Refaat Alareer, who has appeared on the BBC, ABC, and Democracy Now to discuss life in Gaza, made light of Hamas terrorists killing a baby in an oven.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look into a Palestinian scholar’s track record of antisemitism, call into question a wishy-washy headline from the AP, and cover more media misses.
Media Gives Voice to Palestinian Scholar with History of Making Antisemitic Comments
Media outlets have shown a lack of judgment in dozens of ways since the start of the Israel–Hamas War. The decision to give a platform to a Gaza professor of literature with a history of making vile antisemitic comments is perhaps among the greatest lapses in judgment.
Refaat Alareer, who has appeared on the BBC, ABC, and Democracy Now as a source of information on life in Gaza during the war, recently shared a callous response to the news that a baby was found in an oven after having been baked to death by Hamas terrorists.
“With or without baking powder?” Alareer asked in a post on X.
On that glowing NYT profile. Journalism at its finest.https://t.co/iVdiO32oIT
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) October 30, 2023
The ghastly detail was shared by Eli Beer, the founder of the volunteer-based Israeli EMS organization United Hatzalah, in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition over the weekend.
“A little baby in the oven — These bastards put these babies in the oven and put on the oven,” said Beer. “We found the kid a few hours later.”
“We saw a little baby in the oven.”
— @EliBeerUH to @RJC pic.twitter.com/MBKgrgwxRi
— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) October 30, 2023
Alareer’s decision to make light of savagery is nothing new. His antisemitism was revealed in 2021 after the New York Times wrote a highly complimentary profile about him: “In Gaza, a Contentious Palestinian Professor Calmly Teaches Israeli Poetry.”
That piece initially detailed Alareer’s teaching of the works of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and claimed he encourages his students to “empathize” with Jewish characters.
But an editor’s note was later added to the article saying the Times had “reviewed additional information that is at odds with the article’s portrayal of Refaat Alareer” and found that the “article did not accurately reflect Mr. Alareer’s views on Israeli poetry or how he teaches it.”
While a Times reporter witnessed Alareer’s lesson on a poem by Amichai in which he called the poem “beautiful” and said it underscored the “shared humanity” of Israelis and Palestinians, a video of a class from two years earlier revealed that Alareer called the poem “horrible” and “dangerous” and claimed it “brainwashes” readers by presenting the Israelis “as innocent.”
Months before the profile was published, the paper relied on Alareer to author a guest essay during an earlier eleven-day conflict between Hamas and Israel.
After the profile was published, media watchdog HonestReporting revealed that Alareer had compared Israel to Nazi Germany more than 100 times and compiled a list of his other antisemitic comments.
He claimed Zionism and Nazism are “two cheeks of the same dirty arse” and described Israeli as “nazi Germany on steriods [sic].”
In 2018, Alareer claimed that most Jews are evil, according to another media watchdog, CAMERA. He also referred to Zionists as “the most despicable filth” and called Israel “the root cause of evil,” according to the watchdog.
“All supporters of Israel would be cheering for the Nazis in the ’30s and ’40s,” Alareer said.
Among other things, Alareer has also claimed that “Hitler is as peaceful as any Israeli leader” and that the Jewish State “starves Holocaust victims and steals their money to slaughter and occupy native Palestinians.”
Alareer’s brother, Mohammed Rafiq Alareer, died in the 2014 Gaza war. According to Israel National News, Mohammed Rafiq Alareer was featured in a martyr video produced by the military wing of Hamas, which seemed to suggest he served as a terror-operative combatant. He was also an actor who appeared on a Hamas TV program, Tomorrow’s Pioneers. He played a giant bee that taught young children to “shoot all Jews.”
Despite his own checkered past, Refaat Alareer served as a guest speaker at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival hosted by the University of Pennsylvania last month and has been featured as a media pundit to weigh in on the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
On October 10, Alareer appeared on the BBC and claimed that Hamas had acted in a “legitimate and moral” manner.
