Mere hours after Hamas militants began their wholesale slaughter of innocent Israelis on Saturday, the media were already gearing up to excuse the mass murder. And while we certainly have seen some appalling takes from these liberal news networks in the past few days, it’s worth recalling that the media have a long and disturbing record of dismissing Palestinian violence against the Jewish people.
The left-wing media view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a pseudo-Marxist framing, in which Israel is cast as the cruel and racist oppressor while the Palestinians are the oppressed minority subjugated by a hostile regime. As a result, journalists at these networks think of violence by Palestinians as the “voice of the unheard,” and therefore they endeavor to excuse it.
We’ve put together a compilation of the most disgusting claims made by journalists in defense of Hamas. Watch below:
On Saturday, while many Israelis were still being raped and killed by Hamas terrorists, CNN’s Christian Amanpour made the insane decision to host Palestinian National Initiate leader Mustafa Barghouti, who, of course, promptly blamed Israel for provoking the attack. Barghouti returned two days later on Fareed Zakaria GPS, where he falsely claimed Hamas had only targeted “military installations.”
On Sunday morning, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi spoke with Palestinian political analyst Nour Odeh, who complained that American politicians criticizing Hamas weren’t considering the “context” of the attack:
American politicians and other politicians think they can just ignore the context in which all of this is happening. The fact that Israel is an occupying power, the fact that Israel has international law and Palestinian rights. As for the experts, the leading UN agencies, the leading human rights organizations around the world, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, their word is reliable and acted on in other areas, but not here.
In 2018, CBS News foreign correspondent Holly Williams gave several stilted reports about Palestinians rioting at the Israeli border. Despite participants lobbing firebombs across the border at Israeli citizens, Williams described them as “protestors,” and was quick to remind viewers how justifiably “upset” and “angry” the demonstrators were.
She even threw in the time-honored media favorite of “mostly peaceful” protests: “While many protestors were peaceful, some started fires along the border fence with Israel… they were angry.” She later added:
Many Palestinians, like Hakam Abushanab, who wants to study for a master’s degree, believe dancing with death is the only way to show their desperation.
In 2014, then-CNN host Ashleigh Banfield implied that there could be no such thing as terrorism against Israeli civilians, because Israel’s mandatory military service meant all adults were de-facto “soldiers.”
ASHLEIGH BANFIELD: When you have mandatory conscription and service in Israel, effectively the Palestinians will say it’s war against everyone because everyone’s a soldier.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Well, that’s just racism and bigotry to say that everyone is a soldier.
BANFIELD: But everybody is!
All the way back to 2006 now, when the New York Times’s pro-Palestinian reporter Steven Erlanger wrote a glowing piece about a Hamas terrorist released from Israeli custody:
The first to get a hug from Mr. Barghouti was his son Basel. Then he stopped at the grave of a neighbor’s son who died in a clash with Israelis, before a festive meal, with his son Bilal on his lap.
As if the reporting weren’t bad enough some of these outlets have been caught employing outright antisemites. Back in 2021, CNN quietly fired a freelance contributor named Adele Raja, after he tweeted: “The world today needs a new Hitler,” in response to the conflict in Gaza. In 2019, CNN photo editor Mohammed Elshamy was caught celebrating Hamas’s murder of “4 jewish pigs” on Twitter.
If there’s anybody normal left at these networks, now would be a good time for them to wonder why their colleagues keep tweeting about the return of Hitler and hosting overtly pro-Hamas guests.
