It is no exaggeration to say the media breathlessly amplified a terrorist organization’s blood libel against the Jewish people Tuesday, less than a week and a half after that same terrorist organization carried out the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
When an explosion occurred near a hospital in Gaza, the press instantaneously — and nearly unanimously — reported Israel was responsible for a strike that killed hundreds.
“Breaking News: An Israeli airstrike hit a Gaza hospital on Tuesday, killing at least 200 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, which said the number of casualties was expected to rise,” declared The New York Times.
“Hundreds killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza City hospital, Health Ministry says,” decreed the Associated Press.
Reuters attributed the same news to enigmatic “health authorities.”
Still others cited the “government in Gaza.”
Not so very long after these reckless voices had rushed to propagate this unfounded accusation, Israeli authorities released information to support its contention the explosion was actually caused by a faulty rocket.
One that had been fired from within Gaza — at Israel — by Palestinian terrorists.
The American military came to the same conclusion, as President Biden later confirmed.
Journalism’s most hallowed halls had gotten the weighty story hopelessly wrong.
“But wait!” cried out the media’s apologists.
“These outlets were merely reporting on the claims of reputable sources on the ground in Gaza.”
That dog won’t hunt.
All the vague attributions leaned on by the press — “Palestinian Health Ministry,” “health authorities,” “government in Gaza” — could easily, and more accurately, be substituted out for “Hamas,” the terrorist organization responsible for initiating the war in Gaza with its barbaric attack on Israeli civilians this month.
Everyone, especially the reporters responsible for Tuesday’s deluge of misinformation, knows there’s no independent health ministry operating in Gaza; every piece of information coming from official channels in Gaza is curated or fabricated by Hamas.
The ethical problems that proceed from this truth are twofold.
One, the media should obviously not be amplifying the claims of terrorists.
Especially not those who hold the explicit aim of murdering Jews, have the explicit intention of sacrificing innocent Palestinians to do it and take explicit interest in exaggerating civilian casualties in Gaza and misleading the international community about who bears responsibility for them.
And especially not without doing any kind of basic blocking-and-tackling to confirm their claims.
Two, if the press insists on using these sources, it must not conceal them from the public.
Laundering Hamas’ lies with weasel words like “government in Gaza” or by referring to innocuous-sounding “health authorities” isn’t exonerating — it’s an even more damning indictment of those who engaged in this thinly veiled propaganda campaign.
No doubt the guilty outlets fear that revealing where their information is really coming from might preclude them from using these sources in the future.
Heaven forfend they displease their terrorist-puppeteers or discredit themselves with their audiences by having their strings exposed.
But this incident proves once and for all that using Hamas as a source and then lying about it isn’t worth the cost.
The consequences of this particular scandal, after all, are reverberating far beyond the media ecosphere.
Across the Middle East, protesters are taking to the streets to pressure their governments to condemn Israel and aid Hamas.
This atmosphere, which saw an angry mob gather outside the US embassy in Beirut, doubtlessly contributed to the cancellation of Biden’s planned trip to Jordan to discuss the war in Gaza with Arab leaders.
In America, prominent antisemites like Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are using the fake news to inspire their fellow travelers and continuing to repeat the blood libel long after it’s been disproven.
Palestinian terrorists killed Palestinian civilians, Hamas lied about it, and the media presented that lie as the reasonable claim of a neutral third party.
Now Jews will suffer for it.
This constitutes one of the most flagrant and consequential failures of the American press in decades, and the full measure of its repercussions will likely not be known for years to come.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
