Master Sgt. (res.) Naftali Yonah Gordon, 32, a soldier in the 188th Armored Brigade’s 53rd Battalion, was killed in battle in Gaza on Dec. 7, 2023, exactly two months into the war which began when Hamas perpetrated the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust.
Gordon, who made Aliyah with his family from the US when he was a toddler, left behind a wife and two young daughters. His widow, Pesi, whose sister Malki Roth was among those murdered in the 2001 Sbarro massacre, said that he was a perfect husband and father.
Guardian columnist Ahmed Moor published an op-ed on May 29 titled “Why do so many Americans join the Israeli military?” which maliciously defamed the slain soldier as a perpetrator of “genocide”.
Here’s the relevant paragraph:
When you open the link, it takes you to the Washington Post article that clearly identifies the Israeli in question, who Ahmed so cruelly and dishonestly smears, as Naftali Yonah Gordon.
Further, it’s not just Gordon who Moor defames. In addition to characterising all Americans who make Aliyah and join the IDF as having been “radicalised”, he writes that of the American-Israelis that “now, with the genocide in Palestine, we’re faced with a reality in which tens of thousands of Americans are actively involved in war crimes…part of an army responsible for the murder of more than 20,000 children in Gaza“.
To place Moor’s unfathomable moral inversion in context, in a 2024 op-ed at the Guardian, he effectively defended Hamas terrorism, writing the following:
It remains the case that many Palestinians view the Islamist parties Hamas and Islamic Jihad as among the only actors committed to their right to self-defense. That right is self-evident to the Palestinians and their supporters, no matter their views of either party. As Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and former spokesperson of the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, told me: “People under occupation have the right to defend themselves. It is enshrined under international law.”
Hamas’s assertion of Palestine’s right to self defense – in defiance of Israel, the United States, Britain and Germany – also acts as one of the few points of leverage available to the Palestinians after decades of a failed “peace process”.
That wasn’t a one-off for Moor. On October 21st, 2023, he wrote this in the Guardian on his emotional response to the Oct. 7 massacre:
I experienced a commingled set of feelings. You can’t, as a Palestinian, as somebody of conscience, observe that bulldozer breaking through that wall and not feel a sense that “the natives have broken free – good for them”. At the same time, I had a deep sense of foreboding [about Israel’s likely response].
It’s of course not just Moor.
As we’ve documented, the Guardian began promoting the genocide libel within a week of the barbaric attacks by Hamas’s bloodthirsty pogromists, just one example of how the institution, when it comes to covering Israel and diaspora Jews, is not a Western media outlet in any serious sense. Rather, it’s more akin to an anti-Zionist propaganda project, one whose coverage often normalises anti-Jewish ideas and rhetoric, contributing to an atmosphere which makes antisemitic violence more likely.
Despite that fact, we continue challenging the Guardian in the face of erroneous and defamatory reporting and commentary. After all, it’s worth the fight if our efforts result in even a few less lies about Israel and Jews at the outlet.
So, in our complaint to the Guardian Readers’ Editor about Ahmed Moor’s libel, we wrote, in as restrained a manner as we could muster given the obscene accusation, that, for sake of decency, and out of consideration for his surviving wife, that they consider the moral and journalistic appropriateness of referring to Gordon as someone who died while committing “genocide”, despite the absence of any evidence that he was guilty of any misconduct whatsoever, yet alone a war crime of that magnitude.
So far, there’s been no response.
For those who wish to assist us in getting the libel removed from Moor’s op-ed, you can contact the readers’ editor at guardian.readers@theguardian.
