Episode No. 134--The Media and anti-Semitism

The media are helping to stoke worldwide anti-Semitism in the way they report the war Israel is fighting with Gaza. Why? Well, consider these two facts: The New York Times rehired an avowed Jew-hating, Hamas-loving avowed fan of Adolf Hitler to cover the war from Gaza. And it was just revealed that journalists the major media rely on for their coverage not only may have had advanced knowledge of the June 7th horror (and so could have warned Israel in time to prevent it) but actually went into Israel with the Hamas murderers. There's lots more, and though this is long (about 32 minutes), it's well worth listening to.

Transcript

Welcome to Keep the Faith, the usually bi-weekly podcast in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition. I said “usually bi-weekly” because my next podcast will appear in four weeks, barring unusual circumstances. I need a little break.

Also, we’re going to run for over a half-hour this week. I was going to discuss the history of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. I’m recording this on Thursday, the 85th anniversary of that pre-cursor to the Holocaust, the Shoah.

I had to change topics, though. The issue I’ll be discussing is too important to give short-shrift to, as I hope you’ll agree after listening to it. As to why you should listen to it, consider what I’m about to say:

The media’s reporting on the war Israel is fighting against Hamas has been deliberately skewed to paint Israel as the aggressor, not the victim. Just the other day, a former Labour member of Britain’s parliament, Chris Williamson, told a television interviewer that QUOTE Israel is behaving worse than Nazis. UNQUOTE

Normally, we can dismiss anything Williamson says regarding Israel because he’s long been considered to be anti-Semitic—the Labour Party has even suspended him a number of times because of it. His description, however, resonates with people around the world because of the war footage they see on television and the accounts they read in newspapers—reporting that has been deliberately skewed to paint Israel as the aggressor, not the victim. And now we know one reason why that is: The media are relying on reporting they get from so-called reporters who side with Hamas and oppose the existence of the State of Israel.

On Wednesday afternoon, the website HonestReporting revealed that journalists and photographers working for some of our most major news outlets—including the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, and even The New York Times—not only knew what Hamas was planning for October 7th, some of them, at least, actually went along with Hamas when it infiltrated Israel on that very black day in Jewish history.

Here’s how HonestReporting’s explosive revelation began:

QUOTE On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.

“What were they doing there [at the border between Israel and Gaza] so early on what would ordinarily have been a quiet Saturday morning? Was it coordinated with Hamas? Did the respectable wire services, which published their photos, approve of their presence inside enemy territory, together with the terrorist infiltrators? Did the photojournalists who freelance for other media, like CNN and The New York Times, notify these outlets? UNQUOTE

The media’s role in the worldwide explosion of Jew hatred was the topic of a sermon I delivered last Shabbat, which I distributed last Saturday evening. It was also the topic of my column in this week’s Jewish Standard and in next week’s Long Island Jewish World.

As this revelation by HonestReporting shows, though, there’s so much more to discuss—and not just about the very likely possibility that journalists working for major news outlets could have warned Israel of what Hamas was planning but didn’t because they support the abominable atrocities Hamas commits.

They deliberately skew their reporting in order to make Israel look “worse than Nazis,” to quote Williamson, and the media that hire them should know that.

In a way, we already knew that because of something that happened just five days after October 7th, a day on which more Jews were killed in a single day than on any other day since the Shoah. On October 12th,  the New York Times knowingly hired a Jew-hating someone who lives in Gaza to cover the war there, someone who has made no secret of his love for—wait for it—Adolf Hitler.

Actually, re-hired is more accurate because the person in question, the video-journalist Soliman Hijee, worked for the self-proclaimed newspaper of record for several years. The Times fired him in 2022 after HonestReporting revealed his love for Hitler, only to rehire him on October 12th.

In 2012, for example, Hijee praised Hitler on a Facebook post, writing: QUOTE How great you are, Hitler. UNQUOTE

In 2018, Hijee posted a photo of himself together with these words: QUOTE in a state of harmony as Hitler was during the Holocaust. UNQUOTE

This Jew-hater Hitler-loving man is the person the New York Times hired to cover the Jewish state’s war with Hamas just five days after the worst Jewish day since Hitler managed to kill six million Jews.