“This is exactly like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is the Gaza ghetto uprising against 100 years of European and Zionist colonialism and occupation,” Alareer said, likening the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians to a Jewish uprising against the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.
He said the terrorist attacks, which killed 1,400 Israelis, were an act of “Palestinian resistance.”
The BBC later expressed regret for airing the interview.
“While an interviewee, who made comments on the Warsaw Ghetto, was robustly challenged on air, we agree his comments were offensive and we don’t intend to use him again,” the BBC told a British newspaper.
On the same day of the BBC interview, Alareer also appeared on Democracy Now, where he was invited to discuss the “conditions inside the besieged territory.”
“We are dealing with a systematic, structural, colonial attempt to annihilate and exterminate the Palestinians, with the aid and support of the West and American tax money. America is sending $8 billion. This is really insane. America is also sending warships and bombs and bullets for Israel to kill more and more Palestinians,” he claimed.
One week later, he was invited to appear on ABC to “break down how he has been impacted by” the explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
Meanwhile, President Biden reportedly criticized the New York Times during a private meeting with Wall Street executives at the White House last week over its own coverage of the hospital blast, Semafor reported. The Times’ initial reporting on the blast relied on Hamas’s claim that an Israeli airstrike had hit the hospital. The Times later published an editor’s note acknowledging that the paper “should have taken more care with the initial presentation” of the coverage of the explosion. Biden said the paper’s headline was irresponsible and suggested its coverage could have triggered military escalation in the Middle East, according to the report.
Biden has made clear that Israel was not to blame for the blast, which U.S. officials say killed between 100 and 300 people. The Israel Defense Forces have said the explosion was caused by a rocket misfire launched by Islamic Jihad, a conclusion that’s since been confirmed by video analyses conducted by the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN. However, the Times then published a report that raised questions about Biden’s claim.
Headline Fail of the Week
“Crowd storms Russian airport to protest flight from Israel” is how the Associated Press chose to describe an antisemitic mob rushing an airport in Russia.
But what the story describes was far from a protest.
“Hundreds of people stormed into the main airport in Russia’s Dagestan region and rushed onto the landing field, chanting antisemitic slogans and seeking passengers arriving on a flight from the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, Russian news agencies and social media reported,” the story begins.
CNN more accurately reported: “Antisemitic mob storms through Russian airport as flight from Tel Aviv lands”
Media Misses
• MSNBC host Jen Psaki claimed the new House speaker, Mike Johnson, is “far from benign.” “It’s not just his political ideology that should scare us,” she wrote. “Johnson is basically a Christian fundamentalist.”
• Bill Maher, meanwhile, compared Johnson to the gunman who killed 18 people and injured 13 others in Maine last week.
When you’re this much of a religious fanatic, there is no room for real democracy. That’s not what you believe in. He said it today. “Look in the Bible. That’s my worldview.” And I was reading about this horrible shooting in Maine. And, you know, we don’t know much about the guy yet, but apparently he heard voices and I thought “Is he that different than Mike Johnson?” I mean, degree? Yes. But it’s thinner than you’d think.
• Spanish HuffPost published a graphic likening the conditions in Gaza to the Auschwitz death camp.
Congratulations, Huffington Post.
You’ve perfected Holocaust trivialization. pic.twitter.com/cBaxh4yRgH
— Yoni Michanie (@YoniMichanie) October 29, 2023
• Editors at the Yale Daily News added a “correction” to a column by former NR intern Sahar Tartak that mentioned Hamas’s raping of women and beheading of men. The correction said the claims are “unsubstantiated.”
At the end of a column by @sahar_tartak, editors at @yaledailynews affixed a “correction,” saying claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men are “unsubstantiated.” @Yale’s student newspaper is running cover for Hamas. https://t.co/NPIrIXcdqf pic.twitter.com/6YopEnG50X
— Zach Kessel (@zach_kessel) October 30, 2023