As a former journalist, I know well how those in the media can distort and manipulate a story to promote a chosen narrative. I also know that in the fog of war facts can be difficult to ascertain. But it is unacceptable that an entirely implausible narrative - that Israel deliberately bombed a hospital in Gaza - was pushed by Hamas, the American media broadcast that propaganda without any hesitation, or pang of conscience. The New York Times even went so far as to publish a photo of a destroyed building – one they knew wasn’t the hospital in question.
That storyline, taken in, adopted, and republished throughout the Middle East, our college campuses, and by the typically anti-Israel progressives in Congress, has not only fueled more violence; it has raised serious questions about the state of our media as much as it has our education system, our youth, and our politics.
Bombing a hospital is a war crime. Students, professors, and members of Congress shouted that from every megaphone and microphone they could this week. But then the facts came out, and they couldn’t blame Israel anymore. Now that it is clear beyond any doubt Israel was not responsible for this atrocity (even the Biden Department of Defense confirmed this) the crime and the dead are all-but-forgotten—as if there is nothing to see here and we should all just move on. Welcome to the world of moral double standards Israel has had to operate in for the past 75 years.
Meanwhile, nobody in the media or on our college campuses, or seemingly anywhere else, is asking the most basic and fundamental of questions: why are Islamic Jihad and Hamas launching missiles anywhere, at anyone? Two weeks after a massively shocking and unprecedented massacre committed against vulnerable and innocent women and children, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and all their enablers and supporters are not apologizing. Instead, they are too busy justifying Palestinian terrorist violence while ideologically driven antisemites in the halls of Congress, and on our college campuses, protest on their behalf, defend them, “contextualize” the history of the Middle East, or engage in bias-fueled lectures about colonization.
Perhaps it is an irony of our time that with all the anti-Israel rhetoric, we have forgotten that Israel is a country that found its independence fighting off colonization. Israel was given its modern claims to the land once known as Judea not just because those claims are made throughout the Bible, and not just because almost all other countries were inhospitable to Jews (to say the least), but because the land of Judea has belonged to the Jews for thousands of years, while no such historical record supports Palestinian claims.
Just as we as Americans have an obligation and moral right to protect our sovereign borders, so does Israel.
The pro-Hamas narrative being taught in our schools and blared on the front pages of our newspapers and tv shows is little more than vicious antisemitism masquerading as virtue. And I’m sorry to say it, but our media—my former profession—is largely responsible for fueling this. It’s not that democracy dies in darkness, it’s that bias and propaganda from those who should know better plunges us all into it.
Kari Lake is a Republican candidate for US Senate in Arizona