At UPI, Hang Glider Journalist Adam Schrader Shills For Hamas

By: Tamar Sternthal February 21, 2024

“It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore nobody should blame us for the things that we do,” Hamas’ Ghazi Hamad said in an Oct. 24 LBC TV (Lebanon) interview regarding the Oct. 7 carnage inflicted by Hamas.

Hamad would get a big lift from the work of Adam Schrader, an international news editor for United Press International in New York.

In his error-ridden Feb. 18 article, “Yoav Gallant claims Hamas is looking for a successor for Sinwar,” Schrader shifts blame to Israel for Hamas’ atrocities, fabricating: “Hamas has blamed the attack on the killing of hundreds of Palestinians and arrest of many more by Israel in the months before the war broke out. Israel had also raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites.” Hamas, for its part, was extremely forthcoming regarding the motive for the Oct. 7 attacks: the very annihilation of Israel, a goal which Hamas said it intends to achieve by repeating Oct. 7-inspired attacks again and again until the Jewish state is erased from the map. Hamad said so himself in the aforementioned October interview (posted below).

Indeed, Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, in which approximately 1,200 were murdered, more than 250 kidnapped, and at least 60,000 residents of southern Israel were displaced is a step towards the realization of Hamas’ “stances on Palestinian sovereignty,” as Schrader delicately phrases Hamas’ goal to eliminate Israel. Covering up Hamas’ genocidal goals, Schrader opines: “Over the years, Hamas has fought multiple wars against Israeli forces occupying Gaza where it remains popular for its stances of Palestinian sovereignty.” The terror organization’s governing charter, still in force, calls on its followers to “fight the Jews and kill them” and to replace Israel with an Islamic state. Nowhere does Schrader inform readers that Hamas’ “stances of Palestinian sovereignty” involve the complete erasure of Israel – “From the River to the Sea,” a point which AFP commendably corrected in recent month.

Screenshot of Hamas propaganda video showing training for Oct. 7 terror attack

Thus, couch journalist Schrader has branched into a new speciality: hang glider journalism, or shilling for Hamas post-Oct. 7, 2023, when hundreds of terrorists used motorized hang gliders, among other means, to infiltrate into southern Israel and perpetrate the most deadly massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Swooping in with great conviction and few facts, the New York news editor whitewashes and justifies Hamas’ heinous atrocities.

Schrader similarly sanitizes Sinwar’s earlier crimes, writing:

Over the years, Sinwar was one of many Palestinians arrested by Israel for supporting a free Palestine. His rise to power in Gaza began in the 1980s, when he earned a reputation for killing Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.

Sinwar allegedly planned the abduction of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians suspected of cooperating with Israel in 1988 during a series of protests and riots against Israeli occupation, known as the First Intifada. He was arrested again and sentenced to four life sentences in 1989.

Sinwar was not “arrested by Israel for supporting a free Palestine.” Israel does not arrest Palestinians “for supporting a free Palestine.” In Sinwar’s case, he was arrested and convicted of murder of four Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers – a fact which Schrader obscures with linguistic cover ups including “reputation for killing Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel” and “allegedly planned the abduction of two Israeli soldiers.” Again, he was convicted of the abduction and murder of the two Israeli soldiers, along with the murder of four Palestinians. 
About the Oct. 7 atrocities, Schrader writes: “Israel has accused Sinwar of organizing the attack on October 7, which many have characterized as a terror attack.” (President Joe Biden was among the “many” who called the Oct. 7 massacre a terror attack.) CAMERA has called on UPI to clarify whether the news organization’s policy is to refrain from identifying the mass slaughter of youth at a dance party, and the rampant murder, multilation, and kidnapping of families, including small children, the elderly, and women, a terror attack, when the victims happen to be Israeli and the perpetrators are Palestinians. 
 
A bipartisan group of Congressmen recently called out the Associated Press for such a policy. As Jewish Insider reported:
 

The letter, led by Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Mike Gallagher (R-WI), states that the lawmakers are “deeply disturbed by the AP’s failure to accurately label Hamas a terrorist organization.” It warns of “potential dangers that may arise” from this guidance.

The lawmakers said that the guidance ignores a definition of terrorism and description of the Hamas attacks provided in the same document. 

