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Hamas Counted on Biased Western Journalism — and They Got It
CNN’s International Diplomatic Editor, Nic Robertson, recently authored an analysis (“Hamas gambled on the suffering of civilians in Gaza. Netanyahu played right into it,” Jun. 11) castigating Israelis for foolishly falling for Hamas’ tricks.
Instead, Robertson’s piece ironically illustrates the failure of CNN’s journalism. Rather than successfully depicting Israelis as fools caught in Hamas’ trap, the analysis instead exemplifies how Western journalists have become Hamas’ “useful idiots.”
The gist of Robertson’s analysis is that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has masterfully manipulated Israelis. “Netanyahu has played right into” Sinwar’s trap by waging a “brutal” war against Hamas, thus turning public opinion against Israel.
But in crafting his argument, Robertson unwittingly demonstrates how it is himself, and the media at large, that have played into Hamas’ hands. In doing so, he shows that it’s not the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that has turned public opinion against Israel — but rather, the media’s portrayal of the IDF’s conduct.
That portrayal involves spreading propaganda and narratives crafted by Hamas, which are entirely detached from reality.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this is when Robertson declares, without qualification or attribution, that the number of Palestinians killed so far in the war is more than 36,000. This number comes straight from Hamas’ media office, and has been widely discredited, to the point that even the United Nations quietly backtracked on repeating the media office’s figures.
It is publicly known that Hamas has a cynical strategy to deliberately exploit global sympathy for civilian casualties. That is why Hamas doesn’t just engage in the most sophisticated and systematic exploitation of human shielding, but also regularly inflates the casualty figures for media consumption, which CNN falls for — hook, line, and sinker.
And CNN is known to not just uncritically repeat these propaganda figures, but to deceptively obscure the source in a transparent attempt to give the figures a false appearance of credibility. The network has repeatedly laundered these Hamas figures by falsely attributing them to the Palestinian Authority, the United Nations, and even foreign aid agencies, who themselves acknowledge they’re just using Hamas’ figures.
The network has also worked overtime to portray the IDF’s conduct in the worst light possible, omitting and obscuring important, contradictory context. It has repeatedly made a big deal about the large blast radius of Israel’s 2,000-pound bombs — in order to portray the IDF as indiscriminate — all while omitting that these bombs are intentionally detonated underground, thereby substantially reducing the blast radius.
When Robertson then goes on to write that the “devastating effectiveness” of Israeli weapons “is becoming a liability” in terms of international opinion, he’s omitting that the reason they’re controversial is because his own network has distorted how these weapons are actually being used. Worse, CNN journalists have used their platform to engage in activism in favor of an arms embargo on Israel.
But what Robertson’s analysis shows best is just how skewed the network’s overall coverage has been.
Israel is placed under a microscope in a way that Hamas and the Palestinians are not, as if this isn’t an armed conflict between two sides, but a story of “oppression,” of one side imposing its will on the other. With every new event in the conflict, CNN spills much ink casting responsibility, real or imagined, onto Israel, while the role the Palestinians played is often entirely absent.
This isn’t just an anecdotal observation. If one searches CNN articles between October 7, 2023, and March 31, 2024, for articles on the conflict, the data bears out this disparity.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is mentioned 9-times as often as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and an obscene 31-times as often as both Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh.
As with CNN’s overall coverage of the conflict, Robertson also avoids truly tangling with the actions and agency of Palestinians, in order to cast responsibility solely on the Jewish state. His analysis was prompted by a Wall Street Journal report about several messages sent by Yahya Sinwar in which the terrorist leader made clear the organization sees Gazan civilians not as subjects to be protected, but as pawns to be sacrificed. The goal: to elicit international outrage and pressure against Israel.
Sinwar knows that trying to use Gaza civilian casualties for Hamas’ benefit will work because media figures like Robertson can’t, or won’t, entertain the moral and legal distinction between a military that does its best to avoid civilian casualties, and the terrorist organization that deliberately exploits the civilians as cannon fodder to feed to Western cable news audiences. (Of course, Hamas — which controls Gaza — also directly targets women and children, and states that its goal is to eradicate all of Israel).
Yet instead of taking this opportunity to give CNN’s audience a straightforward explanation of how Palestinian terrorists have intentionally and cynically exacerbated the war’s effect on civilians, Robertson turns the story on its head and instead makes it once again about Israeli actions. Think about that. A Hamas leader admitted to deliberately engaging in war crimes as a matter of strategy, and CNN’s Robertson still made it instead about Israel being bad.
