The Washington Post, fresh off its Pulitzer Prize for breaking the news about the “loud noises” that infamously interrupted that Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July, has a bit of egg on its face. This time, it’s for reporting what the lying terrorist propagandists at the Hamas “health ministry” said as if it were true.
On Sunday, a pro-Hamas illegal alien Egyptian launched a Molotov cocktail terrorist attack in Boulder because he’s outraged at the way the Israelis are supposedly committing war crimes against the Palestinians. Attacking Jews and their allies here in America was his “solution.”
The motive for his attack, which he yelled in explanation while he was perpetrating it, still somehow totally eluded the geniuses in the Leftmedia.
Earlier that same day, The Washington Post falsely reported on some of the alleged atrocities in Gaza. One of the authors was Louisa Loveluck, who The Washington Free Beacon notes is “a former Al Jazeera correspondent … who recently made headlines for delivering an anti-Israel diatribe to the Post newsroom.” She was also part of a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Gaza. The Post’s original story said:
At least 31 people were killed Sunday morning in Southern Gaza, according to the Strip’s Health Ministry, when Israeli troops opened fire on crowds making their way to collect aid from a new distribution mechanism backed by Israel and the United States that has been marred by chaos and violence since it began operating last week. More than 170 others were wounded Sunday in the Rafah shooting, officials said, marking the deadliest incident yet as Palestinians desperately scramble for food despite the danger.
The Post stealth-edited its story later that day to be more passive: “More than 30 killed by gunfire near U.S. aid site in Gaza,” read the new headline, with the story explaining, “Scores of Palestinians were killed and wounded trying to reach a food distribution site in southern Gaza on Sunday, according to residents, medics, and the local health ministry.”
Hmm. So, who did the shooting, then? Footage of the distribution site in question showed nothing happening at all. The Israel Defense Forces released drone footage of a different distribution center (another detail the Post got wrong), showing masked men firing rifles into a crowd. You know who wears masks? Hamas fighters. That’s not definitive proof, of course, and the IDF is not above using propaganda itself. But it’s not as if Hamas doesn’t use civilians as human shields. Maybe now they’re human targets for propaganda purposes.
On Tuesday, the Post issued a statement about the story. Here’s a portion of what the paper said on X:
Correction: We’ve deleted the post below because it and early versions of the article didn’t meet Post fairness standards. …
The article failed to make clear if attributing the deaths to Israel was the position of the Gaza health ministry or a fact verified by The Post. The article and headline were updated on Sunday evening making it clear that there was no consensus about who was responsible for the shootings and that there was a dispute over that question.
Other than that, though, the story was accurate!
My point here isn’t limited to The Washington Post, although it is a flagship newspaper for the Leftmedia. The Post wasn’t the only media outlet to repeat Hamas’s false claims about Sunday’s shooting as facts in headlines, and this story is far from the only example of such anti-Israel lies.
In fact, that is the point. Mainstream media outlets routinely cite Hamas without sufficiently qualifying those citations. As Hot Air’s David Strom observes, “They credulously publish the most outlandish claims made by Hamas as if they were fact, employ actual Hamas members as reporters and photographers, and use loaded language that slanders Israel daily.”
By contrast, you will never see the legacy media cite, say, The Heritage Foundation without noting that it’s “right wing” or some such. No such labels are applied to the Left, or to deceitful and antagonistic players around the world.
Hamas jihadis are certainly well aware that they can say whatever they want, and Western media outlets will repeat it. If it’s later exposed as a lie, so what? The damage has been done because useful idiots on college campuses will believe there’s a genocide in Gaza.
So the pertinent, specific, and admittedly rhetorical question is this: Now that the Post has had to issue an embarrassing correction, why would the paper ever cite Hamas again?
If “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” maybe journalism dies in propaganda.
