took on a new challenge: activism on behalf of children. She used her massive platform to fundraise for Save the Children’s Emergency Fund, which in addition to sending funds to address other humanitarian crises also does so to Gaza. This unexpectedly led to a massive backlash and what she called “bullying” in a tearful Instagram story posted on May 16 of this year. Even for a media celebrity the virulence of the commentary from the online peanut gallery seemed to really catch her off guard. Speaking purely editorially, many of us in the pro-Palestine movement have also had moments of horror encountering the callousness of people’s disregard for human suffering. The blowback was immediate and vigorous. The Zionist group stopantisemitism.org accused Griffin-Accurso of being a “mouthpiece for Hamas.” In a letter from the group to US Attorney General Pam Bondi its director Liora Rez said, “Given the vast sums of foreign funds that have been directed toward propagandizing our young people on college campuses, we suspect there is a similar dynamic in the online influencer space.” Rez goes on to say, “We urge you and your office to investigate whether or not Ms. Rachel is being remunerated to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda to her millions of followers, as this may violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).” News outlets like the New York Post picked up this story uncritically for their audiences and continued to call Griffin-Accurso “antisemitic.”
It is worth discussing the specific accusations of antisemitism against Griffin-Accurso. What does stopantisemitism.org say she did wrong? In its article from April 7, 2025, “Ms. Rachel,” it says its criticisms include “never condemning Hamas and the Palestinians responsible for murdering Israeli children on 10/7 or [holding] the Bibas children in captivity.” In this instance, it is useful to work out these accusations in terms of the species of pro-Israel propaganda called hasbara. Hasbaratracker.com says “‘Hasbara’ is a Hebrew term that translates to ‘explanation’ or ‘public relations’ in English.” It clarifies further that hasbara has a specific function: “Hasbara includes various forms of communication, such as media outreach, social media campaigns, and other strategies to shape public opinion in favor of the Israeli state, and involves manipulation of information, spreading propaganda, and stifling dissenting voices.” The website goes even further to collect the incidences of the widespread claim that 40 Israeli babies were beheaded by Hamas on October 7.
So it would seem that the backlash against Ms. Rachel provides an occasion to check in on debunked hasbara claims. Let’s start with the “40 beheaded babies” allegation. This assertion, made by an Israeli spokesperson three days after October 7, 2023, when coordinated attacks by the armed wing of Hamas—the Al-Qassam Brigades—broke through the Gaza-Israel barrier and executed military operations. These operations included taking hostages from settlements around the Gaza envelope (Sderot and Be’eri) and an attack on the military outpost at Re’im. In the days following the attack the claim that babies were beheaded was repeated ad nauseum by Israeli military talking heads on international news media. And yet the claims were entirely unverified. Sara Sidner, in a report for CNN on October 11, 2023, reported this claim—and the very next day had to retract and apologize for repeating it. In a post on her social media Sidner said, “Yesterday the Israeli prime minister’s office said that it had confirmed Hamas beheaded babies and children while we were live on the air. The Israeli government now says today it CANNOT confirm babies were beheaded.” The culmination was President Joe Biden repeating the accounts in a press conference on October 11. In the end this oft-repeated claim makes clear that the point of this disinformation is to manufacture consent.
These accusations go alongside claims of “mass rapes” repeated by Biden in the same press conference. Widely reported in Western media, the claim goes something like this BBC headline from December 5, 2023: “Israel Gaza: Hamas Raped and Mutilated Women on 7 October, BBC Hears.” The BBC reported eyewitness testimony of rape from a dance music festival that was being held in the Gaza envelope that weekend. The story gained scope in Western media, and by March 25, 2024, the New York Times ran a story called “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” However, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Independent Investigation Committee’s report on “international crimes committed by all parties,” issued June 24, 2024, concluded that these “mass rapes” reported so broadly in Western media were unverifiable “due to a lack of access to victims, witnesses, and crime sites and the obstruction of its investigations by the Israeli authorities.” Furthermore, “The Commission did not find credible evidence . . . that militants received orders to commit sexual violence.” In sum, the reports in the Times and the BBC seem to be entirely contradicted by the United Nations itself.
So what are the broad takeaways here from Western media and the propaganda attempts to condemn Ms. Rachel? The problem with hasbara is that it works best not at the headline level but in the flame wars in the comments. Hasbara works because the claims are salacious and easily shared, but it takes a mountain of evidence to debunk those claims. If you’ve ever seen a headline about Gaza posted to Facebook, you’ll see people gleefully lob shameless lies at their ideological opponents and you’ll be tempted to duke it out with them. You may even have said unprintable things to these people, but the key is that even though these misanthropes are the loudest voices in any comment section, they’re still wrong. In the end, it will be Palestinians that decide the outcome of history and not Westerners.
Alen Romero is a local Marxist revolutionary writer, thinker, and organizer. He has worked in education for the past seven years.
869 total views, 7 views today