The refusal to seriously consider Palestinian agency is how we end up with a headline like “Hamas gambled on the suffering of civilians in Gaza. Netanyahu played right into it.”
It might as well read: “Hamas put civilians in harms way. Here’s why harm to civilians is still Netanyahu’s fault.”
Sinwar couldn’t have asked for a more useful journalist.
In a similar vein, Robertson also repeats the “you can’t kill an ideology” argument, a yawn-inducing platitude associated with Western armchair strategists sitting thousands of miles away on the other side of an ocean from any real threat. Strangely, while the international coalition didn’t kill the Islamic State’s ideology, no one seems to talk about the threat from that organization much since its “caliphate” was obliterated and its military power degraded into insignificance.
You can’t kill an ideology, but you can kill its ability to wreak havoc and commit wide-scale atrocities, even if western media analysts seem intent on advocating for the preservation of terroristic military power.
Furthermore, a recent opinion poll showed that while West Bank Palestinians still support Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre at a rate of 73%, Gazans only support it by 57%. So maybe the war has undermined Hamas’ support in Gaza (or at least support for terrorism).
This is all, of course, to say nothing of the typical inaccuracies and spin found in CNN articles. Robertson claims, for example: “Earlier this year, university campuses across the United States and Europe combusted in spontaneous protest over the toll of Israel’s war on civilians in Gaza…”
This isn’t “Israel’s war,” the war is not “on civilians in Gaza” (at best, atrocious writing), the protests did not start “earlier this year,” they were not “spontaneous,” and they were not “over the toll of Israel’s war.”
Israel was attacked — it is Hamas’ war. The pro-Hamas demonstrations were already being organized on October 7, before Hamas had even finished butchering its way through southern Israel and before Israel even had a chance to begin any organized campaign in Gaza. Within hours of the attack, malicious anti-Israel organizations were already sending out “toolkits” not just glorifying the terrorist massacre, but also giving instructions to the demonstrators.
Robertson also claims that Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Portugal recognized “Palestine” because they are “frustrated Netanyahu won’t agree to a peace deal,” suggesting the problem is “Israeli intransigence.” It’s an astonishing inversion of reality, given that it was Palestinian leadership that has repeatedly said no to offers on the table since even before the State of Israel was born, including three major offers in the 2000s.
But why get into the history of Palestinian rejectionism when CNN can instead just blame some unspecified “Israeli intransigence” for the lack of a Palestinian state that the Palestinians keep saying no to?
And why tell the truth when the network can get away with a bald-faced lie like, “None of this means Sinwar will be winning a popular vote in Gaza during his lifetime…?” Except Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist organization, did win the popular vote in Gaza in 2006, and the pro-Hamas sentiment hasn’t changed. Palestinian surveys consistently show that Palestinians widely approve of Hamas’s October 7 massacre and that a large majority (61%) prefer Hamas in control of Gaza over Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Of course, misleading audiences about polling data, and even outright fabricating polling data to avoid acknowledging Palestinian responsibility for the conflict, is a regular occurrence at the network.
Robertson is free to armchair strategize from his comfortable perch in the United States, where he need not fear multiple terrorist armies just a few hundred yards from his family. But before accusing others of playing into Hamas’ game, it would be wise of Robertson, and indeed the entire CNN network, to consider the wind they’ve blown beneath Hamas’ wings with their slanted, inaccurate, and lazy coverage.
David M. Litman is a Research Analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
The post Hamas Counted on Biased Western Journalism — and They Got It first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Online Antisemitism Watchdog Group Blasts Kanye West for Exploiting Social Media to ‘Make Racism Cool Again’
Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, dressed in a full black leather KKK outfit during his interview with DJ Akademiks that was shared on YouTube on March 31, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The founder of a nonprofit organization that serves as the world’s first live database of online antisemitism said on Tuesday that Ye’s new song “Heil Hitler” is the rapper’s latest effort to “make racism cool again,” and criticized X for allowing the musician to promote Jew-hatred.
Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, the founder and executive director of CyberWell — which focuses on combating online antisemitism, especially on social media — railed against Ye (who changed his name from Kanye West) the same day the Yeezy founder posted on X the messages “FREE GAZA” and “All racist allowed into the Nazi party.”
The self-described Nazi released last week a song titled “Heil Hitler,” which is the greeting in praise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler that is given as part of the Nazi salute. The song includes an audio clip of a German speech given by Hitler in 1935. A clip of far-right social media influencer Andrew Tate playing “Heil Hitler” in his car has garnered over 3 million views on X and was reposted by Ye, although the re-post has since been deleted.
