Imagine the reaction if Western media outlets participated in a campaign for Hamas to release the hostages in Gaza, which included suggested talking points, that was launched and coordinated in part by a pro-Israeli organisation in the UK: Let’s call it CAMERA-UK.
The outrage expressed in posts decrying the media’s subservience to the “pro-Israel lobby” would trend on X, and newspaper editors who didn’t join the call to highlight the suffering of emaciated and tortured Israeli civilians in Hamas’s dungeons would emphatically denounce those outlets who did sign up for the ‘hasbara’ campaign.
Of course, CAMERA UK strives to hold outlets accountable to their own editorial standards of accuracy. We certainly do NOT engage in campaigns to tell outlets what they should publish, and which humanitarian campaigns they should enlist in.
Well, today, the Guardian, Press Gazette and the Independent self-conscripted to a political campaign, coordinated in part by the political, pro-BDS NGO Avaaz, to libel Israel as a state which intentionally murders journalists. Avaaz’s partner NGO in this campaign is Reporters Without Borders.
Here’s the campaign’s letter to outlets, which, as you see, includes directives on where to place the story, what language to use and suggested hashtags for social media.
One of the Guardian’s articles in their campaign (‘The deadly toll on journalists in the Gaza war‘, Sept. 1), written by Annie Kelly, the outlet’s “human rights journalist”, includes a strap line that could have been pulled from a Hamas propaganda memo:
With foreign media barred, Palestinians have reported alone, facing the ‘most deliberate effort to kill and silence’ them ever.
It also includes a lie in the first sentence, writing that “Over the past 22 months, the war in Gaza has become the most deadly conflict for journalists in history.”
The article cites the Committee to Protect Journalists figure, 192, for journalists killed in Gaza, which, as we’ll show later, is grossly inaccurate as it includes in its list Palestinians who clearly are not journalists. Nonetheless, even based on that benchmark, the Oct. 7th war has not been “the deadliest conflict for journalists in history“.
The Syrian Civil War has reportedly claimed the lives of 717 journalists and media workers.
Further, over 1,400 journalists and newspaper editors were killed during the Holocaust, based on a search on Yad Vashem’s database. As researcher Salo Eizenberg commented upon citing the Yad Vashem figures, the Nazis erased the massive Yiddish press in Europe at the time.
Then, the Guardian reporter pivots to the following grossly misleading allegation, writing that, “Last week, five Palestinian journalists were killed in a double strike on Nasser hospital by the Israeli military…”.
Naturally, Kelly omits that six identified Hamas fighters were killed in the same IDF strikes at Nasser hospital.
Though the army is investigating the incident to determine why the attack resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians, including the five journalists, the Guardian fails to note that the presence of Hamas terrorists at the hospital is illegal, representing another example of the group’s human shield/human sacrifice policy. This tactic, which intentionally embeds fighters in civilian locations, likely helps explain the deaths of some of the other media workers in Gaza.
The lies continue when Kelly writes that, a week earlier, “the Israeli military said it deliberately targeted the Al Jazeera crew – the correspondent Anas al-Sharif, who had reported on the war since its outset”, and that “no evidence has ever been offered by the Israelis to substantiate their claim that Sharif was a Hamas terrorist“. Yet, even Guardian articles published at the time of the attack on al-Sharif grudgingly acknowledged that the military showed Hamas salary records indicating he received payments from the proscribed terror group.
Kelly, citing the claims of CPJ, describes as “misinformation” evidence that many if not most of those listed as “journalists” were in fact affiliated with proscribed terror groups.
Tellingly, the Guardian article included a montage of Palestinian “journalists” killed in Gaza that included Abdallah Aljamal, a Hamas operative widely reported to have held three Israeli hostages captive in his home for over eight months.
In fact, widely cited, in-depth research in January, 2024, by independent journalist David Collier, showed that at least half of the CPJ list of “journalists” killed in Gaza were in fact affiliated with terror groups. Another 25%, Collier demonstrated, didn’t seem to be journalists at all. Rather, he showed, they were employed in other professions.
Additionally, others on the CPJ list unaffiliated with terror groups were, Collier showed, certainly moral monsters – those who celebrated the Oct. 7th massacre, or other murderous attacks on Jewish civilians. One such journalist on the CPJ list, Hassuna Salim, as you can see on page 26 of Collier’s report (Warning: Graphic Image) flooded laughing emojis under a video showing a group of terrorists entering a room where an Israeli family had been slaughtered.
More recently, journalist James Kirchick, writing in the Wall Street Journal on August 21, explained that:
“Of the 192 putative journalists on the CPJ [Committee to Protect Journalists] list, 26 were employed by or freelanced for Al-Aqsa TV, which the committee generously describes as ‘Hamas-affiliated.’ Nineteen were employed by Al-Quds Al-Youm, which the State Department says is ‘run by Islamic Jihad,’ and seven worked for Palestine Today, which the CPJ itself calls ‘pro-Islamic Jihad.’ Six worked for Al Mayadeen or Al-Manar, the former affiliated with and the latter owned by Hezbollah, and another 23 worked for outlets connected to terrorist groups ranging from Hamas and the [PFLP] to the Houthis. Not counting those the IDF has accused of being terrorists themselves—including Sharif—nearly half the people on the committee’s list worked for media owned by or affiliated with terrorist organizations.”
Kirchick continues:
Most of the journalists who have died in Gaza were on what the CPJ calls “dangerous assignment”—death was a risk they took while working in a war zone.
But the committee alleges that 24 of the 192 listed journalists were actually “murdered” by Israel.
Most of the allegedly murdered journalists, however, worked for terrorist-aligned media outlets or were, according to Israel, terrorists themselves. The committee called “murdered” Ahmed Mansour, for instance, whom it described “an editor for the pro-Palestinian Islamic Jihad news agency Palestine Today.” Similarly, Ayman al-Gedi was “a camera operator for Al-Quds Al-Youm TV, a channel affiliated with the Islamic Jihad militant group,” CPJ acknowledges. Israel has accused Ismail al-Ghoul, a correspondent for Al Jazeera, of participating in the Oct. 7 attack and killed him in a targeted air strike in July 2024. Al Jazeera has denied that al-Ghoul was a Hamas member.
(Note that our colleagues at CAMERA Arabic confirmed that Kirchick’s numbers are accurate.)
What most of these Palestinian men did, Kirchick added, “wasn’t journalism, and claiming otherwise dishonors the real journalists who risk and sometimes lose their lives endeavoring to bring us the truth.”
Finally, it’s telling that the Guardian reporter didn’t appear to include any original research when writing her copy and paste CPJ-based, NGO-inspired ‘article’. It was churnalism and political campaigning, not journalism.
As we’ve demonstrated over the last fifteen years of posts and research, and particularly since Oct.7th, the Guardian is not a media outlet in the traditional Western understanding of that term. Rather, when it comes to covering Israel, Palestinians and Jews more broadly, it’s an anti-Zionist ideological project operating under the guise of ‘journalism’.
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See a Hebrew version of this post, here.
This post was edited on Sept. 4th to add information about the Guardian’s inclusion of terrorist Abdallah Aljamal on their montage of slain “journalists”.
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