Hijee is also on record as saying that Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel are a proper response to what he calls QUOTE the crimes of the Zionist occupation in Jerusalem. UNQUOTE He also tends to refer to Hamas not as a terrorist organization but as a QUOTE resistance [movement]. UNQUOTE

As Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., tweeted on X, the former Twitter, QUOTE The @nytimes has just rehired a NAZI. Let that sink in. Soliman Hijee praises Hitler, and the NYT rehired him. UNQUOTE

There’s a lot more that needs to sink in, though, as the latest HonestReporting revelation shows, and so the topic for this week is: How the media help stoke Jew-hatred here and around the world.

One news account, more than any other since Hamas’ October 7th attack, set off the powder keg of Jew-hatred worldwide.

On October 17th, The New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, The Associated Press, and so many other media outlets, all of whom rely heavily on some of the same so-called journalists who went along with Hamas on October 7th, at least in part, jumped oh so quickly on the story that Israel had just bombed the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, killing over 500 people. The number climbed to as many 800 dead over the course of that day.

A reporter on BBC television, for example, did report that Israel denied having bombed the hospital and that it claimed that the damage was caused by a rocket fired by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, but then this BBC reporter insisted that it could only have been an Israeli airstrike. As he told viewers, QUOTE it is hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes. UNQUOTE

The reporter, who is not a Muslim by the way, added that in his experience as a reporter in Gaza, he had never seen explosions of such a ferocious magnitude caused by rockets being fired out of Gaza.

There were two problems with this. First, there was no such huge explosion. Second, the hospital building wasn’t even hit. There was just a small crater in a parking lot. While it did cause considerable damage there, it was the kind of damage a rocket would make, not a bomb, which almost certainly would have leveled the building.

The early reporting immediately set off riots in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Tunisia, and in Ramallah on the West Bank.

It also forced an awkward change of plans for President Biden, who was boarding Air Force One for his trip to the region when the story broke. Biden was scheduled to travel from Israel to Jordan, there to meet with King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas. His plane was hardly off the ground when the three Arab leaders canceled their meeting with him to protest U.S. support for Israel because, they said, it enabled Israel to bomb the hospital.

Israel, of course, was telling the truth and even provided visual and audio evidence to back up that truth, but the media took a long time to correct its reporting—and by then it was too late.

The New York Times, for example, retracted its story on Monday, October 23rd.

Here’s an edited excerpt:

QUOTE On October 17, The New York Times published news of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City, leading its coverage with claims by Hamas government officials that an Israeli airstrike was the cause, and that hundreds of people were dead or injured. The report included a large headline at the top of the paper’s website. [It read: ‘Israeli strike kills hundreds in hospital, Palestinians say.’] Israel subsequently denied being at fault and blamed an errant rocket launch by the Palestinian faction group Islamic Jihad….American and other international officials have said their evidence [also] indicates that the rocket came from Palestinian fighter positions….

“[T]he early versions of the coverage—and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert, and social media channels—relied too heavily on claims by Hamas and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified. The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was….Times editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation and been more explicit about what information could be verified. UNQUOTE

The original story, by the way, was front-page news and so it was not something readers would miss seeing. The retraction, though, didn’t get the same play. It appeared on Page 15 of the paper’s first section, something many readers very likely would miss seeing.

Alison Leigh Cowan spent much of her career as a reporter and editor for the New York Times. She currently serves on the board of the School for Ethics and Global Leadership in Washington, D.C. In an article on the Commentary website the day after the Times issued its retraction, she reacted to Soliman Hijee’s rehiring and to the Times retraction of the hospital story. Here are some of the things she said, albeit in edited form.

She began by saying that QUOTE the paper of record callously and somewhat blithely committed at least two grave journalistic errors in relation to Israel and Gaza.  One, the hiring of an avowed Hitler-worshipper to cover a Middle East hotspot….The other, propping up propaganda that blamed Israel for last week’s deaths at a Gazan hospital, kept smears online for six days, unfixed, un-apologized for, unexamined and largely uncorrected…. UNQUOTE

She added that the newspaper’s QUOTE brazen self-assuredness and moral blindness in moments like these is breaking my heart. UNQUOTE

Regarding Hijee, she said, nothing could QUOTE justify re-hiring someone to help cover a sensitive part of the Middle East…who has extolled Hitler more than once on social media…, but the paper has brought him back into the fold…. UNQUOTE The rehiring, she wrote, QUOTE is evidence of an elementary lack of standards…. UNQUOTE at the New York Times.