On Wednesday, Ye shared on X a video of someone leaving a Chick-fil-A drive-thru on a motor vehicle while playing the “Heil Hitler” track, before parking in front of the fast food restaurant and continuing to play the song. The vehicle had a screen that showed the music video for Ye’s hateful song and the person sitting in the motor vehicle did the Nazi salute twice when a choir on the track sang, “Ni–a, Heil Hitler.”
“Ye’s latest hateful contribution to the world, the song entitled ‘Heil Hitler,’ is part of his unabashed campaign to make racism cool again,” Montemayor said. “By embedding Nazi glorification – including ‘All my ni–as Nazis, ni–a, Heil Hitler’ and quotes from a 1935 Adolf Hitler speech – in pop culture, Ye exploited the algorithmic charge and large reach of social media platforms to normalize and spread Jew-hatred to millions.”
“As a repeat offender, duping advertisers, the Super Bowl production, and abusing music and social media platforms, this moment should be met with swift and scalable action by all digital service providers with any Ye footprint,” Montemayor added. “But, most importantly, a succinct response is needed by the platform that has systematically granted Ye and other celebrity antisemites their largest audiences in the space — the platform formerly known as Twitter.”
Many others have previously criticized the Elon Musk-owned social media platform for not removing Ye from X because of his antisemitic actions. Earlier this year, Jewish actor David Schwimmer asked Musk, who acquired the company in late 2022, to ban rapper Ye from X because of his antisemitic comments and his decision to sell a shirt that features a Nazi swastika.
The groups Campaign Against Antisemitism and StopAntisemitism have both called on Musk to delete Ye’s account from X. StopAntisemitism said in part: “Ye has twice as many followers on X as there are Jews on earth. His obsession with us isn’t just deranged — it’s dangerous. Kanye is a deeply troubled man, but also a powerful one. Deplatform him before his violent rhetoric turns into violent action.”
Despite efforts by other social media platforms to ban the “Heil Hitler” song and music video, X has yet to delete the music video that Ye posted on his account last week. The clip has thus far garnered more than 9 million views.
In 2022, Ye was temporarily suspended from X when he made antisemitic remarks, but shortly after returned to the platform to share more hateful comments targeting Jews.
CyberWell works with leading social media platforms to identify and remove antisemitic content. Its artificial intelligence-powered technologies scan social media in English and Arabic for posts that promote antisemitism, Holocaust denial, and violence against Jews. CyberWell’s analysts review the harmful content and report it to platform moderators.
In regards to the song “Heil Hitler,” Spotify and SoundCloud have both removed Ye’s new track, but alternate versions and snippets of the song have been shared by Ye’s supporters and still appear on the platforms. The same is true on YouTube and Apple Music, where a Ye fan uploaded the song under the title “HH,” but it has since been removed. On Reddit, versions of the song were shared in subreddits dedicated to Ye and other rappers.
A Reddit spokesperson told NBC News the platform is actively working to remove uploads and posts related to the song. “Hate and antisemitism have absolutely no place on Reddit. We have strict rules against hateful content, “the spokesperson explained. “In line with our sitewide rules, we are removing the song and any celebration of its message.”
Meanwhile, comedian and actor Russell Brand shared the music video for “Heil Hitler” on his X account on Monday, and defended Ye in a post online and on his podcast last week. The host of “Stay Free with Russell Brand” said the song has “a good hook,” and that Ye is a “true artist” and “uncancellable.” Similar sentiments were expressed on X by far-right American political commentator Candace Owens.
Montemayor condemned several social media platforms for their inaction in removing Ye’s hateful “Heil Hitler” song, starting with X.
“While YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok made speedy and clear attempts to demonetize Ye’s accounts and remove the presence of the song at scale, X platformed this hatred for more than 6.5 million views,” she explained, before turning her attention to Facebook and Instagram. She said the Meta-owned social media platforms “failed to moderate this content and its reposted formats, despite clearly violating Holocaust-denial and distortion policies.”
“The comments sections, even to content condemning the song across social media platforms, has been rife with open Jew-hatred — another testament to the negligence of social media platforms to enforce their policies where they effect users most,” Montemayor added. “The response, or lack thereof, on the part of the social media platforms to this latest celebrity-led assault of hatred is a litmus test for how seriously they take the issue of antisemitism and platform safety. CyberWell will continue to assist our Trusted Partners in optimizing their response to Ye’s latest abomination with clear and expert antisemitism compliance guidance.”
