Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the news and social-media environment that has allowed antisemitism to fester, call out a laughably bad headline from CNN, and cover more media misses.
NBC Reporter’s Arrest Shows How Pervasive Pro-Hamas Support Can Be in Western Media
An East Jerusalem–based NBC journalist was arrested last week on suspicion of inciting terrorism and identifying with a terrorist organization in connection with several social-media posts she published on October 7, during the Hamas terror attacks.
Marwat Al-Azza, a freelance producer who started working with the network shortly before the war began, wrote in response to the kidnapping of an elderly woman, “It’s killing me, it’s a black comedy, the old woman looks happy, a bit of action before she dies,” Haaretz reported.
“Sirens all the time, the Jews are hiding and the Arabs are out drinking coffee on their balconies,” she wrote in another post.
“I feel like I’m watching a movie where the director is Palestinian and the protagonists are from Gaza,” another message read.
Police told the Jerusalem Magistrate Court that the posts were “inciting and glorying the horrible acts committed against civilians,” the Jerusalem Post reported. Authorities said she cooperated fully with police and admitted to writing the posts. She “arrived ready for arrest,” according to the report.
“The woman in question is an ordinary woman, who works as a journalist and whose work is important to us all,” al-Azza’s attorney said, according to the report.
“She was asked during her investigation about her employment. I believe she admitted to all the deeds described to her, and cooperated fully with the investigation. She did not attempt to conceal the offenses or claim that her accounts had been hacked. Even when she didn’t have a mobile phone, which is the main tool involved, she still said, ‘Yes, those are my posts.’”
Her last story for the outlet, which said newborns at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City were dying amid a lack of resources, was published on November 12.
NBC said in a statement to National Review that Al-Azza “will not be contributing to our coverage going forward.”
“The investigation of Ms. Azza is unrelated to NBC News. It is based on her personal Facebook posts that predate her time with us as a freelancer. We were not aware of those posts before we engaged Ms. Azza four weeks ago,” the statement added.
The arrest comes after CNN suspended ties with freelance photojournalist Hassan Eslaiah after a photo purportedly showed a top Hamas leader kissing the photographer on the cheek.
Watchdog group HonestReporting published the photo of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the October 7 massacre, kissing Eslaiah. The group reported that Eslaiah and other photojournalists were embedded with Hamas terrorists on the day they attacked Israel last month.
“We are aware of the article and photo concerning Hassan Eslaiah, a freelance photojournalist who has worked with a number of international and Israeli outlets. While we have not at this time found reason to doubt the journalistic accuracy of the work he has done for us, we have decided to suspend all ties with him,” CNN said.
And while the mainstream media has fallen short in many ways since the start of the war, TikTok has exemplified the dangers of receiving news from social-media in recent weeks.
A group of House Republicans, led by Representative Buddy Carter (R., Ga.), are calling on TikTok to be more transparent about its algorithm as antisemitism rages on the platform.
“On October 7, the Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas, brutally attacked Israel and killed more than 1,400 people. Since this terrorist attack, disinformation related to the conflict has run rampant on your platform, stoking antisemitism, support, and sympathy for Hamas,” the lawmakers wrote to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.
Perhaps the most troubling example has been a handful of viral videos lending credibility to Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” that he wrote as justification for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people and injured thousands more.
Pro-Palestinian activist Lynette Adkins told her 175,000 TikTok followers to read bin Laden’s letter, which claims the attacks were justified because “you attacked us” and “you attacked us in Palestine.”
“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read — It’s literally two pages. Go read ‘A Letter to America,” Adkins told her followers. “And please come back here and just let me know what you think because I feel like I’m going through, like, an existential crisis right now and a lot of people are, so I just need someone else to be feeling this.”
Bin Laden’s letter calls the creation of Israel “a crime which must be erased.”
“Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily,” he wrote, and suggested the U.S. had peddled “fabricated lies that Jews have a historical right to Palestine.”
He went on to claim Jews control the media, economy and policy.
Adkins, for her part, said she didn’t share the letter “to promote any form of hate or violence against anyone, nor do I agree with the extremism in it.”
“I was 3 in 2001 and was always taught 9/11 happened because other people were jealous of our democracy in the U.S.,” she said. “Now that I’m older and am able to learn about history beyond the narrative of mainstream media, I’m realizing that there is more to the story. I think we all deserve a right to access the information being presented to us & form our own conclusions without subscribing to extreme or radical ideologies.”
In another video, the TikToker claimed the platform will “save this generation.”
“The amount of things that we’ve learned on this app in this past month alone that other people in other generations I tried to talk to them about it, they don’t understand,” she said. “They don’t get it because they’ve been literally so programmed to think a certain way, TikTok is undoing all of that. It’s crazy to watch in real time.”
The Republican lawmakers noted roughly half of the app’s U.S. user base is under 25 years old and warned that “American youth are being exposed to extremely violent and disturbing images and videos.”
“This deluge of pro-Hamas content is driving hateful antisemitic rhetoric and violent protests on campuses across the country. The CCP has already co-opted your platform, and it seems TikTok and TikTok’s employees are resigned to becoming a mouthpiece for antisemites, terrorists, and propaganda,” the letter read.
The Republican lawmakers note pro-Palestinian content was more widely viewed than pro-Israel content.