She then turned her attention to how the hospital story was reported which, she wrote QUOTE morphed quickly into something that, in itself, seemed all too capable of inciting another world war…. UNQUOTE

She explained that comment this way. It’s a long quote but bear with me. Because of how the story was reported: QUOTE Iran and other provocateurs, inflamed by the mounting reports of a ‘massacre’ and ‘carnage’ at a Palestinian hospital—words the Times repeated over and over that day—then called for an unprecedented ‘day of rage’ as a show of protest. Embassies had to be locked down.  An historic synagogue in Tunisia was torched, and Harvard students led another protest against Israel ostensibly for killing what their organizers now claimed was 800 people at a hospital without mercy….

“The New York Times…had always recoiled from the use of what it called ‘loaded’ language that hyped facts or encouraged readers to prejudge one party or another….Yet, in this case, the paper’s updates had no qualms issuing a steady drumbeat of words characterizing the ‘attack’ as ‘staggering,’ ‘horrific’ and ‘devastating,’ and a possible act of ‘genocide,’ [all words that were used in the Times’ coverage that day].

“As many of us now know, the story was ass-backwards….More neutral language could have been deployed at the outset until the fog of war lifted, especially since there were ample hints in plain sight that journalists needed to proceed with caution on this one. To my dismay…, [the Times clung] to the narrative that the Israeli military was behind the slaughter….

“Pretty soon, I felt like I was watching a modern-day blood libel take shape before my eyes. Despite the [retraction] the paper finally posted six days after the blast…, I remain fearful that much of what the paper of record published in the blast’s blurry aftermath, continuing to point blame in Israel’s direction for the hospital’s dead, will live on in the narratives and [in the] lies that have been used throughout history to justify hatred towards the Jews. UNQUOTE

Those aren’t my words. They’re the words of a 27-year veteran New York Times reporter and editor who said the Times was breaking her heart.

We keep hearing about the extraordinary number of Palestinian deaths Israel has caused. These numbers come from the Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, and dutifully reported by those questionable journalists the media are relying on. That the figures come from the Gaza Health Ministry alone should cause the media to be cautious in reporting those figures. As President Biden said, QUOTE I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war….I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using. UNQUOTE

He has no confidence in those numbers, and neither should anyone else, and especially the media.

That statement, though, troubled the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, considered an expert on the Middle East—and no, he’s not Jewish. Since 2011, he’s been editor and chief writer of the Washington Post's The Fact Checker feature.

He did acknowledge the role the Gaza Health Ministry’s daily death count had caused by helping to stir anti-Israel protests around the world, but he then went to great lengths to make a case for why those numbers were accurate, including this morsel: QUOTE The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tracks deaths in the conflict, has found the ministry’s numbers to be reliable after conducting its own investigation….The Gaza Health Ministry has had a pretty good track record with its death estimates over the years, notwithstanding that it is part of the Hamas-run government, and Biden is in a position to know that….But he swept away all the numbers as not credible. That’s his opinion—but it’s remarkably uninformed by history and precedent. UNQUOTE

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs didn’t actually say that the way Kessler characterized it. Here’s what it did say: QUOTE Past experience indicated that tolls were reported with high accuracy. UNQUOTE

It said “past experience” and “were reported,” not “current experience” and “are reported.”

There was another quote from the U.N., though, that the Washington Post’s in-house fact checker didn’t cite. The U.N. admits that it can’t corroborate the numbers the Gaza Health Ministry is handing out. The U.N. says that it has QUOTE not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures UNQUOTE. Accurate figures, it says, must QUOTE await further verification. UNQUOTE

Yet media outlet after media outlet continues to report these numbers without the slightest qualification and many do what Kessler did—they claim that the U.N. stands behind those numbers, even though it says it does not.

Even those numbers, though, should alert the media to avoid quoting without context the claims by Hamas and others that Israel is indiscriminately bombing civilian sites in Gaza in order to kill as many civilians as possible.

