Connect with us

RSS

Systemic Bias? Top Reuters Editors Share Disturbing Content Online

Friends and family mourn Israeli military reservist Sergeant First Class Hadar Kapeluk, 23 who was killed in the southern Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing ground operation of the Israeli army against Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, at his funeral at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem, January 23, 2024. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Two top news editors at Reuters have shared unsettling social media posts throughout the Israel-Hamas war, HonestReporting revealed last week, casting doubt on their adherence to journalistic impartiality.

The revelation, which comes after a series of exposés by HonestReporting about the news agency’s Gaza-based photojournalists who had either infiltrated into Israel with Hamas on October 7 or praised its terrorists, raises concerns that anti-Israel bias in the wire service hasn’t plagued only its bottom ranks.

The online posts, by Reuters Executive Editor Simon Robinson and Global Foreign Policy Editor Samia Nakhoul, have been visible to many Reuters journalists who follow the two senior editors on LinkedIn and social media platform X. Yet the message of these posts is not a call for fair and balanced reporting on Israel, nor is it a demand for journalists’ objectivity.

On March 3, Robinson posted on his LinkedIn a 7,500-word anti-Israel essay from the London Review of Books that includes criticism of Western media coverage of the Jewish state.

Titled “The Shoah after Gaza,” the essay by Indian author Pankaj Mishra asks questions like: “How can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even justify, its [Israel’s] clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?”

It also includes claims such as: “The liquidation of Gaza … is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military & cultural hegemony,” including “prestigious news outlets deploying the passive voice while relating the massacres carried out in Gaza.”

Another paragraph reads: “Why have Western politicians and journalists kept presenting tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage, in a war of self-defence forced on the world’s most moral army, as the IDF claims to be?”

And there’s also, as the title suggests, an inevitable shoehorning of the Holocaust: “A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel.”

When @Reuters‘ Executive Editor posts on his LinkedIn a 7,500-word anti-Israel essay from @LRB that includes criticism of Western media coverage of Israel, what sort of message does that send his Reuters staff?

Clue: It’s not a call for fair and balanced reporting on Israel. pic.twitter.com/8ax1onYXvi

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) March 4, 2024

As of last week, the post was still visible on Robinson’s profile, with comments ranging from “excellent article” to “that article is horrifically anti-Israel,” and “Why can’t you call for fair and balanced reporting on Israel?”

But the senior editor — who is also Reuters’ Deputy Editor-in-Chief — has kept silent. Perhaps Robinson felt safe in posting that article because earlier in the war, his colleague Nakhoul had seemingly set the tone.

On November 25, she reposted on X a message by BBC journalist Nada Abdelsamad, who had been investigated by her network over accusations of praise for the deadly October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel that sparked the war.

In the Arabic message reposted by Nakhoul, Abdelsamad says she has sued the BBC over “professional abuse against me.”

According to The Telegraph, Abdelsamad had been exposed by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) after retweeting a video of Israelis hiding in fear on October 7, entitled: “settlers hiding inside a tin container in fear of the Palestinian resistance warriors.”

The Telegraph added that it came with a hashtag translated as “promise of the hereafter,” a Quranic reference to the killing of the Jews.

Doesn’t Nakhoul think a journalist who publicly voices such sentiment should be held to account?

An earlier repost by Nakhoul may provide an answer.

On November 3, she reposted a tweet that defended Abdelsamad, claiming “Her sin was to RE-tweet, in the chaotic early hours of 7/10, a news post referring to Hamas fighters as “resisters.”

So does Nakhoul think it’s okay for a journalist to do what Abdelsamad had done?

And would she care to explain that to her Jewish-Israeli colleagues?

What sort of message do Robinson and Nakhhoul’s posts send their subordinates, who look up to them as responsible leaders, mentors, and guides?

As Reuters fails to get to grips with HonestReporting’s exposé of a terror-praising Gaza journalist and others who had called on Gazans to infiltrate Israel on October 7, could it be that something is systemically rotten in the once-respected wire service?

HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post Systemic Bias? Top Reuters Editors Share Disturbing Content Online first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Post Views: 584
Related Topics:
Continue Reading

RSS

Charlie Kirk Sought to Encourage Debate — His Murder Must Not Stop It

Charlie Kirk speaking at the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2025. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect

I first became familiar with Charlie Kirk after October 7, 2023, when my TikTok algorithm began showing me videos of him fiercely, and quite effectively, debating students on college campuses, often those in keffiyehs and with purple hair.

Thus began my fascination with what I soon learned was a man who was dedicating his life to debating and promoting what he believed in.

Charlie Kirk was the face of the young Republican movement, respected even by some Democrats. He had a promising future ahead of him. As Ben Shapiro wrote: “That kid is going to be the head of the Republican National Convention one day.”

Kirk dedicated his life to debate. To disagreement. To hearing the other side and persuading with facts and truth. And this, tragically, cost him his life. His assassination represents the meager and devastating state of the West, a state we have slowly, almost willingly, been accepting for years now.

There is a deep intolerance for differences. People do not want to be persuaded. They do not want to consider another perspective. Instead, they condemn what they believe is wrong, clinging to black-and-white narratives, even when an entire gray area holds the broader picture. They turn their heads away from nuance. Kirk aimed to change that. He devoted his life to it, fully aware of the risks.

As Adam Rubenstein wisely wrote for The Free Press: “Kirk was not naïve. In the video after he is shot, you can see a security team of at least half a dozen bodyguards surround him and spirit him away. Like anyone speaking their mind in public these days, he knew there was a risk.”

Kirk’s assassination signifies a low point for this country — and another attack on free speech. It was an assassination of dialogue, of diplomacy, of the ability to disagree without destruction. And perhaps the most bitter irony is that it all happened on a college campus, an environment that should foster growth mindsets and open-mindedness.

This attack was not only an attack on Charlie Kirk. It was an attack on freedom of thought and expression. And while it succeeded in killing the bright and young 31-year-old so many of us admired, I hope that is a rallying call to protect the broader freedom of speech we still enjoy — at least in part — in this country.

Alma Bengio is Chief Growth Officer at The Algemeiner Journal and founder and writer for @lets.talk.conflict

Post Views: 8
Continue Reading

RSS

Jews Are Indigenous to the Land of Israel — and Everyone Should Know It

The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Few words in modern political discourse carry as much distortion as “Palestine.” Today, the term is wielded not as history but as a weapon — designed to delegitimize the Jewish State and recast Jews as foreign colonizers in their own homeland.

Take away the propaganda, however, and one unshakable truth remains: the Jewish people are the indigenous nation of the Land of Israel. The Arab claim to “Palestinian indigeneity” simply does not line up with history.

The Jewish people trace their roots back over 3,000 years to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who lived in the land of Canaan — later Israel. By the time of King David, Jerusalem was the capital of a united monarchy, and Solomon’s Temple stood as the spiritual and political center of Jewish life. Even after the Babylonian exile, Jews returned, rebuilt, and re-established their national life in Judea.

Despite invasions, destruction, and exile, Jews never abandoned their homeland. They remained in Jerusalem, Galilee, Hebron, Safed, and along the coast. Their prayers, rituals, and festivals kept the bond to Zion alive. This is not the story of outsiders — it is the story of the land’s first and most enduring nation.

Rome tried to sever that bond by force. After the Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century, Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea as Syria Palaestina , borrowing the name of the long-vanished Philistines, and turned Jerusalem into Aelia Capitolina. It was an act of erasure, meant to punish the Jews by striking even their name from the map.

But the attempt failed. Jews continued to live, pray, and return to their ancestral soil. A new label could not undo thousands of years of rootedness.

The Arab story is very different; their origins lie in the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest records available to us describe nomadic tribes in Arabia and the Syrian desert. Their cultural centers were Mecca, Medina, Yemen, and Petra. It was only in the 7th century, with the rise of Islam, that Arab armies exploded out of Arabia and conquered the region. By 636 CE, they had invaded Byzantine Judea; within a century they ruled from Spain to Persia. Their presence in Judea was the result of conquest, not continuity.

