A half year before Hamas’s invasion of Israel and massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli police used force to remove armed rioters from Al-Aqsa Mosque, who intended to attack worshipers during a sensitive time when Passover, Ramadan, and Easter overlapped.
The videos went viral. Incorrect reports said the police had attacked Muslim worshipers when, in fact, the police used force in self-defense against rioters who intended to attack worshipers and ended up attacking the police.
The incorrect reports led directly to anti-Israel riots across the globe, rockets fired at Israeli civilians, and the murders of an Italian tourist in Tel Aviv and and her daughters, Maia and Rina, near Hamra, in the Jordan Valley.
Lucy’s widower, Rabbi Leo Dee, passionately begged the international media at the time to report about Israel more responsibly.
“World media: Show me your true colors,” he implored. “Do you really believe in moral equivalence? Will you continue to support evil by giving it a voice? Am I and my family really a threat to world peace? We who teach kindness and love? We who value life over anything else? Is this anonymous killer really justified? Is he progressing moral values and a future for himself?
“Come on! Wake up! Listen to your souls. Do you really believe it? Or does it just sell advertising space for material goods none of us really need?”
Spoiler alert: The media did not wake up. They employed the usual false moral equivalence in reporting about the Dee family’s murders. Al Jazeera’s headline was “Israeli settlers killed in occupied West Bank shooting,” and the Associated Press’s headline wasn’t much better.
After Rabbi Dee’s dare went unheeded, no one should have been surprised that incorrect reports about Jews ascending the Temple Mount during Sukkot six months later led to ordinary Gazans joining Hamas’s well-planned infiltrations and murders.
AND NOW, after nearly 20 months of war on the military and media battlefields, why is anyone still surprised that dishonest reporting kills?
The tragic murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky in Washington, DC, last week should have been a wake-up call for American Jews, underscoring that they are under constant threat from the same antisemitism that attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
There should have been marches of proud pro-Israel Jews throughout the United States, warning that “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada” are calls to murder more Jews. They should have demanded that the murders become a turning point like George Floyd’s in May 2020.
As Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz of Los Angeles’s Valley Beth Shalom wrote in his excellent new book The Case for Dual Loyalty: “In this October 8 world, we have an opportunity to forge a new path forward as to how we imagine Jewish citizenship. It begins by acknowledging the rampant, socially acceptable Jew-hatred that has permeated many public spaces in America and around the world.
“It begins by recognizing that many of the strategies that we employed as a people in thousands of years of diasporic experience have simply not worked. Our situation today provides a new framework to move ahead.”
If the martyrdom of Milgrim and Lischinsky in the US capital did not cause a mass outcry among American Jews, inspiring them to embrace their dual loyalty publicly, perhaps it is not too late for the wake-up call to at least impact how they view coverage of Israel’s current war in the international media.
In the final post on his X account before his murder, Lischinsky warned of the dangerous consequences of irresponsible reporting, blood libels, and disinformation. He called out United Nations emergency relief coordinator Tom Fletcher for his false claim on the BBC that 14,000 babies died in Gaza in two days.
Even after the BBC itself corrected Fletcher – saying that a report he cited had merely warned of potential acute malnutrition over the course of a year, and the UN retracted its own report – media outlets around the world, including ABC and NBC, continued to broadcast and print his false accusation.
The murders of Milgrim and Lischinsky were then twisted by the media. Some neglected to mention that they were killed at a Jewish event at a Jewish museum, as if it were a random mugging gone wrong.
Justifying the brutal killings
The Daily Beast justified the brutal killings by comparing them to an incident in Jenin in which the IDF fired warning shots in the air in the vicinity of a delegation of foreign diplomats who were visiting the area.
Anti-Israel activists with huge followings on social media went further. Guy Christensen, who has more than three million TikTok followers, defended the double murder as an “act of resistance.” Hasan Piker, one of the top streamers on Twitch, suggested the crime was “engineered by Israel” and called the murderer “genuine in his actions.”
Thankfully, Jerusalem Post Conference speaker Dr. Phil told the truth on his show, citing the media watchdog HonestReporting in highlighting the role anti-Israel media spin plays in fueling antisemitic violence and biased narratives, leading to real-world consequences.
But any hopes that lessons had finally been learned proved fleeting shortly thereafter, when the foreign press reported on Alaa Najjar. Hamas said she was a doctor and mother of nine children who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on May 2 while on duty at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza.
The international media, either uncritically or deliberately, spread old and fake photos, misidentifying the husband’s niece as the mother. A dramatic photo of a screaming woman holding the wrapped body of a baby, surrounded by a crying boy and a man trying to console her, was actually from December 2023.
The death of any child is a tragedy that cannot be minimized, and there is no doubt about the death of Najjar’s children. But there were holes in Hamas’s narrative that should have been questioned by any journalist who wanted to get to the bottom of the story.
One can only hope and pray that incorrect reporting about Najjar will not lead to further attacks in Israel, the US, or anywhere else in the world.
The lives lost due to dishonest reporting must finally start to matter.
The writer is the executive director and executive editor of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.