Former Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger is a U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel. He flew missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He served in the Air Force Special Operations Command, the Air Combat Command, the Air Mobility Command, and he still serves in the Wisconsin Air National Guard. Even though he was a member of Congress by then, Kinzinger flew missions in 2019 as part of an effort to maintain security at the U.S.-Mexican border.

In other words, Adam Kinzinger knows all about what happens when a plane drops a bomb on a target. 

Here’s what he said last week on The View:

QUOTE When…I hear people say that Israel is indiscriminately bombing, they’ve dropped, let’s say, 5,000 bombs. If you drop 5,000 bombs indiscriminately, you would have massive casualties everywhere. UNQUOTE

The number, Kinzinger said, QUOTE [would] be about 200,000 dead right now in Gaza, UNQUOTE not the 10,000 or so Gazan health officials say have been killed so far.

These numbers, Kinzinger said, show that the Israelis are QUOTE attempting to do the best they can to minimize collateral damage, UNQUOTE but you don’t often see comments like his in the media’s reporting.

Demonstrations, some of which are violent, are held all over the world—including even on college campuses here—charging Israel with war crimes and genocide because the media reports uncritically and without context every word that comes out of terrorist mouths or their press releases. By doing so, they help paint Israel as the aggressor and the terrorists as Israel’s victims whose actions against Israel are justified.

A Harvard Center for American Political Studies-Harris poll of American voters that was conducted in the wake of October 7th found that just under 50 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 34 believe that Hamas’ attacks were QUOTE justified by the grievance of Palestinians. UNQUOTE  Overall, just under one out of every four American voters believed that.

Reporting these numbers as accurate and verified has helped turn the October 7th massacre into a justified act by freedom fighters trying to throw off the shackles of their occupiers. I’ll get to that fraud further on.

The media use words like war crimes and genocide all too often, and they even quote military experts to back up the claims the terrorists make. What the media don’t often do, though, is to quote what other military experts have to say, probably because it doesn’t fit into the picture they’re painting.

Here’s one example. John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute. He also codirects its Urban Warfare Project and hosts something called the “Urban Warfare Project Podcast.” He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He’s also the co-author of the book “Understanding Urban Warfare.”

In other words, his urban warfare credentials are impeccable.

As he put it on Tuesday in an opinion piece published on CNN’s website, no less, QUOTE All war is hell. UNQUOTE He then added that civilians historically QUOTE are inordinately the innocent victims of wars. UNQUOTE “Noncombatants, he wrote, QUOTE have accounted for 90 percent of casualties…in the modern wars that have occurred in populated urban areas…, even when a Western power like the United States is leading or supporting the campaign. UNQUOTE

Such destruction and suffering, however, QUOTE don’t automatically constitute war crimes—otherwise, nearly any military action in a populated area would violate the laws of armed conflict….

“Hamas forces indisputably violated multiple laws of war on October 7 in taking Israelis hostage and raping, torturing, and directly targeting civilians, as well as continuing to attack Israeli population centers with rockets. Years of intelligence assessments and media reports have shown that Hamas also commits war crimes by using human shields for its weapons and command centers and by purposely putting military capabilities in protected sites like hospitals, mosques, and schools. UNQUOTE

And then he wrote this, and it’s another long quote:

“On the other hand, nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza….[U]nder international law, Israel needs no permission to enter the territory and resort to using force in order to wage defensive operations because Israel’s right to immediate and unilateral self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter is universally recognized….

“When Hamas uses a hospital, school, or mosque for military purpose, it can lose its protected status and become a legal military target. Israel must still make all feasible attempts to get as many civilians out of the site as possible, but the sites don’t need to be clear of civilians before being attacked. UNQUOTE

Very significantly, Spencer also wrote this: QUOTE So far, I have seen the IDF implementing—and in some cases going beyond—many of the best practices developed to minimize the harm to civilians in similar large-scale urban battles. These IDF practices include calling everyone in a building to alert them of a pending air strike and giving them time to evacuate—a tactic I’ve never seen elsewhere in my decades of experience…. UNQUOTE

To repeat, Spencer is an urban warfare expert at no less an institution than the United States Military Academy at West Point. But you don’t see or hear him quoted in many news reports. All too often, only those experts who insist Israel is guilty of war crimes are quoted.