The post Online Antisemitism Watchdog Group Blasts Kanye West for Exploiting Social Media to ‘Make Racism Cool Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Belgian Police Raid Mohels’ Homes in Antwerp, Sparking Outrage in Jewish Community
Police pictured at an Anderlecht supporters village at the Atomium, before the final of the ‘Croky Cup’ Belgian soccer cup, between Club Brugge and RSC Anderlecht, May 4, 2025. Photo: BELGA/HATIM KAGHAT via Reuters Connect
Belgian police raided the homes of several mohels in Antwerp, a northern Belgian city, seizing their circumcision tools after a local Jewish rabbi filed a complaint — an incident that has sparked outrage within the local Jewish community.
A mohel is a trained practitioner who performs the ritual circumcision in Jewish tradition known as a bris.
On Wednesday, Belgian authorities raided three locations in the Jewish Quarter, searching for knives and other equipment allegedly used in unauthorized or illegal circumcisions. However, local police confirmed that no arrests were made during the operation.
Among the homes raided by the Belgian police was that of Rabbi Aharon Eckstein, a highly experienced mohel and a prominent leader within the Antwerp Jewish community.
In an interview with the publication JNS, Eckstein said the raid took place around 5 am.
“They didn’t say much. They just looked through the place and took my kit,” the Jewish leader said.
He also expressed his intention to continue performing circumcisions, as he had not received any instruction to stop such practice.
According to a police report, the searches were ordered by a judge following a complaint filed in 2023 by Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Friedman against Eckstein and other mohels within the Jewish community.
Prosecutors have been investigating illegal circumcisions in the country since last fall, amid concerns from local authorities that Jewish circumcisions are being carried out by individuals without proper medical training.
In his complaint, Friedman accused six mohels, whom he identified to the police, of endangering infants by performing the metzitzah b’peh ritual, in which the mohel uses his mouth to suction blood from the circumcision area.
However, Eckstein and other rabbis, along with parents of children circumcised by them, have denied such accusations, insisting that they do not perform this practice.
In Antwerp, Friedman is known for publicly criticizing several customs that are important to ultra-Orthodox Jews, who represent the majority of the city’s 18,000 Jewish residents.
The European Jewish Association (EJA) condemned the government’s handling of the issue, claiming it threatens freedom of religion.
“This constitutes yet another red line crossed in the intimidation of Jewish religious figures in Belgium,” Rabbi Mencahem Margolin, chairman of the EJA, said in a post on the social media platform X.
“Following the ban on shechita [kosher ritual slaughter], the harassment of mohels represents a further red line and a clear warning sign to Belgian Jews and the Belgian government. Freedom of religion must be upheld!” he continued.
The European Jewish Association (EJA) strongly condemns the police raid on the Mohels’ premises in Antwerp this morning.
EJA Chairman, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, say that this constitutes yet another red line crossed in the intimidation of Jewish religious figures in Belgium.…— EJA – EIPA (@EJAssociation) May 14, 2025
Despite several attempts to ban it across Europe, ritual circumcision remains legal in all European countries, though many, including Belgium, limit the practice to licensed surgeons and often perform it in a synagogue.
Last year, the Irish government arrested a London-based rabbi for allegedly performing a circumcision without the required medical credentials, marking the first arrest of a rabbi in Europe in years related to a bris.
The post Belgian Police Raid Mohels’ Homes in Antwerp, Sparking Outrage in Jewish Community first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Putin Has Invitation to Visit Iran, but Dates Have Yet to Be Set, Kremlin Says
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attend a ceremony to sign an agreement of comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries, at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Jan. 17, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Pool via REUTERS
Russian President Vladimir Putin has an invitation to visit Iran, but the dates have not yet been agreed, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.
Iran‘s government spokesman Fatemeh Mohajerani was quoted by Russian state news agency RIA Novosti on Tuesday as saying that Putin‘s visit to Iran “is currently being worked out.”
Moscow and Tehran signed a 20-year strategic partnership agreement in January, the two countries have supplied each other with weapons, and Russia has defended what it says is Tehran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy.
“Indeed, President Putin has an invitation to pay an official or working visit to Iran. The dates have not yet been agreed. As soon as they are agreed, we will inform you,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about a possible visit.
“We highly value our partnership with this country and we highly value the depth of our relationship in a wide variety of areas.”
The last time Putin visited Iran was in 2022, months after he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine.
The post Putin Has Invitation to Visit Iran, but Dates Have Yet to Be Set, Kremlin Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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