The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association urged members to avoid using ‘unprovoked attack’ to describe the brutal murder of civilians.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we round up disappointing reactions to the atrocities in Israel, look at a misleading CNN headline, and cover more media misses.
Media, Democrats Show Their Bias on Israel
The news coming out of Israel this weekend has been undeniably brutal. At least 900 Israelis were killed and thousands more injured when Hamas terrorists rampaged through communities along Israel’s border with Gaza, raping and torturing civilians and abducting women, children, and elderly people.
A horrifying scene played out at a desert music festival by the Gaza border over the weekend when terrorists descended on the party and murdered and brutalized hundreds of young Israelis. Israel’s search and rescue team has recovered 260 bodies from the site.
One survivor of the massacre at the festival told Tablet Magazine about having seen “bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated. Of scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point-blank. Of cars, perforated by bullets or blown up by grenades.”
“Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies,” another survivor told the magazine.
“Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs,” the report notes.
Nine U.S. citizens were killed in Hamas’s attacks and more are believed to have been taken hostage, according to the State Department.
And despite the tragedy being referred to by some as the equivalent of Israel’s own September 11 terrorist attacks, some news outlets and politicians cannot stop bending over backward to blame Israel for the tragedy.
The New York Times responded to the devastating attack on Saturday with an article from Middle East correspondent Raja Abdulrahim titled, “Gaza Has Suffered Under 16-Year Blockade.”
“For some Gazans, Saturday morning’s surprise Palestinian attack into southern Israel seemed a justified response to a 16-year Israeli blockade,” the story from the Jerusalem-based correspondent begins.
Abdulrahim’s article includes no mention of the decades of terrorist activity orchestrated out of Gaza that led to the blockade.
And the following day, the front-page coverage of the attacks mentioned the word “terror” just once — in a reference to Palestinian children being terrified:
1/ After likely the largest atrocity against Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, the @nytimes front page—which talks of an "assault" by "militants" whose "gunmen" infiltrated Israel—does use a "terror" word once.
Only, it's in reference to *Palestinians* being terrified. pic.twitter.com/Pl12ibSODm
— Gilead Ini (@GileadIni) October 8, 2023
MSNBC host Ali Velshi urged people to consider the “context” behind the attacks, including the “inhumane treatment” Israel has inflicted upon Palestine.
During a discussion with Palestinian analyst Nour Odeh, Velshi said the attack had not come “out of the blue” and was the result of Israelis “harassing” Palestinians.
Odeh said in recent years there has been a “record number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli occupation forces, a record number of Palestinian homes demolished by Israel, a record number of Israeli settler attacks against Palestinian villages where homes and businesses were set on fire, where Palestinians were injured or killed by armed Israelis.”
“And to think that all of that wouldn’t have consequences, or wouldn’t have a reaction from the Palestinians, all Palestinians, was delusional,” she said.
MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin separately claimed that Hamas terrorism is “ultimately the end result” of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “ignoring” Palestinians.
“Hamas is saying, ‘Well, if nobody is able to defend what is happening for Palestinians in the West Bank, or in East Jerusalem, with the home demolitions, the arrests, the children being killed, the desecration of holy sites . . . then we only have the ability to do it with military might and crude weapons,’” Mohyeldin said.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday and blasted the network for legitimizing barbarism by calling Hamas terrorists “militants” or “fighters.”
“I am angry with a world that allowed the dehumanization of Israelis and sanitized the terrorism of Hamas,” Greenblatt said. “I must say, I love this show, and I love this network, but I’ve got to ask: Who’s writing the scripts? Hamas — the people who did this — they are not fighters, they are not militants, and I’m looking right at the camera. They are terrorists.”
“It is a barbarian who rapes and brutalizes women, who kills children in front of their parents, and then brings them over to Gaza,” Greenblatt added. “These aren’t just reports — these [attacks] were filmed gleefully by the barbarians who committed these grotesque crimes. They filmed, for example, an elderly woman in her home, in one of these towns. They burned her alive in her house because she was too infirm to take out.”
Meanwhile, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association urged reporters to “remember the broader context of Palestinian-Israeli relations and how they tie into the events you’re currently covering.”
“All reporting should take into consideration that, according to international law and consensus, Israel occupies Palestinian territory, and that Palestinians — whether they live in the West Bank, Gaza or inside the internationally recognized borders of Israel — are subject to an unjust and unequal system, as documented by international organizations like Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem,” the guidance added. It went on to suggest journalists avoid terms such as “unprovoked attack,” that “often ignore prior events.”
The association also suggests avoiding “both sides” framing, in favor of recognizing the “power imbalance between Israel and the Palestinian people.”
NJ.com took its reporting one step beyond “both sides,” opting instead to ignore the Israelis’ plight altogether: “N.J. Palestinians watch, wait in fear as Gaza dissolves into conflict.”
The Washington Post, meanwhile, offered up this report about Israel’s declaration of war: “Israel formally declares war against Hamas as hundreds killed on both sides.”
Conservative journalist Megyn Kelly kindly offered the paper a revision: “How about: ‘Hamas Terrorists Murder, Kidnap Hundreds of Innocents in Unprovoked Attack; Israel Acknowledges: It’s War’”
Vox senior foreign-policy writer Jonathan Guyer wrote an article for the site that suggested “This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere” and claimed it took “Hamas’s deadly attack . . . to remind Israel, the United States, the world that Palestine still matters.”
