Another Myth Falls Apart: Our Slain ‘Colleagues’

It was one of the most powerful narratives of the Gaza war: first dozens, then hundreds, of “journalists” were killed. Names on lists, photographs in tributes, numbers in headlines — and the same conclusion: Israel had made journalists targets.

Except that there was a problem with that story all along, and it turns out to be a massive one.

The Israel Defense Forces has published files on 170 people presented after death as journalists or media workers, but whom Israel says it identified as members of terrorist organizations in Gaza. The evidence provided in the link below is stunning.

According to the IDF, 118 served in Hamas’s military wing, 49 belonged to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and three to other armed organizations.

Seventeen, allegedly took part on October 7.

The files include names, photographs, military IDs, affiliations, and declassified documents. Alleged roles include snipers, commanders, instructors, and propaganda-unit members.

That last category matters. These were people feeding a Western ecosystem primed to believe anything about Israel — from heirs of Marx and Stalin to admirers of political Islam — including claims about “tens of thousands of children” killed.

A 14- or 16-year-old fighting for a terrorist organization is a minor. But calling him simply a “child” while omitting that he was armed is not journalism. If Hamas regarded such teenagers as children, it should have treated them as children rather than turning them into jihadists.

None of this means every journalist killed in Gaza was a terrorist. But it creates a problem when Israel says 170 were members of terrorist organizations, while estimates of media workers killed ranged from 189 in some CPJ tallies to over 200 in Reporters Without Borders figures.

Claims of systematic Israeli “targeted killings of journalists” therefore deserve far more scrutiny than most newsrooms have given them.

Putting on a vest marked PRESS does not make someone a journalist. When the wearer is also a terrorist, pretending otherwise starts to stink.

And here, it stank from the start.

Those of us who challenged this and other dubious claims learned what “activist” and leftist journalism can do best: silence dissent.

Their purpose was not to answer the argument but to make dissent costly.

Yet freedom of expression belongs to all of us.

One by one, their fabrications are being exposed.

On September 24, the Committee to Protect Journalists removed 22 people it had previously listed as journalists killed in Gaza. Among the reasons cited were obituaries from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that identified some as members.

That should have prompted soul-searching. Instead, the correction received a fraction of the attention the original allegation did.

Other Gaza narratives are also being challenged: the sweeping use of “genocide” and the portrayal of skeletal children as victims of Israeli starvation, without proper examination of medical conditions or context.

All of this came together with the usual slur, portraying a developed democracy as a nation of monsters while sanitizing the Islamist madness and its crimes even against its own people. Many of the same “progressive” voices were silent about killings in Iran or in Putin’s Russia, where journalists have been murdered, imprisoned, threatened, or disappeared. CPJ reports that 43 journalists have been killed there for dissent.

I take that for granted. Wars produce crimes. But that is totally different from saying they were systematic, ordered from above, or reflected something inherent about Jews or Israelis.

Nor does October 7 excuse wrongdoing. A crime remains a crime.

But a claim of planned genocide against more than two million people demands answers, not slogans or blood libels.

If extermination was the objective, how does that align with the war’s scale and conduct, including the civilian-to-combatant ratios — particularly when Hamas operated among civilians and used civilian infrastructure militarily?

Those are legitimate questions. For too long, people treated asking them as a moral failing.

Well, it was not. It was journalism.

And one more thing:

This documentary offers an evidence-based response to a film built by two left-wing Israeli filmmakers around anonymous testimony and a deeply defamatory portrayal of their own countrymen.

Watch it and judge the evidence.

Getting closer to the truth was not difficult for everyone else.

Someone simply had to bother looking.