Imagine if 50 years ago, the international press broadcast the Egyptian and Syrian attacks on Israel that started the Yom Kippur War and streamed it live.
Would it have further devastated the already shocked Israeli population? Or garnered sympathy for the beleaguered Jewish state?
Israeli civilians were butchered in their homes on Saturday, when more Jews were killed than any day since the Holocaust. The victims include the elderly and infirm, young adults at a music festival, and babies murdered in their parents’ arms.
But has the Jewish state also been massacred in the media?
It has not been a good week for Israel in the international media by any means, as the exhaustive coverage by media outlets around the world was primarily negative, as usual. But there were plenty of bright spots.
What was the positive coverage of the Israel-Hamas war?
Some of the top international reporters who parachuted in to cover the war did so with a full understanding of the enormity of Saturday’s atrocities. They reported with the proper perspective and used the correct terminology.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper has brought gravitas to the coverage of the war. He has not hesitated to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and reminds viewers that women and children are among the Israeli civilian hostages.
In a memorable moment, Cooper broke out in tears when interviewing an Israeli woman whose family was kidnapped. The silence that followed, as he tried to compose himself, conveyed to viewers around the world the horror that so many Israelis have endured.
Veteran British war reporter Nic Robertson also cried on CNN as he described the bloodstained bunker at the site of the music festival where hundreds of Israelis were murdered.
CNN anchor Dana Bash inspired Jewish pride as she quoted the Kaddish memorial prayer and spoke of the unchanging cruelty of the enemies of the Jewish state.
Bash interviewed Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer fairly, in what was unfortunately one of the only English interviews given by top Israeli officials close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
And, in a must-watch clip, ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt called out his MSNBC interviewers by asking “Who is writing the scripts?!” He accused the mainstream media of sanitizing Hamas’ atrocities and justifying their terror.
The majority of front pages in the US, UK, and Australia on Sunday focused on the savagery of Hamas’s rampage through Israel’s southern communities.
Photos of kidnapped Israeli Noa Argamani being abducted to Gaza were featured on the cover of the New York Post with the headline “War Crime,” the Daily Mail with the headline “Don’t Kill Me,” and The Australian, whose cover proclaimed “Israel’s 9/11: Unbearable cruelty of terror savages.” Germany’s Bild and Der Spiegel had positive headlines that did not stoop to the moral relativism of American newspapers like The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal that from day one suffered from moral equivalence and counted the casualties of Israeli civilians and their Gazan murderers together.
What was the negative coverage of the Israel-Hamas war?
We can always rely on @nytimes for a #headlinefail.Who exactly are these "militants?"And why the moral equivalence of "Gaza & Israel Go to War?" One side initiated this, not to mention that this is not "Gaza" but Palestinian terrorists that Israel is now forced to respond to. pic.twitter.com/5ktK0AAu55
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 7, 2023
JUST FOUR hours after the terrorists opened fire on the partygoers outside Kibbutz Re’im, The New York Times headline online was already “Gaza and Israel go to war after militants launch attacks.” The Times chose to ignore the policy of the American government that formally designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. You would have to go to the paper’s business section to find a reporter correctly calling Hamas a terrorist group in a story on oil prices.
Use of the word “militants” was actually relatively good, compared to Reuters, BBC, and Sky News that throughout the week constantly referred to the murderers who killed elderly kibbutz residents as “fighters” and other media outlets that called them “Palestinian soldiers” and “raiders.”
Hamas has been whitewashed by many media outlets this week. NBC’s website published this propaganda: “Hamas says it is a freedom-fighting movement trying to free Palestinians from occupation and reclaim large parts of Israel.”
In a backgrounder entitled “What Is Hamas and Why Did It Attack Israel?” The Wall Street Journal claimed that Hamas has “indicated it is willing to accept a two-state solution based on borders that existed before 1967.”
