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An Israeli Soccer Star Stood Up for Hostages in Turkey; Then He Was Attacked
Israeli soccer star Sagiv Jehezkel arrives in Tel Aviv from Turkey. Photo: Reuters/Alexandre Meneghini
It should have been a straightforward story that included facts, relevant reactions, and background.
But these key elements were either omitted or distorted when some media outlets reported on the detention of an Israeli soccer player in Turkey, due to his on-the-pitch gesture of solidarity with Israeli hostages in Gaza.
The reports of CNN and The New York Times painted a picture that legitimized the actions taken against Sagiv Jehezkel, who, until last week, played for Turkish team Antalyaspor.
Here are the core components of the story:
On January 14, after scoring a goal during a Super League match in Antalya, Jehezkel displayed a message written on his bandaged wrist alongside a Jewish Star of David, reading “100 days, 7.10.”
The message alluded to the passage of 100 days since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and some 240 taken hostage. Most mainstream media outlets rightly understood it as a solidarity message with the hostages.
Jehezkel was, however, detained, questioned by Turkish police, and suspended from his club. The Turkish Justice Minister condemned his tribute as “inciting people to hatred and hostility.” His team said he had acted “against the national values.” Jehezkel, who had already returned to Israel, rejected the accusations and according to Turkish media said he had meant to convey a message supporting an end to the war.
Outraged Israeli officials denounced Turkey. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant criticized it as a “de facto executive arm of Hamas.” Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz said Turkey was “working against humane values and sports values.”
Turkey’s actions come against the backdrop of its fierce criticism against Israel since October 7. Turkish President Erdogan has called Israel a “terror state” and said that Hamas terrorists are “freedom fighters.”
But this is not how the story was necessarily covered.
CNN has misrepresented Jehezkel’s message, omitted Israel’s criticism, and added flawed context.
1. The network labeled his solidarity gesture a “protest.”
2. CNN completely ignored Israel’s strong criticism against Turkey, while including the reactions of Antalyaspor and the Turkish justice minister.
The omission of the Israeli foreign minister’s comments is all the more questionable because, apparently, the reporters had been following the Foreign Ministry’s statements. They chose to include the following sentence: “On Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said that Jehezkel is returning to his home country.”
3. In an attempt to provide “context” or “balance,” CNN created a false symmetry between a non-violent solidarity tribute and incitement to violence:
This isn’t the first time that a soccer player has become embroiled in controversy over the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Earlier this month, Algerian Youcef Atal, who plays for French club OGC Nice, was handed a suspended sentence and a €45,000 fine ($49,000) following a social media repost about the conflict.
According to Reuters, which cited French newspaper Nice-Matin, Atal republished a 35-second video by a Palestinian preacher who called on God to send “a black day over the Jews.”
4. CNN did include a lengthy background on Israel-Turkey relations. But it called Israel’s actions in Gaza “carnage” and quoted an expert attempting to explain away the Turkish reaction:
Jehezkel’s gesture was misunderstood and misrepresented, Lindenstrauss added, which is “a clear indication that Turkey and the Turkish public have very little understanding of Israel’s interpretation of the events that unfolded on October 7.”
But there was no mention that Erdogan had publicly stated his staunch support for Hamas and its actions.
The New York Times also misrepresented Jehezkel’s message, and felt the need to provide problematic context instead of just reporting the facts.
The newspaper called Jehezkel’s gesture in support of hostages a “pro-Israel” message, creating the impression that Turkey was acting against the player’s political stance.
As mentioned above, other mainstream media — such as The Washington Post and the BBC — reported Jehezkel’s gesture as a plea for the hostages, not a politicized call.
But there’s more.
While The New York Times did provide the necessary background on Turkey’s support for Hamas, it also gave a “balancing” context by equating Jehezkel to other soccer players who had been suspended or fired after sharing violent anti-Israeli calls online.
The paper did not mention why Dutch player El Ghazi had his contract terminated by his German club, Mainz.
