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The Wall Street Journal’s Israel Coverage Is Extremely Biased

An aerial view shows the bodies of victims of an attack following a mass infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip lying on the ground in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg

Throughout the 10 months of war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page has been one of mainstream media’s most sympathetic to Israel and its fight against terrorism.

With riveting analyses and a wide range of perspectives, the Journal’s opinions page stands out as a light in the darkness.

However, the same cannot be said of the Journal’s news section.

Since Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on October 7, HonestReporting has called out the Journal numerous times for its subtle (and, sometimes, unsubtle) bias against Israel and the Jewish State’s justified war against Hamas.

This bias takes the form of misleading its readers by leaving out vital context, whitewashing Hamas, and relying on Hamas propaganda as a legitimate news source.

The Wall Street Journal’s Bias Against Israel Since October 7

One of the key ways in which The Wall Street Journal’s reporting is biased against Israel is by the omission of vital information needed for its readers to fully understand Israel’s actions and what is happening in Gaza.

For example, in early November 2023, the Journal wrote that even though the IDF had been encouraging Palestinians to leave northern Gaza for three weeks, “many Gazans have been unable to flee due to ongoing Israeli airstrikes,” implying that Israel was solely responsible for putting local Palestinians in harm’s way.

However, what this article failed to inform Journal readers is that many Palestinians were also being prevented from venturing south due to Hamas attacks on those who were trying to flee northern Gaza.

Similarly, a month later, after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas broke down, the Journal headlined its article “Israel Resumes Combat Operations in Gaza as Ceasefire Stalls,” focusing on Israeli actions and ignoring Hamas’ resumption of rocket fire against Israel that preceded Israel’s resumption of military operations in the Gaza Strip.

We’ve fixed it for you, @WSJ. There’s one side that broke the ceasefire before it expired. Clue: It wasn’t Israel.https://t.co/ThrdpBtMRX pic.twitter.com/X3ad1VZk33

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 1, 2023

And it’s not only reports on the current conflict between Israel and Hamas that are misleading and lacking a proper context. For example, in the last weeks of December 2023, the Journal published two articles that featured misleading claims about Israel in general.

The first, about Israeli immigration policy, made it seem as if Israeli law is somehow discriminatory against non-Jews. However, as HonestReporting noted, the naturalization process for non-Jews to become Israeli citizens is similar to the process found in other democratic countries and is not inherently discriminatory.

The second misleading claim was made a week later, when the Journal reported that the imposition of the Israeli/Egyptian blockade of Gaza in 2007 following Hamas’ violent ascension to power ended decades of Gazan employment within Israel, implying that Israel purposefully made conditions harder for innocent Palestinians living in Gaza.

This is simply not true as, up to October 7, 2023, roughly 18,000 residents of Gaza had permits to work in Israel.

The Journal’s misleading pieces on the conflict continued into 2024, with a January report referencing Israel’s conducting “strikes on hospitals and other key infrastructure in its pursuit of the tunnels” with no mention of Hamas purposefully embedding itself within these “civilian” sites.

A June article referenced the closing of the Rafah crossing since Israel’s invasion of the southern Gazan city, but did not mention the fact that Egypt is the one intent on keeping it closed, not the Jewish State.

Actually, @WSJ, Israel has said it has conducted strikes on key Hamas infrastructure that the terrorist organization purposely built underneath hospitals, mosques, schools, and homes.

Fixed it for you. https://t.co/N4sp1SJwjS pic.twitter.com/WQnf9SCJGB

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 28, 2024

Another aspect of The Wall Street Journal’s biased reporting is its whitewashing of Hamas.

Even on October 7, as Israeli forces were battling Hamas terrorists in southern Israel, the Journal published an explainer piece on the internationally-recognized terror group that included the false claim that Hamas is focused on creating an independent Palestinian state and has been open in recent years to a two-state solution.

The piece ignored the fact that Hamas views this “openness” as a temporary step in achieving its ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish State.

Months later, the Journal once again whitewashed the terror group when it referred to Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh in a headline as the “leading advocate for a Gaza cease-fire,” ignoring his long history of advancing terrorism against Israelis and his support of the October 7 attack.

Hamas Charter: we will “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine… Peace initiatives are in contradiction to our principles.”@WSJ: “Hamas has indicated it is willing to accept a two state solution” and suggests Israel escalated the hostility. pic.twitter.com/thtXyaJjXs

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 7, 2023

Aside from whitewashing Hamas, the Journal’s reporting bias also extends to its uncritical reliance on Hamas as a source.

For example, in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza in October 2023, the Journal’s headline parroted Hamas’s talking points, writing that “Israeli airstrike on Gaza hospital kills more than 500, Palestinian officials say.”

Hours later, it was determined that the explosion was caused by an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, and that the casualty numbers were much lower than the 500 that the Journal initially reported.

Months later, the Journal continued to take Hamas propaganda for granted, including buying into the claim in May 2024 that Hamas had agreed to a ceasefire (which it had not negotiated with anyone except itself), and repeating the claim that an August attack by the IDF on a Hamas center had killed “dozens of civilians.”

In fact, the Journal’s reliance on Hamas’s uncorroborated facts led it to wonder what could account for the discrepancy between the IDF’s assertions and Hamas’ claims, ignoring the fact that the former is a sovereign democracy’s military while the latter is an internationally-recognized terror organization.

Do @WSJ just take Hamas’s statements as fact? pic.twitter.com/CI1IXbSI2F

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 17, 2023

The Wall Street Journal’s Poisoned Pen

Aside from its implicit bias, another issue with The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict is its reliance on contributors with a history of hostility to Israel, who help contribute to the distorted framing of the newspaper’s narrative.

In the first month of the war, HonestReporting shined a light on Palestinian journalist Fatima AbdulKarim, who had been affiliated with the Journal since before the war.

Based in Ramallah, AbdulKarim has a history of incendiary social media posts that accuse Israel of “Apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” rely on anti-Israel sources like Breaking the Silence and Defense for Children International-Palestine (a front for the PFLP terror organization), and distort the news in order to whitewash Palestinian terrorism and smear Israeli actions.

In August 2024, HonestReporting uncovered the hate-filled social media history of Journal contributor Abeer Ayyoub, who celebrated October 7 on X (formerly Twitter), spread fake news about a kidnapped Israeli general, mocked Israel in its darkest hour, and whitewashed Hamas’ terrorism.

To solidify her anti-Israel presence online, Ayyoub commented in Arabic “Eat sh*t” on a message of sympathy with Israel by X owner Elon Musk on October 7.

With contributors like Fatima AbdulKarim and Abeer Ayyoub, is it any wonder that there is a noticeable trend of bias that permeates The Wall Street Journal’s ongoing coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas?

 

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A post shared by HonestReporting (@honestreporting)

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.

The post The Wall Street Journal’s Israel Coverage Is Extremely Biased first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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