Journalism Succumbs To Its Wounds

By Seth Mandel

Monday, May 11, 2026

 

The famous saying attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre holds that “the anti-Semite doesn’t accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.”

 

That is no doubt as true today as ever, regardless of the quote’s origins. And it immediately comes to mind when watching, in real time, the evolution in the latest in a long line of accusations about the nefarious trained militarism of Zionist animals. Whereas many of these rumors—my favorite being the griffin vulture that Arab governments claimed had been trained as a Mossad spy—had an air of levity about them, the new one most certainly does not. And that is the idea that Zionist dogs are trained to rape Arabs.

 

The anti-Zionist activists who started or popularized the rumors have made clear that there is no evidence in their favor. That didn’t stop the sick-minded anti-Israel protesters from adopting the talking point, as demonstrators did in London. From there, however, it has moved to the pages of the New York Times, where Nicholas Kristof repeats it.

 

I watched other sensational “reports” of Israeli perfidy circulate among people who treated them as fact recently and thought about how the question of whether Western journalism will ever recover from its alliance with the machinery of Hamas propaganda appears to have been answered. No.

                                                                        

I saw a video of a woman wearing a “PRESS” vest in Southern Lebanon, (though her bio lists no affiliation) and proceed to read a list of talking points off of a card and then say “I just received a heartbreaking report”—please note the wording—of an Israeli drone following a girl riding a scooter and shooting at her until she was mortally wounded.

 

Usually the reporter reports. But when it comes to Israel, activists costumed as journalists “receive” reports and then continue the game of telephone. “Somebody told me” is not reporting, but you can report out what somebody told you. Reporters know the difference, or should.

 

Anyway I only saw this because Leighton Woodhouse, the conservative activist and filmmaker, repeated it, ironically calling it “real life” despite there being no claims of corroboration even by the activists pushing the story.

 

Perhaps because I spent formative years of my career as a real reporter I’m just over-sensitive about this stuff. Perhaps if you “identify” as a reporter then that’s what you are.

 

But then we get to another aspect of the same set-piece scandal. In March, Salo Aizenberg, a board member at HonestReporting and among the most meticulous researchers on the conflict, wrote an article about 10 Gaza “journalists” who turned out to be combatants from Hamas and other local terrorist groups. Aizenberg noted that there were 35 such cases so far, and that independent analysis has found that “60% of those described as ‘journalists’ or ‘media personnel’ had documented ties to militant organizations.” In other words, the majority.

 

Aizenberg began his list with Yacoup Al-Borsh, a Hamas figure that the Committee to Protect Journalists listed as a journalist slain by Israel during the conflict. After publication of Aizenberg’s article, CPJ removed Borsh from its list, apparently with no explanation.

 

This well-documented phenomenon of supposed “civilians” actually being part of Gaza’s various armed forces—in other words, the invading army—goes well beyond journalists. For example, the New York Post just revealed that USAID has found four more employees of the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency who were involved in the grisly crimes of October 7. “The recent investigation by the USAID IG confirms that the UN is deficient in vetting its own staff for ties to terrorist organizations,” an official told the Post.

 

I wrote about this in 2024 in a post titled “Gaza, Land of Make-Believe,” describing the enclave as a place where doctors who aren’t actually doctors work in hospitals that aren’t really hospitals, where journalists aren’t journalists and aid workers aren’t aid workers and teachers aren’t teachers. The problem is that it’s easy for an organization like CPJ to quietly delete someone’s page from a false list well after the fighting stops and the hoax has outlived its usefulness. So that’s what they do.

 

And “reporters” do the same, and continue to do so, as recent events show. I used to ask if there were any journalists at all in Gaza, but Gazans might ask the same about the rest of the world.