Instead, it linked to reports in the Qatari-owned network Al Jazeera that also failed to mention the reason: El Ghazi shared a post early in the conflict with the genocidal call “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”
HonestReporting has sent a complaint detailing these flaws to The New York Times.
The wire services included all the necessary elements in their reportage, so any writer or editor could and should have seen what to include in the story.
Why, then, did the outlets mentioned above remove criticism of Turkey, “balance” it or provide background that doesn’t adequately explain the prevailing Turkish zeitgeist?
Instead, their stories downplay or even legitimize the appalling Turkish actions against an Israeli Jew who merely voiced solidarity with innocent people held by a terror group.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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New York City Jews Targeted for Most Hate Crimes in March, NYPD Stats Show
Orthodox Jewish man waiting for the train in the New York City subway. Photo: Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect.
Jews in New York City were victims of more hate crimes in March than any other group even as crime across the Five Boroughs fell to “historic” lows, according to statistics issued by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) on Thursday.
39 hate crimes targeted Jews last month, the Algemeiner reviewed data shows, outstripping the combined total of all other groups combined — 28 — and constituting 58 percent of all hate crimes reported to authorities. So far, there have born 85 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City through the first three months of 2025, with the month of February seeing a 100 percent increase in them over the previous year and March seeing no improvement at all.
The data continues a trend that has persisted for several years and concurred with a rise in antisemitic incidents across the US.
Jews represented a disproportionate share of hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024 as well. Of the 641 total hate crimes tallied by the NYPD that year, Jews were victims of 345, which, in addition to being a 7 percent increase over the previous year, amounted to 54 percent of all hate crimes in the city.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitic hate crimes have posed a major threat to the quality of life of New York City’s Orthodox Jewish community, which was the target in many of the incidents. In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery.
In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn. Days after the week-long antisemitic hate crime spree, three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the Crown Heights neighborhood.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post New York City Jews Targeted for Most Hate Crimes in March, NYPD Stats Show first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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NYC ‘Dyke March’ Bans Zionists From Participating in Annual Demonstration
(Source: Reuters)
NYC Dyke March, a public demonstration held by members of the lesbian community in New York City, has banned self-proclaimed “Zionists” from its annual event, citing a desire to stand against the so-called “genocide” occuring in Gaza.
The group revealed in a statement that their decision to ban Israel supporters from their ranks came after multiple members dropped out of the organization due to differences in “political beliefs and values.” After engaging in discussions with frustrated members, the NYC Dyke March committee agreed to adopt “an explicitly anti-Zionist position.” The organization claims that it will “strengthen our commitment” to fighting against Israel and advocating on behalf of Palestinians.
Last year, the NYC Dyke March previously came under scrutiny after organizers settled on “genocide” as the theme of its 2024 event. In a statement, decrying “ethnic cleansing, violence, and dehumanization,” the organization compared the ongoing war in Gaza, to the mass slaughters occurring in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Sudan.
The organization plans on recycling the same theme for this year’s march, titling it “Dykes Against Genocide.” The group released a statement clarifying that Jews are allowed to attend and condemned the Oct. 7 slaughters as a “senseless loss of life.” After an apparent uproar from its members, the organization deleted the post and wrote that the group “unapologetically stands in support of Palestinian liberation.” In addition, the group affirmed that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and any language we put out which is not clearly opposed to a Zionist, imperialist agenda is harmful to us all.”
In the 17 months following the Hamas-led massacre of roughly 1200 people throughout Israel, the NYC Dyke March has produced numerous statements lambasting Israel and declaring “solidarity” with Palestinians amid their so-called “ongoing genocide.” The organization also accused Israel of engaging in supposed “pinkwashing” and “manipulative use of Jewish and queer identities,” with the aim of justifying its war efforts in Gaza.
