Those who work at the fact-checking websites like to portray themselves as the heroic defenders of civilization against the barbarians at the gate who come armed with misinformation and seek to destroy it. Therefore, it was rather interesting on Friday when Snopes’s Nuir Ibrahim sought to reassure all of the Israel haters on the internet that Dolly Parton did not, in fact, donate books to Israeli children.
Ibrahim is the kind of fact-checker who in her previous life worked for Al-Jazeera and who, less than a week after October 7, was writing articles claiming that talking about Hamas beheading babies was Islamophobic.
Now, after Parton’s death, Ibrahim recalled, “An online debate ensued on X about whether Parton had donated books to Israeli children, part of a broader discourse about her alleged views on the state of Israel. Some posts claimed Parton worked with PJ Library (archived), an organization that sends free books to Jewish children worldwide, including children in Israel.”
She added, “One X user wrote: "People accusing Dolly of being evil because she MAYBE donated books to some Israeli children?"
As of the publication of this article, that X user has a mere 749 followers. The other X user Ibraham linked to has only 150 followers and has a picture of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei as his header.
Nevertheless, Ibrahim reassured the Israel haters that they can still be Parton fans, “There is no evidence the Imagination Library has ever operated in Israel. According to its website, the organization operates only in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland and Australia. In 2022, the Library announced it would provide free books each month to 200 refugee children in London until they turn 5.”
Much of the rest of the article was focused on differentiating Parton’s Imagination Library from PJ Library, and so while Ibrahim is correct to say that Parton’s organization didn’t donate books to children in Israel, the question is why did Snopes feel the need to clarify that some nobody on the internet was wrong?
I’ll explain it like you’re 5: “Dolly Parton donated books to Israel” would only be a statement worth debunking if its untruth was somehow harmful. The framing of “don’t worry folks, she didn’t do it and you can keep loving her” is the problem. https://t.co/y1WZxa07SX
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) September 1, 2026
If someone claimed that Parton donated books to Palestinian children, would Ibrahim still have fact-checked it? Probably not, because she wouldn’t view that as problematic.
