By Brittany Bernsetin
Monday, August 25, 2025
The ‘Face and Voice of Gaza’
“He Was the Face and Voice of Gaza. Israel Assassinated
Him,” writes Lydia Polgreen for the New York Times.
“Eleven days ago, Israel assassinated a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, a young man who had suddenly become the face and voice of the
desperate people of his homeland, Gaza,” she writes of Anas al-Sharif, an
Al-Jazeera employee who was killed in an Israeli airstrike earlier this month.
But al-Sharif was more than just a journalist.
The IDF has offered evidence proving that he was a commander of a terrorist cell in a Hamas-guided
rockets platoon. An internal Hamas document obtained by the IDF shows
that al-Sharif was registered as a soldier and team commander. The IDF also
shared a photo of the “journalist” being
embraced by former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
But Polgreen seeks to explain away al-Sharif’s ties to
Hamas.
“Even if one takes Israel’s allegations at face value . .
. and entertain[s] the idea that in 2013, at the age of 17, al-Sharif joined
Hamas in some form, what are we to make of that choice? Hamas at that time had
been the governing authority of his homeland since 2006. It ran the entire
state apparatus of a tiny enclave,” she writes.
She also quotes Tareq Baconi, who serves as president of
the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network: Hamas “is a
movement with a vast social infrastructure connected to many Palestinians who
are unaffiliated with either the movement’s political or military platforms.”
Polgreen argues that the “history of war correspondence
is replete with examples of fighters turned reporters — indeed perhaps the most
famous among them, George Orwell, recorded soldiers’ lives while fighting in
the Spanish Civil War and became a war correspondent.”
“These days, having served in the military is widely seen
as an asset among American war reporters,” she adds. “Far from seeing those who
served as hopelessly biased, editors rightly value the expertise and
perspective these reporters bring from their experiences and trust them to
prioritize their new role as journalistic observers. In Israel most young
people are required to serve in the military, so military experience is common
among journalists.”
Polgreen is willing to overlook the fact that Hamas is
“different” and “engaged in horrifying terror tactics” because it is also the
“accepted authority in Gaza.”
It’s no wonder, then, that she also downplays the fact
that Hamas operates in civilian areas.
“To justify its pitiless pulverizing of Gaza, Israel has
endlessly invoked the threat of Hamas, supposedly lurking in schools,
hospitals, homes and mosques,” she writes.
As pro-Israel watchdog group Honest Reporting notes,
Polgreen is a member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a
group that “has been exposed for consistently
mourning ‘journalists’ who were either members of or had affiliations with
terror organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (DFLP).”
The larger media reaction to al-Sharif’s death left James
Kirchick questioning who counts as a journalist in Gaza in an essay for the Wall Street Journal.
As Kirchick notes, the phenomenon of mourning
“journalists” with ties to Hamas is not exclusive to Polgreen:
“No conflict in modern history
has seen a higher number of journalists killed,” Amnesty International tweeted.
Reporters Without Borders (known by the French acronym RSF) claims that “Palestine has become the
most dangerous state in the world for media professionals.” The Committee to
Protect Journalists puts the count of “journalists and
media workers killed in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory” plus
Lebanon at 192 since Oct. 7, 2023.
Yet of those 192 journalists, “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 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 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.”
And while the committee says that 24 of those 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.”
Headline
Fail of the Week
The BBC is under fire once again for misleading readers
with its reporting on Gaza. “Malnourished Gazan woman flown to Italy dies in
hospital,” the outlet reported.
But it later emerged that the woman had died from
leukemia.
BBC journalist Rachel Muller-Heyndyk had reported that
the woman “was evacuated to Italy for treatment while severely emaciated” and
noted, “The UN has warned of widespread malnutrition in Gaza.”
“The University Hospital of Pisa said that she suffered a
cardiac arrest and died on Friday, less than 48 hours after arriving,” the
report said. “The hospital said she had suffered severe loss of weight and
muscle, while Italian news agencies reported she was suffering from severe
malnutrition.”
The headline was later amended to read, “Gazan woman
flown to Italy dies in hospital,” while the story was edited to say that
additional reporting from the hospital and Israeli aid officials uncovered a
“very complex clinical picture,” including the woman’s leukemia diagnosis.
“This article’s headline originally said that Marah Abu
Zuhri died of malnutrition, with the introduction stating that she suffered a
cardiac arrest and died on Friday,” a correction read. “The headline has been
amended to remove the reference to malnutrition being the cause of death in
what the hospital described as a ‘very complex clinical picture.’”
The BBC said it was not aware that the woman was being
treated for leukemia when the story first ran.
Media Misses
• In a shocking turn of events, a New Yorker staff
writer who accused Sydney Sweeney of being an “Aryan Princess” has been
tweeting racist things for years. Doreen St. Félix deleted her X account after
users found old posts, some of them more than a decade old, where she said
things like “I hate white men” and that “white capitalism” is the “reason the
earth is in peril.”
• Atlantic writer Faith Hill appeared on CNN last
week to argue that young women are becoming distrustful of dating apps because
of young men’s shift to the political right. “You see that young men are moving
further to the right, young women growing more progressive. And I think, for a
lot of women in particular, it can just sort of feel like, ‘This is not a time
where I trust men — [where] I feel respected by men. I don’t necessarily want
to go out and meet strangers who are men,’” Hill said.
No comments:
Post a Comment