The immediate reaction by journalists covering the region to Hamas’s mass murder, torture, rape and mutilation of Jews on Oct. 7th is a moral test like few others. The antisemitic savagery carried out by the terror group’s death squads throughout Israeli communities like Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nahal Oz, Nir Oz, Ofakim and Re’im resulted in the murder of over 1200, with hundreds more taken hostage, and as many have noted, represented the most deadly attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Though, as we’ve demonstrated, some media outlets, journalists and columnists, after a period of weeks, decided to shift from the uncomfortable and ideologically disorienting reality of Palestinian antisemitism and Hamas barbarism to one where the Jewish state, in its military response to the attack, became the perpetrators of ‘crimes against humanity’, ethnic cleansers and genocidaires.
Some didn’t wait weeks, or even days.
For instance, on the evening of Oct. 7th, while Hamas butchers were still in Israeli territory, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Bethan McKernan tweeted that “Until this morning, tearing down the walls that have hemmed in Gaza’s 2.3m people for 16 years was unthinkable. Whatever else happens now, this is a clear sign that the siege, and 56-year-old occupation, are not sustainable projects“.
That same night, she penned her first Guardian analysis on the massacre, focusing on the current threat to Palestinian civilians in the aftermath of Hamas’s offensive.
But, nothing much at the Guardian shocks us, as its long been a purveyor of the most unhinged anti-Zionist propaganda and, more than occasionally, antisemitic tropes.
The London-based Financial Times, on the other hand, is a far more respected global outlet, one which focuses on business and economic current affairs and fancies itself as being recognised internationally for its “authority, integrity and accuracy”. So, its Oct. 7th coverage is far more revealing, offering a glimpse into a broader media failure we’ve documented since that dark Shabbat day.
On Oct. 8th, the outlet published an official editorial on the previous day’s massacre. Though the Palestinian violence was still unfolding, and Israel hadn’t yet began a serious military response, editors opted for cliches and platitudes, such their warning Jerusalem that “violence begets violence”, over moral clarity and serious analysis.
It also repeated the mantra that “the region can only secure peace if the decades-old Palestinian demand for a viable state is addressed with serious intent“. In addition to ignoring the actual consequences of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, their suggestion that the group’s bloodthirsty pogromists would somehow be appeased by the quotidian demands of attending to the social and economic requirements of statehood beggars belief.
On Oct. 10th, FT editors published a list of suggested reading for understanding the Oct. 7th massacre in particular, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more broadly – a list which included books by anti-Zionist propagandists like Rashid Khalidi, Nathan Thrall and Joe Sacco.
The FT’s US editor Edward Luce, in an op-ed (“Biden, Netanyahu and America’s choice”, Oct. 11), absolved Palestinian terrorists of responsibility for the massacre, writing that “Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel has starved non-violent Palestinian alternatives” and that the violence is the result of Israeli leaders “depriv[ing] Palestinians of hope for the future and peaceful outlets to express their frustrations”.
FT contributor Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian writer and political commentator, literally justified Hamas’s massacre in an Oct. 7 retweet, before publishing an op-ed at the outlet a couple of weeks later accusing the Jewish state of treacherously using the attacks as pretext to carry out their long desired wish to empty Gaza entirely of their population.
Here’s her retweet:
Kim Ghattas, a distinguished fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics, is another FT contributor who effectively gave the pogromists a moral pass, tweeting this on Oct. 7th:
The FT contributor, in addition to falsely claiming that Gaza was under “occupation”, was clearly more morally outraged by Israel’s (potential) “wrath” than with the medieval savagery meted out to men, women and children by Hamas, in a massacre she described as an “operation” and “incursion”.
Ghattas also wrote what was effectively a defense of Hamas in a FT op-ed three days later, arguing that, at its core, “the current conflict is about the longest occupation in modern history, one that leaves the Palestinians dispossessed“.
No, it’s about the lethal antisemitism of a movement whose objective is the annihilation of the Jewish state – and one which still enjoys a disturbing amount of support from within the Palestinian population. The FT’s early coverage of Oct. 7th is another illustration of the moral corruption within too many Western media institutions, particularly in their insistence on framing the pathologies of anti-Western extremists as legitimate grievances.
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The FT is still at it – more like Goebbels propaganda to stir up international Anti -Semitism!