You also don’t often see anecdotal support being offered for what Spencer said, either. On Wednesday, the National Review did offer such support when it reported that QUOTE Israeli intelligence officials called Mahmoud Shaheen, a dentist in Gaza, late last month and spent several hours walking him through the evacuation of several apartment buildings that were later struck by the air force. UNQUOTE

The IDF didn’t just do a robocall to warn of an impending attack. It spent several hours on the phone walking this Gaza dentist through everything he needed to help him get civilians in his building to safety—several hours.

That was in the National Review, but don’t expect it to find its way into The New York Times or The Washington Post.

Look, words matter. I’ve said this so many times on these podcasts. The Talmud even teaches us that words can kill. Twenty-eight years ago last Saturday, words spoken by radical rabbis in Israel caused Yigal Amir to put a bullet through the head of the late Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin—and what a much different, even peaceful Middle East we might be seeing today if that murder hadn’t happened.

Words matter. As Alison Leigh Cowan put it, words can serve as loaded language that hype facts or encourage readers to prejudge one party or another.

The media call Hamas a militant organization, but by calling Hamas that, the media put Hamas on a par with other organizations the media called militant such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement, or Nelson Mandella’s anti-apartheid movement.

Hamas is a terrorist group. Hamas cares nothing for the sanctity of human life. In fact, Hamas leaders brag about killing people indiscriminately, including its own Palestinian people.

The words “occupied” and “occupier” all too often appear in media reports of the current war, referring to Israel. As I’ve shown, those words are used by Hamas to justify its bloodthirsty actions. The media dutifully quote those words without bothering to mention that Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 2005, or that Hamas is the occupier and has been for 18 years, and that as an occupier it has done virtually nothing to improve the lives of Gaza’s citizens, or to provide protection for them to keep them safe from Israeli bombing raids that inevitably follow Hamas’ rocket attacks on Israel.

Words matter. Context matters.

Much is made, as well, of the fact that Israel refuses to make peace with the Palestinians and to give them a state of their own, which is supposed to validate Hamas as being freedom fighters and its actions as justified. Only rarely do media reports point out that Israel offered the late Yasir Arafat a Palestinian state in 2020 and that not only did he refuse the offer, he launched the bloody so-called Second Intifada. As Hilary Clinton pointed out on the View on Wednesday, there could have been a Palestinian state in existence for the last 23 years, but Arafat chose violence instead. That violence radicalized many Israelis to the point that its current government is the most right-wing imaginable.

What almost no one ever points out is that there could have been a Palestinian state all the way back in 1949. The U.N. on November 29, 1947, voted to create two states living side by side—a Palestinian Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state—but seven Arab states invaded the entire area, with Jordan occupying the West Bank, Egypt the Gaza Strip, and Syria the Golan Heights.

Israel defeated the invaders, an armistice was signed in 1949, and Jordan, Egypt, and Syria took control of the territory that was meant for the Palestinian Arab state—a state they refused to let be born.

When crowds of protestors demand that Israel free Palestine, most of them have no clue about what they’re talking about because the media choose to use “loaded” words while omitting context that puts it all in perspective.

Those protestors probably never even heard of the Three No’s that the Arab League issued after the June 1967 war in which Israel took control of the territories seized in 1949 by Jordan, Egypt, and Syria—a policy that stood in place up to the 1990s: QUOTE No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. UNQUOTE

The images the world sees give the Jew-haters the excuse to bring their long-dormant anti-Semitism out into the mainstream, attracting so many others who cringe at the brutality of Israel’s war—a brutality they don’t understand because the media they depend on failed to educate them about the truth.

One reason the media fail to do so is because of the words they use. Another reason, as we’ve just seen thanks to HonestReporting’s revelation, is that they hire as reporters people who are biased against Israel and who support terrorists and terrorism.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I hope you come back for my next podcast, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.o-r-g—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email,  please.

My next podcast, as I mentioned earlier, will be in four weeks, unless circumstances in the news get in the way. Thanksgiving is in two weeks from today and I’m taking some time off.

If you don’t get the Jewish Standard but want to read my columns, go to the columns page of my website. My latest column, as I said, is another take on the media’s role in promoting global anti-Semitism.

Shabbat Shalom, stay healthy, keep wearing N95 masks in crowded areas no matter who tells you otherwise, and, above all, stay safe.