A NEW GENERATION OF JOURNALISTS ARE EFFECTIVELY AGAINST JOURNALISM IF IT DOESN'T BACK UP THEIR EFFORT TO DELEGITIMIZE AND DEMONIZE ISRAEL

Yes, the whole world is wrong about Israel

Even some who say they don’t hate the Jewish state yet rely only on the mainstream media for news think that there must be some truth to the “genocide” blood libel. Challenging it isn’t easy. 

 

By Jonathan S. Tobin 

 

JNS

Aug 26, 2025

 

The New York Times front page on Juky 25 and the Daily Express front page on July 23 featured photos of a 'starving' Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq who was actually born with cerebral palsy which affected both his brain and muscle development.

 

You can see it in online exchanges and hear it in casual conversations. The accumulated weight of nearly two years of media stories claiming that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, murdering journalists to cover up those misdeeds, deliberately starving its residents and thus responsible for “genocide” has had an impact on public opinion across the globe, as well as in the United States.

This has created a growing consensus about the war that ensued after the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab attacks on Israeli communities that took place on Oct. 7, 2023. It doesn’t matter how often the specifics of this narrative of Israeli awfulness are debunked or Hamas propaganda exposed. The notion that what seems like the whole world can’t be wrong while the few embattled defenders of the Jewish state are right is not something a lot of people, including many liberal Jews, can accept.

Falling for Hamas propaganda

After all, if you’ve grown up believing that what you’ve read in The New York Times, watched on CNN or heard while listening to NPR is true, then why question the assumptions about what’s been happening in the conflict that are treated as accepted facts in those outlets and others like them? And even if you are willing to question individual stories that are largely the product of Hamas propaganda and spread by so-called journalists working in territory controlled by those Islamist terrorists, the sheer volume of reporting that bolsters these claims has established a baseline concerning assumptions about the war. Those who consider themselves fair-minded and not prejudiced in their opinions about Israel have long since accepted the idea that where there is so much smoke about Israeli misconduct, there must be fire.

In this way, the belief that the primary, if not sole, cause of suffering in Gaza is an unjustified and heartless war policy pursued by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu becomes not merely a pro-Hamas talking point but conventional wisdom accepted by those on the political left and even in the center, where legacy liberal media outlets still have considerable influence.

The consensus that Israel is completely in the wrong, if not behaving in a criminal fashion, is further fueling an unprecedented surge in worldwide antisemitism.

Acts of blatant Jew-hatred, whether on college campuses or in the streets of cities, in which calls for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) or for terrorism against Jews wherever they live (“Globalize the intifada”) are rationalized or justified in leading publications or even by Democratic politicians. The correlation between the shocking rise in hate crimes committed against Jews and the adoption by corporate media of these anti-Israel narratives is patently obvious. But while it is easy to decry antisemitism in general, it’s much harder to confront the sources of this hate, especially when it is rooted in something that most of the chattering classes now think is factual rather than false.

Debunking images of starvation

Indeed, we shouldn’t be surprised at the difficulty individual Jews and friends of Israel are having pushing back against the “genocide” blood libel when that same consensus is working to try to silence those journalists who point out these lies.

That was evident by the reaction to the recent story published in The Free Press detailing the deceptions behind 12 iconic images of alleged starvation in Gaza. Published in mainstream outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, the AP and Reuters, or broadcast on CNN and NPR, and even used in a widely circulated advertisement for donations to UNICEF, the U.N. children’s charity, they all depicted horrific pictures of children who look like classic examples of starvation victims.

Such images, along with highly questionable statistics about starvation and Palestinian civilian casualties whose original source is Hamas, have helped convince a growing number of people that there is a famine in Gaza. They further buttress the false narrative about who is causing this alleged famine. The same stories accuse Israel, which has been sending aid into Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza throughout the war they’ve been fighting against the Oct. 7 criminals, of being responsible for whatever food shortage there is in the Strip. They downplay or deny the fact that it is the terrorists and their U.N. accomplices who steal the food, hoard it and sell some back at exorbitant prices to their own people, which creates the problem in the first place.

But as the Free Press noted, and facts that have been reported elsewhere in the course of the last months, these pictures are essentially fraudulent. The children depicted in the images as suffering from other ailments, including cystic fibrosis and other severe ailments that have nothing to do with the current war.