For over a thousand years, under successive empires — Umayyad, Abbasid, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and finally British — the local Arab population never called itself “Palestinian.” They identified as Arabs, Muslims, Christians, or by their city and clan. In fact, during the British Mandate, the word Palestinian referred almost exclusively to Jews: the Palestine Post was a Jewish newspaper, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra was Jewish, and the Palestine Brigade that fought in World War II was Jewish.

Many Arabs in the region rejected the label, insisting instead that they were part of greater Syria or the wider Arab nation.

Only in the mid-20th century, particularly under Yasser Arafat and the PLO, did a separate “Palestinian” identity emerge. It was born not from centuries of shared history but from a political need: to create a narrative that could challenge Jewish nationhood and delegitimize Israel. It was, and remains, a tool of war by other means.

This is the historical bottom line: Jews are the only people with an unbroken, 3,000 year bond to the Land of Israel. The name Palestine was a Roman punishment, not an Arab heritage. Arabs arrived in the 7th century as conquerors from Arabia. The idea of a Palestinian people is a modern invention, forged in the 20th century as part of a political campaign against the Jewish State.

Israel is not a colonial project. It is the restoration of an ancient nation to its ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreigners in Judea; they are Judea’s people. By every measure — historical, cultural, and even genetic — the Jewish nation’s claim is authentic, continuous, and undeniable.

Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.

Post Views: 5
Continue Reading

RSS

Israel Attacked Terrorists in Qatar — and the Media Attacked Israel

Vehicles stop at a red traffic light, a day after an Israeli attack on Hamas leaders, in Doha, Qatar, Sept. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

On Tuesday, September 9, Israel targeted those who sought its destruction and planned the barbaric October 7, 2023 massacre.

Israel launched the daring attack on the Hamas leadership in their Qatari safe haven, after their ongoing refusal to agree to a Gaza ceasefire deal and in the aftermath of a deadly terror attack in Jerusalem, which Hamas claimed responsibility for.

But the media still shilled for Hamas by making Israel look like a rogue state attacking a key diplomatic player and destroying any chance for peace.

News outlets used three methods to achieve this goal:

  • Direct accusations
  • Subtle differentiation between a “legitimate” Hamas political wing and its military one
  • The glorification of Qatar as a business hub rather than a terrorist hub

The Independent and The Washington Post shamelessly employed headlines that portrayed Israel as the regional bully and an aggressor randomly attacking other Middle East countries in a bid for regional domination.

Sky News even blamed Israel for a previous attack on Qatar, although the Iranian regime carried it out:

After we publicly highlighted it, Sky quietly rectified its faux pas with no acknowledgment of the correction.

Meanwhile, the Economist was worried that attacking the very terrorists who ordered the mass murder of Jews on Oct. 7 was “a bridge too far” and that Israel had “crossed a line:”

And the BBC’s security correspondent called Israel’s surprising act of self defense “a campaign of score settling:”

NPR and The Wall Street Journal took the subtle approach of creating a false dichotomy between Hamas’ military and political wings — although the entire group is internationally designated as a terror organization.

This naive approach depicted the targeted Hamas leaders as legitimate officials simply because they carried pens and wore suits instead of AK-47s and green headbands.

They may not have got their hands dirty but this does not absolve them from orchestrating numerous bloody terror attacks, including the slaughter and kidnapping of thousands of people in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Finally, many outlets decried the violation of Qatar’s sovereignty, painting it as a peace-seeking state focused on business and regional cooperation, rather than a patron of terrorists.

The New York Times went as far as calling Qatar “a safe haven for business and tourism in a volatile region,” while it was, in fact, a safe haven for the region’s top jihadists.

How can this media distortion be explained? Why is a facade of legitimacy conferred upon terrorists in suits?

There are only two possible answers: Either the media believe the facade the terrorists want to sell, or they are carrying out an anti-Israel agenda.

Both options are detrimental to professional journalism, as well as to basic human ethics.

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.

Post Views: 9
Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News