By Alireza Akbari
Rachel Griffin Accurso, a popular children’s entertainer and YouTube educator, who has been bravely speaking against the ordeal of children in the besieged Gaza Strip, has faced massive backlash from Zionist lobby groups, who accuse her of spreading “pro-Hamas propaganda.”
A beloved internet figure, better known as Ms. Rachel, has been using her media platform not just to teach, but to amplify human rights concerns, and most recently, for the children of Gaza amid the ongoing Israeli-American genocidal war that has killed thousands of innocent children.
A notorious Zionist group has classified her advocacy work as “antisemitism,” launching a vicious campaign against her to the point of threatening to inflict physical harm on her.
Accurso’s social media posts expressing sympathy for Palestinian children have irked the group that calls itself ‘StopAntisemitism’. Undeterred, Ms. Rachel has shown no intention of backing down.
The group’s smear campaign intensified with a letter urging US authorities to investigate the entertainer under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — a startling escalation against a woman best known for entertaining children through educational content.
Accurso continues to do what she’s always done: speak in the language of care, for those who cannot speak for themselves.
The group has now escalated its campaign by formally urging the US Department of Justice to investigate whether Ms. Rachel is “being remunerated to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda to her millions of followers.”
In their letter, the group recently argued that her social media posts, which include heartbreaking images of malnourished children and death tolls reported by Gaza’s health ministry, could amount to undisclosed work for a foreign entity.
“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,” wrote Liora Rez, director of StopAntisemitism, in the letter addressed to US officials.
StopAntisemitism’s objections focus on specific posts where Ms. Rachel shared images of Gaza’s starving children and cited casualty numbers echoed by the United Nations. According to the group, these posts ignored “the suffering of Israeli victims, hostages, and Jewish children.”
When pressed by journalists and activists for direct evidence that Ms. Rachel was paid for these posts, rather than simply expressing moral outrage, Rez offered no documentation.
Instead, she suggested a pattern, saying, “It’s not that secret influencers such as Ms. Rachel often have paid collaborations on social media … We could not help but notice post-10/7, Ms. Rachel posting a massive barrage of anti-Israel propaganda.”
The group is pushing for her to be investigated under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) — a law designed to track Americans working on behalf of foreign political interests.
Legal experts, however, note that FARA investigations hinge on clear evidence of financial direction from a foreign entity — a threshold critics say this campaign fails to meet.
The group’s backlash comes as the death toll from Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza continues to mount. By May 2025, nearly 20,000 children had been killed, according to local health sources — a staggering figure that includes more than 900 babies under the age of one.
Starvation, too, has claimed young lives: 52 people, mostly children, have died from malnutrition as a result of Israeli weaponization of food in the besieged territory. The Gaza Ministry of Health also reports over 4,700 amputations — nearly one-fifth involving children.
Against this backdrop, Ms. Rachel’s quiet acts of solidarity began to resonate. Nearly a year before the accusations against her surfaced, she had launched a fundraiser through the platform Cameo, raising over $50,000 in just a few hours for Save the Children’s Emergency Fund.
The effort was part of a broader initiative titled “Messages of Love To Children, For Children,” offering personalized videos to young fans, with all proceeds directed to support children living through war in Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ukraine.
“The idea is: I’ll make videos for little ones and all the money raised on my end will go to Save the Children’s Emergency Fund, which will go to children living in conflict,” she explained in a video on her Instagram account.
The outpouring of support was met with a wave of hostility. After receiving hateful and politicised comments, Ms. Rachel responded with a statement of quiet moral clarity: “To do a fundraiser for children who are currently starving – who have no food or water – who are being killed – is human.”
The backlash she now faces has drawn attention to the tactics of StopAntisemitism.
The Zionist group regularly singles out individuals in its so-called “Antisemite of the Week” feature — a public shaming tactic that critics say weaponises the fight under the pretext of antisemitism to silence political dissent, particularly around Palestinian rights.
Yet, Ms. Rachel has only leaned in further, using her platform to elevate the humanity of Palestinian children at a time when much of the Western media treated them as statistics.
According to rights advocates, her quiet defiance rattled the media establishment.
“She freaked out the entire media class,” one activist was quoted as saying about her. “Because she’s shown just how easy — and necessary — it is to humanise Palestinians. Meanwhile, mainstream outlets have spent nearly 19 months doing precisely the opposite.”
On May 12, 2025, Ms. Rachel shared a moving post introducing her followers to Rahaf, a three-year-old Palestinian girl who has become a symbol of resilience.
In August 2024, at just two years old, Rahaf lost both her legs when an Israeli airstrike destroyed her home. Her mother, Israa Saed, managed to get her to the US for medical treatment with the help of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF).
Photos in the post showed Ms. Rachel gently hugging Rahaf, both beaming. “I was so honoured to spend time with Rahaf from Gaza,” she wrote. “Rahaf is a 3-year-old double amputee who lost her legs in an airstrike. She’s absolutely adorable and the most loving, smart, playful little girl.”
In the caption, Ms. Rachel extended her empathy to Rahaf’s family, reflecting on the unimaginable pain of separation and survival.
“I imagined myself holding up the phone in the US with my daughter, now a double amputee from an airstrike, away from my son and husband in Gaza, unable to feed them and keep them safe.”
Nearly ten days later, she shared a joyful clip of herself and Rahaf singing together, both wearing matching pink headbands. “This is my friend, Rahaf, from Gaza. Meeting her and her wonderful mama changed my life,” she wrote, thanking PCRF for making the meeting possible.
“When you hear about the thousands and thousands of children killed in Gaza, do you hear a statistic or think of individual children like precious Rahaf?” she asked her audience. “When you hear about the kids being blocked from aid, do you think about sweet kids like Rahaf becoming malnourished?”
In her pointed closing lines, she made the moral stakes clear, saying, “Trying to make it controversial to speak for these children and staying silent shows that you are saying some children’s lives are more important than others. That’s anti-Palestinian racism.”
That post with Rahaf was just one of many heartfelt pleas from the YouTube children’s educator, urging the world to look, listen, and finally act. In other posts,
She also shared the story of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl whose desperate voice was heard in a haunting emergency call — her final words before being killed alone in a car by an Israeli military tank in Gaza in January 2024. That photo, too, found its way onto Ms. Rachel’s Instagram.
But Ms. Rachel hasn’t only spotlighted individual tragedies, she’s turned her feed into a bold indictment of silence. On May 27, she issued a fiery appeal to world leaders, calling out the moral collapse of those who once claimed to stand for human rights.
“Be so ashamed of silence,” she wrote. “Be so ashamed that you’ve seen the images and videos we’ve seen and they haven’t moved you to do the right thing. Be so ashamed that you normally speak out for children and human rights, but won’t now because they are Palestinian.”
Her message was filled with frustration at the indifference of those in power, and the racism she believes fuels it. She named it an “anti-Palestinian racism.”
In a separate Tuesday post, her voice turned more desperate. Holding her own newborn in a video, she pleaded with world leaders to act, echoing a United Nations warning that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza within 48 hours if Israel’s blockade wasn’t lifted.
“Please, everyone, say something for these babies. Please, leaders, say something,” she wrote, sharing images of her child and an emaciated Palestinian infant. The contrast was devastating.
And she wasn’t done. “Be so ashamed that your constituents are begging and pleading for you to speak out, and you stay silent,” she continued. “Celebrities as well. If everyone says something, it won’t be controversial anymore. It’s been wrong to say starving and bombing kids is wrong.”