Writer Najma Sharif, whose byline has appeared in NBC and Teen Vogue, faced widespread backlash over her post on X asking, “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? Losers.”
Left-wing journalist Rivkah Brown of Novara Media callously suggested the day of the attack “should be a day of celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide.”
“The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it,” she said.
Former director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth took issue with a White House statement regarding the “terrorist attacks against Israel.”
“It is not helpful to use the term ‘terrorism’ in a war when the White House only ever applies it to one side. Better to remind both Hamas and the Israeli government that humanitarian law makes it a war crime to target or indiscriminately fire on civilians,” Roth wrote in a post on X.
The Biden administration had its own share of much-criticized responses.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken deleted a post on X in which he said he encouraged Turkey to advocate for a “cease-fire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas immediately.”
U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs posted and later deleted a message that read, “We unequivocally condemn the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred. We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”
And the progressive “Squad” offered up their own predictably bad takes.
Representative Cori Bush (D., Mo.) said she was “heartbroken by the ongoing violence in Palestine and Israeli” and was mourning “the over 250 Israeli and 230 Palestinian lives that have been lost today.”
“I strongly condemn the targeting of civilians and I urge an immediate ceasefire and de-escalation to prevent further loss of life,” she added. “As part of achieving a just and lasting peace, we must do our part to stop this violence and trauma by ending U.S. government support for Israeli military occupation and apartheid.”
Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) said in a statement to Detroit News that a path to a future where everyone can live in peace “must include lifting the blockade, ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.”
“As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue,” she said.
Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) called for prayers for the people of Gaza, which “doesn’t have shelters or an iron dome.”
“May peace prevail in the region and move us towards a moral awakening to care about the human suffering we are seeing. Palestinians are human beings who have been in besieged and are deserving of protection from the international community,” she said.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer tweeted an unusually vague statement. “I have been in touch with communities impacted by what’s happening in the region. It is abhorrent. My heart is with all those impacted. We need peace in this region,” she said.
After receiving backlash, she shared a second message that actually identified the “region” she was talking about. “The images that continue to come out of Israeli on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War are devastating. The loss of lives in Israel — children and families — is absolutely heartbreaking and appalling. There is no justification for violence against Israel. My support is steadfast,” she said.
Thirty-one Harvard University student groups signed a statement explicitly blaming Israel for the atrocities it has experienced in recent days.
“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” the groups wrote. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison . . . the apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.”
“The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation,” the statement concluded. “We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”
Student groups that signed onto the statement include the Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Palestine Caucus, and Harvard South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research, as well as the African American Resistance Organization, Amnesty International at Harvard, and the Harvard Islamic Society.
The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America held a rally in Times Square on Sunday “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.”
NR’s Caroline Downey reported protesters chanted “Zionism has got to go” and “Long live the intifada.” Posters carried by protesters read, ““Resistance is justified when people are occupied,” “Zionism is genocide,” “End all U.S. aid to apartheid Israel.” “By any means necessary” and “Glory to our martyrs.”
To his credit, Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres of New York decried the protest in a post on X: “The DSA refers to ‘75 years of occupation.’ For the DSA, the occupation is Israel itself. Ending the occupation means ending Israel — the home of the world’s largest Jewish population. DSA has been so normalized within New York politics that it will pay no price at all for its genocidal celebration of Israel’s destruction in the wake of Israel’s deadliest terrorist attack. A sign of how far my beloved New York has fallen.”
Pro-Palestinian crowd cheers after speaker praises Hamas’ invasion into Israel and the number of rockets that were fired. pic.twitter.com/x9AhCUoj9L
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) October 8, 2023
Headline Fail of the Week
CNN ran with a study commissioned by the British charity Words Matter last week, claiming in an article, “Parents shouting at children can be as harmful as sexual or physical abuse, study finds.”
“Parents, teachers, coaches and other adults shouting at, denigrating or verbally threatening children can be as damaging to their development as sexual or physical abuse, a new study finds,” the article reads.
The study was published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect and involved the review of 166 earlier studies.
While child maltreatment is currently classed into four categories — physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect — the study’s authors advocate for creating another category specifically for verbal abuse.
Media Misses
- Wired retracted an op-ed about “How Google alters search queries to get at your wallet.” The op-ed claimed that Google “likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations” and that, among those variations, were changes to search to generate results that would create the most money for the search engine. But the site has since taken down the op-ed and explained in an editor’s note that careful review of the piece along with the review of “relevant materials provided to use following its publication” led the Wired editorial leadership to determine that the story “does not meet our editorial standards.”
- The Washington Post was forced to issue a double correction last week after having initially reported that Representative Mark Takano of California was a Democrat. A correction was added to the article explaining that the lawmaker is in fact of Republican. However, the paper was later forced to correct its correction after discovering the lawmaker was in fact a Democrat all along.
This Washington Post correction needs a correction. (Takano is a Democrat) pic.twitter.com/pg6KNNalXs
— Jessica Taylor (@JessicaTaylor) October 4, 2023
- The Washington Post performed a bit of service journalism last week by bringing to light the “violent history” of “fall’s favorite spice blend” — pumpkin spice. The groundbreaking report details how the Dutch invasion of the Banda Islands in 1621, in which “thousands were killed, others enslaved, and many who fled to the mountains were starved out,” is part of the history of nutmeg, which is used in pumpkin-spice seasoning blends.