Israel offers an expansive set of rights for members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transngender (LGBT) community, including recognition of same-sex marriages. Every year in June, Tel Aviv holds one of the largest LGBT Pride celebrations in the world. Meanwhile, members of the LGBT community are routinely imprisoned or murdered in other parts of the Middle East, including the Palestinian territories.
The NYC Dyke March’s announcement was met with widespread condemnation.
“You cannot exclude the majority of Jews and call yourself inclusive,” said the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a post on X/Twitter, adding that the group “essentially equates Zionism with racism” in their announcement.
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Trump Administration Planning $510 Million Cut to Brown University Budget, Report Says
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with journalists onboard Air Force One en route to Miami, Florida, U.S., April 3, 2025. REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
The Trump administration reportedly plans to terminate $510 million worth of federal contracts and grants awarded to Brown University, according to media reports.
Brown University’s failure to mount a satisfactory response to the campus antisemitism crisis, as well as its embrace of the diversity, equity, and, inclusion (DEI) movement — perceived by many across the political spectrum as an assault on merit-based upward mobility and causing incidents of anti-White and anti-Asian discrimination — prompted the alleged pending action by the federal government, according to the right-leaning outlet The Daily Caller.
The announcement comes as Brown scrambles to cover a $46 million budget shortfall and other universities across the country have faced similar funding cuts.
Brown University officials, however, denied that the university had received any directives from the Trump Administration.
“We have no information to substantiate these rumors,” Brown University provost Francis Doyle issued a statement. “We are closely monitoring notifications related to grants, but have nothing more we can share as of now.”
Meanwhile, Brown’s Jewish community rushed to the university’s defense, issuing a joint statement with the Brown Corporation which said that the campus is “peaceful and supportive campus for its Jewish community.”
The letter, signed by members of the local Hillel International chapter and Chabad on College Hill, continued: “Brown University is a place where Jewish life not only exists but thrives. While there is more work to be done, Brown, through the dedicated efforts of its administration, leadership, and resilient spirit of its Jewish community, continues to uphold the principles of inclusion, tolerance, and intellectual freedom that have been central to its identity since 1764.”
Brown Divest Coalition — an anti-Zionist group which recently saw its campaign for the university to adopt the boycott, divest, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel defeated by the Brown Corporation — weighed in too, denouncing the reported cut as “a means of suppressing all forms of popular dissent to the renewed violence of the US war machine abroad.” US Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) also criticized the move, accusing the administration “of a broader pattern of behavior…that will negatively impact communities across the country and lead to layoffs, restrict research, and more.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the Trump administration is following through on its threats to inflict potentially catastrophic financial injuries on colleges and universities deemed as soft on antisemitism or excessively “woke.” The past six weeks has seen the policy imposed on elite universities including Harvard and Columbia, rattling a higher education establishment that has for better and worse operated for decades with little interference from the federal government even as it polarized the public and contributed to a growing sense that elites are contemptuous of Americans who live outside of their cultural enclaves.
In March, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced the cancellation of $400 million in federal contracts and grants for Columbia University, a measure that secured the school’s acceding to a slew of demands the administration put forth as preconditions for restoring the money. Later, the Trump administration disclosed its reviewing $9 billion worth of federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard University, jeopardizing a substantial source of the school’s income over its alleged failure to quell antisemitic and pro-Hamas activity on campus following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Princeton University saw $210 million of its federal grants and funding suspended too, prompting its president, Christopher Eisgruber to say the institution is “committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination.”
Additionally, 60 universities are being investigated by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over their handling of campus antisemitism, a project that will serve as an early test of the administration’s ability to perform the essential functions of the agency after downsizing its workforce to increase its efficiency.
One of those universities, Northwestern University, on Monday touted its progress in addressing campus antisemitism, noting that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, a reference tool which aids officials in determining what constitutes antisemitism, and begun holding “mandatory antisemitism training” sessions which “all students, faculty, and staff” must attend.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Trump Administration Planning $510 Million Cut to Brown University Budget, Report Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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