But the truth is that Hamas and its leaders say outright that the organization does not accept Israel’s existence, and its charter calls for “raising the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”
As early as Saturday, media outlets around the world already began implicitly blaming Israel for Hamas’s invasion and attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Both The Wall Street Journal and Associated Press solely echoed Hamas’s talking points, focusing on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, including visits of Jews during Sukkot and crackdowns on Palestinian violence at the site.
They cited settlement expansion, the Israeli-Egyptian Gaza blockade, and ongoing US-brokered Israeli-Saudi talks as impetuses for the Hamas attacks.
The Washington Post added Israeli counter-terrorism raids and the establishment of the current Israeli government, as if Israelis had it coming for how they voted.
It did not take long for media outlets to minimize the savagery of Saturday’s attacks. A Reuters infographic used by media outlets around the world described how the war’s events unfolded, without ever mentioning the music festival or the terrorists who went door to door murdering families. The time line ignored the Israelis who were raped and kidnapped, amorally sanitizing the “multi-pronged infiltration of fighters,” then skipping directly to the Israeli retaliation.
As the international media’s coverage continued, the focus shifted entirely to Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, where most reports ignored the lengths Israel goes to prevent civilian casualties while rooting out the terrorists among them.
Plenty of media outlets parroted inaccurate anti-Israel myths about Gaza being the world’s most densely populated area. In fact, it doesn’t even crack the top 50.
They called Gaza “an open-air prison,” forgetting that hundreds of thousands of Gazans use its border with Egypt to travel internationally and that Israel evacuated every Jew from the strip in 2005.
By explaining today’s attack as “round 5 in a back and forth,” @cnn’s @amanpour is downplaying Hamas atrocities. This was a ground invasion; an unfolding tragedy that will have unspeakable consequences. This is the equivalent of calling 9/11 something that happened by some… pic.twitter.com/Bl0tdZuBtw
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 7, 2023
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour downplayed Hamas atrocities by calling Saturday’s attacks “round five in a back and forth,” as if Israel did anything to provoke Hamas in a week in which it actually expressed willingness to enable thousands more Gazans to come into the country to work and support their families.
Hey, @vausecnn, "9 million Palestinians" do not live in Gaza. You are wrong by some several million.And it's not "one of the most densely populated areas on Earth."@cnn, please remove this error from your website.https://t.co/ORharGq1c8 pic.twitter.com/eqMvo4gajm
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 10, 2023
MEDIA WATCHDOG HonestReporting got CNN to correct anchor Jon Vause who said nine million Palestinians live in Gaza, off by several million.
A scoop by HonestReporting revealed that AP’s main writer in Gaza, Issam Adwan, used his social media accounts to compare Israel to the Nazis, endorse antisemitic BDS blood libels, and defend a man who praised the 2014 Har Nof synagogue terror attacks that were the model for similar attacks in houses of worship in Pittsburgh, Poway, Copenhagen, and Christchurch.
Adwan labeled Israel as a colonialist and apartheid state, leaving readers to question: Can he be trusted to file unbiased reports from Gaza?
Then there were the indifferent, both in traditional and social media. The Guardian, which has earned its reputation as biased against Israel, remarkably did not mention the war at all on the cover of its Sunday newspaper, preferring to focus on the election of a new US House speaker.
Actor Mark Ruffalo, who has led the demonizing of Israel in Hollywood, could only come up with this incomprehensible statement: “Concerning the tragic events unfolding in Israel and Gaza, I’m grief-stricken for the unspeakable suffering and loss of life and loved ones. This horrific violence must end. I have no answers obviously, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to focus on our shared human existence and reality. The sanctity of our common humanity will hopefully serve to heal the unimaginable wounds of division.” Huh?
CREDIT MUST be given to the celebrities who came to Israel’s side, such as Madonna, U2, Barbra Streisand, Natalie Portman, Ellen, Regina Spektor, Floyd Mayweather, the NBA, NFL, MLB, Mark Hamill, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“I stand with my Israeli friends in the face of these unprovoked, barbaric terrorist attacks,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “My heart breaks when I turn on the news and see this pain and suffering.”
Israel could have used Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character to protect its people, both on Saturday and 50 years ago.
But at least it has him on the media battlefield.