How disinformation against Israel hurts the West

Disinformation against Israel hurts the West because Hamas’ hatred of Israel does not stop with the Jewish nation. Here’s one example of media bias against Israel and why it matters:

Israel’s June Hostage Liberation Operation

After 8 months in captivity, four Israeli hostages were rescued by the IDF after an intense firefight with Hamas militants guarding the hostages. The hostages, Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Andrey Kozlov, and Almog Meir were held in two apartment buildings in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

The apartment holding Noa was the home of an Al-Jazeera journalist, Abdallah Aljamal. His participation in Noa’s captivity demonstrates just how thin the line between civilians and terrorists is in Gaza, which makes the distinction between deaths of combatants vs. noncombatants almost impossible.

By holding the Israeli hostages in a densely populated refugee camp, Hamas drew Israel’s war campaign into the urban center, endangering the Palestinian population and refugees from other parts of Gaza. Tragically, many Palestinian civilians were caught in the firefight with an estimated 70-200 reportedly killed.

The Mainstream Story

The dominant framing of Israel’s operations describes the hostages as “released” instead of “liberated.” This is not only inaccurate but alleviates Hamas and complicit Palestinian civilians of responsibility for refusing to release the hostages.

Stories also emphasize that “274 civilians were killed by IDF.” The loss of innocent lives is tragic, but most outlets leave out the important context that Palestinian civilians helped hide hostages and collaborated with Hamas, refusing to surrender them to the IDF.

Condemning Hamas?

Mainstream media rarely paints Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in a favorable or just light, fueling international bias against Israel as Palestinian civilians are killed in military clashes with Hamas. Even more harmful is the media’s failure to condemn Hamas’ massacre on October 7, its refusal to release the hostages, and its war strategy of using civilians as human shields.

Hamas hides within civilian areas, a violation of the Geneva Convention, and forces Israel to wade through Palestinians to reach Hamas targets. What the media doesn’t report is that in urban warfare, the majority of deaths are about 90% civilians, whereas Israel’s military campaign has achieved an almost one-to-one combatant-to-civilian ratio, a historic low.

Navigating News

The Gaza War’s negative impact on America’s view of Western values highlights the importance of accurate information.

Here are our top news sources:

• Wall Street Journal
• Axios
• National Review
• The Free Press
• All Arab News
• Jerusalem Post
• Tablet Magazine
• Providence Magazine
• Reuters
• Times of Israel

*Cross-check news sources to see which different outlets cover certain stories and how they talk about them.

*Avoid Al-Jazeera (funded by Qatar with links to Hamas).

*Consume CNN, BBC, and AP News coverage cautiously.

Why Israel Matters

Disinformation against Israel hurts the West for many reasons, but one of the most important is that it is fueled by anti-Western ideologies that believe Westerners are “imperialist colonizers,” consequently delegitimizing Western values and global influence.

Hamas’ hatred of Israel does not stop with the Jewish nation. Hamas’ Islamist ideology includes the West in its definition of “infidels,” whose interpretations of the Quran and Shariah Law mandate they must bring under Muslim subjugation.

In the West, the Islamist agenda has allied itself with Marxist ambitions, leading to the breakdown of our academic institutions we witnessed with the Free Palestine protests across campuses and Ivy League Presidents failing to condemn antisemitism.

Hatred of Israel, to be differentiated from critiques of Israeli policy, is the gateway to hatred of our civilization.

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