A video by another TikTok user that claims “We’ve been lied to our entire lives” garnered 640,000 views even though the user has just 1,300 followers.
“I remember watching people cheer when Osama was found and killed. I was a child, and it confused me. It still confuses me today. The world deserves better than what this country has done to them. Change must be made,” the user, raeyreads, wrote.
TikTok said the videos clearly violate the platform’s rules on supporting any form of terrorism and said the content would be removed.
“The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate,” TikTok said. “This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
TikTok held a meeting with Jewish celebrities, including Sacha Baron Cohen, Debra Messing, and Amy Schumer after they signed an open letter to the platform saying it was “not safe for Jewish users.”
“The daily reality for Jewish content creators on TikTok includes death threats, endless threatening comments on posts (many just for being Jewish), and a barrage of harassment in all forms of TikTok-facilitated interaction,” the celebrities wrote. “And that was true before the massacres of Jews on October 7th. Since then, the hate directed at Jewish content creators has been compounded to unimaginable degrees. It’s relentless and, worst of all, it’s largely permitted.”
The celebrities told TikTok head of operations Adam Presser and global head of user operations Seth Melnick that the platform’s tools did not prevent a flood of comments like “Hitler was right” or “I hope you end up like Anne Frank” under videos posted by them and other Jewish users, according to the New York Times.
Cohen told Presser that TikTok could “flip a switch” to remove the antisemitic content from the platform.
“Obviously a lot of what Sacha says, there’s truth to that,” Presser said, but later added that there is no “magic button” to fix the problem.
Messing questioned executives on TikTok’s moderation of the pro-Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea.” Executives said they would ban the use of the phrase when “it is clear exactly what they mean — ‘kill the Jews, eradicate the state of Israel.’”
And U.S. students aren’t only being fed pro-Palestinian propaganda online; it has made its way into many educational institutions as well.
Arizona superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne asked school districts in the state to avoid using information from, or collaborating with, Amnesty International USA and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) education division after a club at Desert Mountain High School in Scottsdale put on a presentation that showed “one-sided propaganda in favor of Hamas terrorists,” according to Fox News.
The presentation from the club, which is affiliated with the student arms of the two organizations, called the October 7 terror attacks “retaliation” and said the Second Intifada, in which 1,038 Israelis were killed in 138 Palestinian suicide attacks, was “largely spontaneous series of Palestinian demonstrations, nonviolent actions like mass boycotts and Palestinians refusing to work jobs in Israel, and attacks (using rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms) on Israelis.”
Horne said the presentation was “profoundly antisemitic in nature.”
Headline Fail of the Week
After a pro-Palestinian protester was arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter over the death of an elderly Jewish protester, CNN seemingly took it upon itself to rid the suspect of any wrongdoing. “Arrest made in death of Jewish protester who fell and hit his head,” the outlet’s initial headline read, leaving readers to question why anyone might be arrested in the incident.
After receiving backlash, CNN updated its headline to read: “Arrest made in death of Jewish protester in California after confrontation over Israel-Hamas war.”
Witnesses say Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji allegedly struck Paul Kessler with a megaphone before the Jewish protester fell to the ground. Authorities say Alnaji caused Kessler to fall and hit his head on the concrete, leading to Kessler’s death at a hospital hours later.
It’s the second time CNN has had to quietly correct a headline about the incident. On November 7, the outlet reported: “Man in California dies after suffering head injury at pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrations.”
It was later amended to read, “Jewish man dies from head injury following ‘interaction’ with pro-Palestinian demonstrator in California, authorities say.”
Media Misses
• The View co-host Sunny Hostin accused House Speaker Mike Johnson of hypocrisy, saying, “Isn’t he the same one that had a deal with his son so that they monitor each other’s porn use?” She added, “I don’t know which chapter and verse of the Bible says that that’s okay, but I haven’t read it yet. So in terms of relying on faith, that is the height of hypocrisy – hiding on your faith to cherry-pick issues.”
She later issued an on-air correction, saying she had mischaracterized a report from Rolling Stone on the issue. “I wanted to explain something a little further. I wanted to clarify that the monitoring app that Representative Johnson and his son use is to prevent porn viewing. They are accountability partners for each other in terms of porn.” In a separate conversation about misinformation on TikTok, Hostin suggested parents should be monitoring what their children are viewing online.
• The Economist is sounding alarms about a potential Trump second-term, calling the former president the “biggest danger to the world” on its latest cover. “A second Trump term would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline,” the article warns.
NEW: The Economist’s annual “World Ahead” guide identifies Donald Trump as the biggest global danger of 2024.
“[I]n the 38 years that we have published this guide, no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024.” pic.twitter.com/2xBYJRfo8z
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) November 16, 2023
• The Los Angeles Times editorial board says it is “time for a cease-fire” in the Israel-Hamas war. It “has become impossible to distinguish between Israel’s decidedly non-surgical operation against Hamas militants in Gaza and the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians,” the board wrote.
“Remaining mindful of America’s mistakes, it is incumbent upon the Biden administration now to avoid complicity with Israel’s,” the board wrote. “We are past the time to excuse the horror in Gaza. Biden has to press Netanyahu hard to stop the mass, indiscriminate killing. That starts with a call for a cease-fire.”