The death of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and other Palestinians who also falsely claimed to be journalists is being portrayed in much of the international media as just the latest in a long list of atrocities committed by Israel. It’s not as important a talking point in the arsenal of the Jewish state’s foes as their claims that Israel deliberately starves Palestinian civilians. But the assertion that the Israel Defense Force targets journalists to silence coverage of their wrongdoing is nonetheless an essential part of their argument that a “genocide” is being perpetrated in the Gaza Strip.
That’s why the debate about al-Sharif, whose membership in Hamas’s military forces was amply documented in files captured by the IDF during the war in Gaza, is about more than just the question of whether he was a legitimate target. Nor is it confined to the related yet separate issue of Israel’s decision not to allow the foreign press free access to the war zone.
Falling for the ‘genocide’ big lie
Instead, the main point is that the sort of journalism practiced by this particular Al Jazeera employee and many others working in the Strip for that and many Western outlets is part of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in memory. Indeed, so decisive is the victory of those working to spread the big lie about Israeli genocide that some Jews, including prominent Israelis like author David Grossman, have repeated it. To illustrate just how much the Hamas line has become embedded in the thinking of “critics” of the Jewish state, the leftist Jewish newspaper, The Forward, which, like Haaretz, has become as much a disseminator of anti-Israel misinformation as Al Jazeera, published a piece this week comparing the debunking of the blood libel about an Israeli-manufactured famine to Holocaust denial.
This is nothing more than gaslighting, but it is nonetheless treated as an accepted fact throughout much of the corporate liberal media, as well as marginal outlets like The Forward.
The voluminous information about al-Sharif’s connections to Hamas made public by the IDF (which they say was but a small part of the dossier they had on him and other Hamas operatives) and the social-media posts in which he made it clear that that he didn’t just celebrate the terrorist attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, but was actually along for the ride during the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on that terrible Shabbat. Despite that, outlets like The Washington Post are still publishing articles claiming that no proof of Israel’s allegations about him has been made public. Their line remains that he was just a journalist practicing his craft and sending the world much-needed information about the war that Israel wishes to keep secret.
Standing by their debunked lies
The same is true even when particularly egregious instances of deliberately misleading coverage are debunked. The photo of a supposedly starving Palestinian child was put on the cover of The New York Times; other outlets showed an infant suffering from cerebral palsy (who was surrounded by his well-fed-looking mother and siblings), and not starvation; and a photo of Palestinian children begging for food that appeared on the cover of Time proved staged. Rather than admit that they had been duped, outlets like the Times publish non-apologetic minimal corrections, stand by their mistakes or engage in post-truth rationalizations that insist that the inaccuracies they publish are true, even when proven false, as The Guardian did.
It is significant that al-Sharif was part of the Hamas military network and not just some writer who, like Western reporters who have operated in Gaza since it became an independent Palestinian terror state in 2007, had to play by the rules laid by the Islamist group. In fact, it illuminates the entire debate about what is or isn’t happening in Gaza.
Like most of what is claimed to be Palestinian journalism, the content about the war provided by Al Jazeera and other outlets that use Hamas operatives and supporters as correspondents is not merely unreliable. It’s designed to fit into a consistent narrative about Israeli brutality and Palestinian innocence. It doesn’t just erase the crimes committed by Hamas against Israelis and their own people, including the fact that it is the terror group’s actions that created food shortages, and that ordinary Palestinians took part in Oct. 7 and have been part of the effort to hold Israelis hostage. In short, it is nothing less than a propaganda campaign.
Palestinian journalism is much like the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, whose wildly exaggerated casualty statistics don’t distinguish between members of the terrorist groups who perpetrated Oct. 7—and continue to fight Israeli forces—and civilians. It also preposterously claims that the overwhelming majority of those killed in the war are women and children. Such reporting is an aggregation of falsehoods in the service of a genocidal movement whose sole aim is Israel’s destruction and the slaughter of its people, for which Oct. 7 was only a trailer, under the guise of reporting.
Journalism through an ideological prism
And yet, if one listens, watches or reads the legacy media, it is treated as anything but. The suffering that unfortunately happens to those in a war zone is transformed through the prism of the sort of journalism practiced by Al-Sharif into being the result of heinous Israeli actions targeting innocents. They then relay that the rest of the world. The liberal media outlets that double down on these lies, even when they are exposed, do so in large measure because their staffs have been indoctrinated into believing toxic left-wing myths that falsely labels Israel as a “white” oppressor state that is always in the wrong, and the Palestinians as victimized “people of color” who are always in the right. In this ideological environment, context is bound to be ignored.
