Our tendency to side with our enemies is all very well when it is limited to denigrating our history or paying reparations, but it is an entirely different matter when it comes to supporting those who will behead us
August 18, 2025 11:42
Take a step back and it is almost unbelievable. For almost two years, the democratic West has been increasingly amplifying jihadi propaganda.
Hamas says a dead terrorist was a journalist? Then he was a journalist. Hamas says that Israel is killing only women and children? Then that must be the truth. We’ve had to get used to it, but it is really quite bizarre.
The latest example came from the distinguished BBC World Editor, John Simpson. Writing on X, he cited research by Brown university claiming that more journalists had been killed in Gaza than in seven other wars, including the First and Second.
Smell a rat? Me too. Not so Simpson, whose journalistic nose detected nothing rum at all. “More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, the Vietnam war, the wars in Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined,” he wrote.
The research has, of course, been contested if not entirely debunked.
For one thing, even if you believe the claim that every one of the 232 journalists killed in Gaza was an impartial reporter in the mould of Woodward and Bernstein, Yad Vashem attests that at least 1,435 of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust were journalists.
For another, about 1,400 Russian journalists lost their lives in the Second World War and 715 were killed in Syria between 2011 and 2023.
And yet, the research at Brown University has become accepted as fact across the digisphere.
So it goes. Look at the Israelophobic stance of the international community more closely and you’ll find that it is inevitably based on propaganda, which either originates in radical “resistance” sympathisers, organs funded by Arab money, or with Hamas itself.
As we have seen far too often, such propaganda now holds great influence even within the Jewish community itself, certain segments of which are now competing with the mainstream in their Israelophobia.
It is also exerting a draw on Israeli society, not just on the Left but also in parts of the defence apparatus.
The irony of it all is that the one thing that would save us all from falling victim to such propaganda is proper journalism based on facts, scepticism and resolve.
Our tendency to side with our enemies is all very well when it is limited to denigrating our history or paying reparations, but it is an entirely different matter when it comes to supporting those who will behead us. Or it should be.
In an appearance on Saudi television last week, I was faced with another iteration of this attitude. “I think we can both say it is propaganda from both sides,” the presenter said, “from Hamas and Israel.”
I was left to explain the moral bankruptcy of drawing an equivalence between the jihadis of Hamas and the Middle East’s only democracy.
Afterwards, it really hit home. Such has been the success of the propaganda that huge numbers of people just don’t see why supporting Israel in its war against Islamist terror is the only ethical position to hold.
It is a sobering reminder of the malleability of the human mind. And it doesn’t make Jews feel particularly safe.
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