American-based antisemitism—and the unlawful acts it fuels—is spreading like wildfire, and MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider is calling out legacy media, agenda-driven publishers, Big Tech platforms and artificial intelligence systems.
Schneider laid out his case directly to lawmakers Tuesday during testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, which hosted a hearing titled “Rising Threat: America’s Battle Against Antisemitic Terror.”
In his written testimony, he singled out The Associated Press (AP), The Washington Post, NPR, Wikipedia, Big Tech giants like Google, and AI chatbots for amplifying antisemitism both before and after Oct. 7, 2023—the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Schneider’s full testimony spans 19 pages; what follows is just a brief overview.
“Their catastrophically effective methods of reporting and disseminating content have sought to frame the complicated conflict in the Middle East to an oversimplified battle of Israel as the oppressor versus the Palestinian people as the oppressed,” Schneider said in his written remarks. “It is a narrative created to compel empathy from the American public, but one rooted in antisemitic beliefs.”
Schneider first condemned politicized legacy media for its part in pushing antisemitism. Among the legacy media entities fueling the rise in antisemitism is the AP—the only western news agency able to operate in Nazi Germany—and which publishes the AP Stylebook, a manual relied upon by countless news organizations for headlines, event descriptions and more.
Yet, the Stylebook has failed to clearly define terms like “antisemitism” or even “Holocaust,” and it instructs writers to avoid using the word “terrorism,” while also urging the use of “fighters,” “attackers” or “combatants” to describe terrorist actors and encouraging the use of “soldiers” to describe Israeli forces. “This discrepancy not only sanitizes violent extremism but also suggests that the Israeli side is the aggressor,” wrote Schneider.
The AP is hardly the only offender.
The Post, National Public Radio (NPR), Reuters, The New York Times, and CNN are among the other outlets that have echoed and amplified the AP’s distortions, Schneider warned.
For instance, The Post published real-time geolocation data of the site of an IRGC missile strike, effectively helping terrorists improve the accuracy of future strikes.
This outlet also hired Heba Farouk Mahfouz, an Egyptian journalist with a disturbing history of supporting violent resistance against Israel. “Her role is not neutral — it is propaganda dressed as journalism,” Schneider added.
Reuters, The Times, AP and CNN, not to be outdone by The Post, took it a step further, having employed photojournalists who reportedly joined the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7. NPR has repeatedly used selective framing in its coverage of Israel and violence against American Jews.
Schneider also pointed to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that effectively blacklists pro-Israel and right-leaning media outlets—all while propping up the very outlets he previously called out.
Adding insult to injury, Wikipedia came under fire after the Anti-Defamation League revealed the digital encyclopedia had more than 30 editors who injected “antisemitic narratives, anti-Israel bias, and misleading information” into several articles. This poses a serious problem, as Wikipedia pages often appear at the top of the online search engines' results.
“Misinformation embedded in its articles does not stay confined to Wikipedia; it migrates into curricula, media reports, and public policy conversations worldwide. In turn, that leads to attacks against Jews in America and other acts of antisemitism,” Schneider alerted.
Enter Big Tech social media platforms and artificial intelligence.
The MRC Free Speech America vice president said Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is one of the biggest spreaders of antisemitism, often propping up Wikipedia in search results, as demonstrated by MRC’s research.
Its CEO, Sundar Pichai, took three days to publicly address the Oct 7 massacre against Jews and failed to mention antisemitism or evil. YouTube, the video-sharing giant, has also participated in anti-Israeli activism.
It suppressed a video from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) that featured footage from MRC’s NewsBusters, which called out ABC, CBS and NBC for airing video of a supposed Palestinian victim who was actually actor Saleh Aljafarawi.
“Of course, it was embarrassing for these media outlets to be exposed for pushing a Hamas narrative without conducting any due diligence (Aljafarawi has over 3.6 million users on Instagram and is a well-known crisis actor based out of Gaza), but the bigger problem is that of YouTube trying to keep the false story alive by silencing the truth.”
Artificial intelligence chatbots have played a role as well, with Google’s Bard (now Gemini) refusing to define Hamas, a foreign designated terrorist organization. Most recently, MRC called out Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, DeepSeek, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta AI powered by Llama for failing to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital without regurgitating leftist rhetoric on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Watch the full hearing below:
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