For this, the publication was subjected, as it noted in a follow-up story, to a campaign of defamation. By actually reporting the truth about these images, The Free Press was accused, as others who have similarly questioned the Hamas narrative that has been mainstreamed by legacy media, of unethical behavior. They have been labeled as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

What’s worse is that this effort to delegitimize anyone who calls out the lies of those who fall for Hamas propaganda isn’t solely or even primarily being driven by the usual online trolls who attack journalists on virtually any issue. Instead, it is coming from people like former MSNBC host and current “Breaking Points” podcaster Krystal Ball and columnist Glenn Greenwald. What they are doing is, as The Free Press rightly put it, illustrating a new generation of journalists who are effectively against journalism if it doesn’t back up their effort to delegitimize and demonize Israel.

The same thing can be said for a number of recent articles in The Times, such as Nicholas Kristof’s disingenuous effort to defend his efforts to rationalize Hamas’s crimes and to unfairly attack Israel, which effectively denies its right to defend itself against a genocidal foe that no one would employ against any country but Israel. The same is true for the paper to publish a gob-smacking paean to Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, a Hamas operative whose “reporting” from Gaza helped promote the genocide and starvation blood libels. Similar criticism can be launched against Thomas Friedman’s latest column in The New York Times, which doubled down on the lies about Israel’s campaign in Gaza, saying that the “pariah” status it is getting is justified. In this case, however, he is more interested in pursuing his decades-long vendetta against Netanyahu.

But the point about all these examples of dishonest journalism in places still viewed as credible by many people, coupled with efforts to ignore or silence those who are calling them out for their shoddy work, is having a cumulative impact. Even those who are not indoctrinated to believe the toxic myths about Israel promoted by progressives and their Islamist allies—who falsely claim that Jews are “white” oppressors always in the wrong and that the Palestinians are “people of color” always in the right—are willing to believe the falsehoods or at least consider them arguably correct.

Journalistic groupthink

We’ve been here before, observing other examples of when journalistic groupthink in the mainstream media creates false narratives.

In September 2000, at the start of the Second Intifada—the Palestinian Arab terrorist war of attrition that answered Israeli and American offers of statehood—another atrocity story became emblematic of how false reporting can influence world opinion. The television channel France 2 broadcast edited footage claiming to show that a 12-year-old boy, Mohammed al-Durrah, was shot dead by Israeli forces while clinging to his father. The claim set off a global tsunami of anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations, as well as providing an alleged justification for more acts of murderous Palestinian terrorism.

Yet, as subsequent investigations showed, the incident was staged by the Palestinians in a classic “Pallywood” information operation that made it clear the atrocity was a hoax. Nevertheless, the mainstream media acted as stenographers for Israel’s foes in much the same way they now do for Hamas’s claims about civilian casualty statistics, starvation and other supposed Israeli misconduct.

Nor is this mentality limited to anti-Israel media bias. Journalistic groupthink, motivated by partisanship or ideology, can have the same impact on other issues.

It happened when some of these same outlets that now defame Israel about Gaza were insisting in 2017 and 2018 that there was credible evidence that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, though the American public now knows that the charge was a lie debunked by the FBI even before the smear was made public. No one at the Times or The Washington Post has subsequently given back the Pulitzer Prizes they got for those misleading, if not downright erroneous, stories. But in the first years of Trump’s first term, even those who were inclined to support him figured there had to be some truth to the claims if so many journalists all agreed they were true.

The current campaign of disinformation is just as dishonest. But when you consider that its impact is to empower antisemites on both the left and the far right, and to create an atmosphere in which Jews are increasingly at risk, the consequences are not merely an unfairly hobbled administration but a wave of violent Jew-hatred.

Battling untruths is difficult for those who are engaged in the business of public discourse and journalism. How much more challenging is it for ordinary people and college students to stand up against the tide of invective and to defend the justice of a war to eradicate the terrorists for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians?

It may take more courage than many individuals possess to correctly identify the corporate media’s conventional wisdom about Israel as blood libels that have led to the mainstreaming of antisemitism. Nevertheless, we must remind ourselves and others that just because what seems like the whole world is ready to buy into a lie, that doesn’t make falsehoods true. And just because questioning conventional wisdom that emanates from Hamas propaganda is being labeled as no different from “Holocaust denial” by journalists who pose as truth-tellers, that shouldn’t deter us from pointing out that their narratives are at odds with facts about the war in Gaza.

Though you wouldn’t know it if all you read is the Times and similar outlets, the world is lying about Israel—and those who defend it are not.