“The decision by the AP to avoid using terms such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ due to their perceived politicization is deeply unsettling,” they wrote. “Mislabeling Hamas undermines journalistic integrity and confuses the public as to the nature of events transpiring in Israel and Gaza. By not accurately labeling Hamas and its continued terroristic actions, we believe the AP inadvertently provides cover for these heinous acts to be accepted.”

The letter makes the case that “failing to accurately describe Hamas as a terrorist organization can result in significant consequences for public perception, online discourse, and even the safety of communities,” arguing that the AP’s “mislabeling [of] Hamas and its actions” is helping to legitimize the Hamas attack and could fuel surging antisemitism “based on a skewed understanding of the conflict.”

Relatedly, Schrader repeatedly mislabels Hamas, the designated terror organization, a militia. “Militia” refers to a supplemental force in additon to the government’s army. In the case of the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is the ruler, the Hamas army is the official army. It’s no militia.

Schrader also egregiously mischaracterizes the 1948 war and says of Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar:

The militia leader was born in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, then under Egyptian rule, to parents who were forced out of their homes by Jewish settlers during the 1948 war when Israel declared its independence.

The expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes came in a campaign known as the Nakba, in which at least a dozen women were raped by Israeli forces and 15,000 other people were killed during a series of massacres.

The vast majority of the estimated 750,000 Palestinian refugees from 1948, including those from Ashkelon (where Sinwar’s parents originated), fled from their homes, often at the urging of their own leaders. Only a small minority faced expulsion at the hands of Israelis. Recently, Agence France Presse corrected the identical falsehood, as had Reuters Arabic and The Guardian previously. What substantiation does Adam Schrader have for the claim that Sinwar’s parents were forced out of their home, and that they didn’t flee, like almost all of the Arabs who left what is now Ashkelon in 1948? 
More broadly, there was no “campaign known as the Nakba” to expel 750,000, massacre and rape. There was a defensive war of survival in which the nascent Jewish state fought off the invasion of five Arab armies seeking to undo the United Nations General Assembly vote recognizing the establishment of the State of Israel. “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” is the term that Palestinians use to describe the founding of the Jewish state, which was established with international legitimacy and on territory that never before in history was under Palestinian sovereignty.

Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where Hamas murdered or kidnapped 10 percent of the population on Oct. 7. Of the 37 residents of the youth neighborhood (pictured here), 11 were murdered and seven were kidnapped (Photo by Tamar Sternthal)

Schrader’s vitriolic propaganda about the 1948 war includes references to unspecified massacres and the alleged rapes of “at least a dozen” by Israeli forces. It’s telling that he mentions a handful of rapes allegedly carried out more than seven decades ago by Israeli soldiers while he ignores Hamas’ systematic, widespread rape brutalizing Israeli women and girls carried just four and half months ago. In citing unverified isolated rapes and disputed claims of massacres allegedly perpetrated by Israeli forces some 75 years ago while completely ignoring the well documented mass rapes and sexual assaults along with massacres, torture and kidnapping of Israeli and foreign civilians from less than five months ago, Schrader engages in raw partisan advocacy rather than sober and objective reporting of current events. Moreover, there was no shortage of massacres of Israeli Jews, including medical workers, carried out by Palestinian Arabs in 1948 as well, massacres which Schrader ignores. Schrader’s oversights of Palestinian atrocites, past and present, would make Hamad and Sinwar proud. Nobody should blame us for the things that we do — exactly as Hamad said.
In 1981, the death of television reporter Ronald Statzer was caught on camera when he plunged from a hang glider as station’s camera filmed him. Schrader’s brand of hang glinder journalism, however, poses zero personal physical risk. While his parachute journalism predecessors dropped into perilous war zones, Schrader facilely files factually deficient reports motored by pro-Hamas messaging without even leaving New York.

Feb. 26 Update: 

In recent days, Adam Schrader reached out to CAMERA alleging that this post's inclusion of a photograph of him scarfing down pizza, which he shared on his online c.v., is a copyright infringement. In deference to Schrader's concern, we removed the photograph. Though Schrader went to the trouble to object to the use of the photograph, he did not address the substance of any of the factual problems or journalistic failures detailed in this article. His editors at UPI have yet to respond.

 

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