If these outlets are churning out articles about Palestinian starvation despite no objective proof that this is actually happening, it is no accident because they rely on Palestinians tasked, like Al-Sharif, with selling the world smears of Israel. If they aren’t reporting about how Hamas steals food, keeps most of it for themselves and then sells the remainder to civilians at exorbitant prices, as well as violently attacks the distribution sites set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation established by the United States and Israel, it is for the same reason.
Yet the same publications and broadcast channels that have dutifully acted as Hamas stenographers throughout the conflict treat everything that Israel’s government puts out about the war in Gaza as if it were propaganda. That is not to say that one should blindly accept the statements of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu without question. But the willingness to believe what Hamas says while disputing Israeli statements, even when documented, is not rooted in journalistic skepticism or truth-telling. This demonstrates a degree of partisanship that speaks to a belief in the illegitimacy of the one Jewish state on the planet and a belief that the Palestinian cause to erase it is just, even when it is rooted in a national cause that is inextricably tied to such a genocidal goal.
It’s equally important to understand that even if you are unwilling to believe the evidence that Israel produced from Hamas’s own files, the willingness to defend the notion that al-Sharif was a legitimate journalist is so troubling. His public social-media accounts spewed out support for Hamas goals. He also had other links to the terrorist group and its leaders. Al Jazeera itself is owned by Qatar, the emirate that openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood and funds Hamas.
But if you believe—as all too many contemporary journalists do—that the point of journalism is activism rather than truth-telling, and view this endeavor through an ideological prism, then you’re likely to think there’s nothing wrong with al-Sharif’s brand of reporting. From that frame of reference, actively affiliating with a terrorist group is not a problem if you sympathize with its goals or have been educated to believe that Israelis are villains, even when they are the victims of unspeakable crimes.
In this way, it’s easy to see that the reporting about the death of this Al Jazeera propagandist is not about defending press freedoms, since there was no such thing in Hamas-ruled Gaza. It is, instead, another instance of how much of the mainstream media has been discarding the traditional standards of journalism in favor of ideological activism.
Nazi and Soviet precedents
Before the age of the Internet, journalism was often partisan. It could be employed by tyrannical governments to promote their agendas, twist the truth and send inconvenient facts down the Orwellian memory hole.
That was the case in Nazi Germany, with its anti-Jewish propaganda broadsheets like Der Stürmer, as well as in the Soviet Union with Pravda and Izvestiya. These publications had people operating as war correspondents, but would anyone claim that they were legitimate journalists today? The same standards ought to apply to Al Jazeera, whose stories about Israeli atrocities and denying those of the Palestinians are as reliable as Nazi accounts of Adolf Hitler’s policy of mass murder or Communist coverage of Joseph Stalin’s crimes. Yet somehow, the pro-Hamas disinformation that is spread by the likes of al-Sharif is treated by mainstream outlets as actual journalism.
Under the circumstances, it’s little wonder that so many people who consume the sort of journalism that allies itself with that of al-Sharif’s cause believe blood libels about Israel and the Jews and rationalize or deny the genocidal nature of Hamas or the eliminationist goals of Palestinian nationalism.
In this way, as was the case with those influenced by “journalism” produced by totalitarian powers, lies are believed, and truth becomes a relative concept.
We’re witnessing how an ideological mindset can transform respected publications into the willing accomplices of information operations by partisans. Many of those who have unquestioningly bought into the blood libel about Israeli genocide will likely cling to it long after the truth is widely acknowledged, giving new life to old antisemitic tropes about Jewish evil-doing.
The bad news is that the damage to journalism illustrated by the misreporting about events in Gaza enabled by Hamas propagandists is severe. The even worse news is that in the case of those outlets that are infected by this ideological virus, they really can’t be fixed since the abandonment of traditional journalistic standards is a deliberate choice rather than a mistake.
The good news is that most of the American people have long since concluded that they shouldn’t believe what liberal outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and the other broadcast and cable channels that are mourning for al-Sharif publish about anything.
Discerning audience members also understand that Israel-hating and antisemitic propagandists who have podcasts, like former Fox News TV host Tucker Carlson and other far-right figures who are equally guilty of spreading misinformation about the Middle East, are just as lacking in credibility.
But the most important takeaway from the story about al-Sharif and other propagandists who work for Hamas in one way or another is how a broad conspiracy theory hatched by a genocidal movement is spread. What we are witnessing in real time is the same general plan of action undertaken by such regimes in the past when circulating blood libels about Jews to justify their criminal behavior. It’s vital to recall that the Nazis and Communists always spoke as if they were the good guys, and that it was their victims who were conspiring against decency. The lies being mainstreamed about Israel by outlets that stand by al-Sharif’s propaganda and that of other Hamas apologists are no different.
Source: JNS