Famously, the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” graces the front page of every New York Times edition. The slogan was coined at the end of the 19th century by the paper’s publisher, Adolph Ochs. Of course, in today’s hyper-globalized world, the slogan is wishful thinking. No paper could realistically cover all the important news stories of the day.
Still, it would be hard to argue that outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and others adequately cover even those stories they do print. They often devote precious space to emotive or opinionated claims, while omitting highly material and relevant information that sheds important new light.
Provided below are three important, but underreported, stories from the week bearing on Israel and the Middle East that media consumers should know.
1) More Evidence of Al Jazeera’s Lack of Independence
Shortly after the announcement of the 20-Point Plan and the ceasefire in Gaza, some media commentators began noticing a change in Al Jazeera’s coverage. The outlet—a mouthpiece for the Qatari regime—had for decades pumped out hostile coverage of Israel and sympathetic coverage of terrorist organizations. But, according to Israeli journalist Amit Segal, that hostile coverage turned into “relatively mild news” coverage in the days after the ceasefire. The change in tone was also noticed by Alhurra, the U.S.-funded Arabic-language news outlet.
According to another Israeli journalist, Ehud Yaari, this change was “apparently part of understandings between [Qatar] and the United States, under which Al Jazeera will reduce the amount of incitement it spreads throughout the Middle East.”
In other words, as critics have pointed out for decades, Al Jazeera is not an independent news outlet but one that toes the line set by the Qatari regime. That Western media outlets like CNN refuse to acknowledge this—simply referring to Al Jazeera as a “Qatari-based news network”—remains a tremendously dishonest practice. As Egyptian analyst Dr. Emad Elhady wrote for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: “Far from being a champion of free speech, Al Jazeera, a mouthpiece for the Qatari monarchy, is a purveyor of Islamist extremism, jihadism, and Salafism.”
But there is even more evidence of Al Jazeera’s complete lack of independence in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict. In the words of Palestinian expert Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib of the Atlantic Council and the Council on Foreign Relations: “Never forget that Aljazeera is the media arm of Hamas; Aljazeera=Hamas.”
One of the captured Hamas documents. Courtesy: IDF
Except for Alhurra, no major Western media outlets have covered these developments.
2) Palestinians Openly Discuss What Western Media Won’t: Hamas’s Use of Hospitals
Hamas has systematically used hospitals as part of its human shielding policy—an established fact that seemingly everyone but Western media understands. Case in point: this week even Palestinians have been openly discussing Hamas’s exploitation of hospitals.
As reported by the Free Beacon and Palestinian Media Watch this week, the Palestinian Authority’s daily paper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, openly discussed the issue, writing: “Hamas’ internal security has begun summoning opponents for interrogation in schools, tents, and hospitals that Hamas operatives have overtaken…”
Similarly, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, members of the Doghmosh clan—which has been under attack by Hamas’s oppressive internal security forces—have said that Hamas “took full control” of the Jordanian field hospital, turning “a building on the hospital grounds into a base of operations and us[ing] a tunnel running adjacent to the medical center…”
Hamas’s human shield policy, including its exploitation of hospitals, has been well-established. Still, media outlets like CNN—ignoring the abundant evidence—continue to treat this as merely an Israeli allegation.
3) Archaeological Finds Continue in Israel
Further archaeological evidence has been uncovered of the millennia-long continuous presence of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. Earlier this month, archaeologists located a 1,500-year-old synagogue in the Yehudiya Forest Nature Reserve, located in Israel’s Golan Heights. Fragments decorated with “lamp and menorah motifs, along with elements interpreted as parts of the Ark of the Covenant,” were found both inside and outside of the ancient structure.
Earlier this week, another exciting discovery was made in Jerusalem: “the first direct evidence of royal Assyrian correspondence sent to the Kingdom of Judah during the First Temple period.” The evidence came in the form of a 2,700-year-old pottery fragment with Akkadian cuneiform inscriptions.
The archaeological finds have been covered only by Jewish and Israeli outlets, as well as a handful of archaeology publications.
Historical Context for Current Events
This week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued yet another advisory opinion relating to Israel, once again abusing the system to “circumvent the sovereign right of nation States to determine whether to submit to the Court a particular dispute to which they are a party.”
Of course, outside of a narrow world of academics and media outlets, the ICJ’s pronouncements carry little actual weight, and for good reason. The factual bases for the ICJ’s opinions are thin at best, relying heavily on assertions made in UN reports, which are notoriously unreliable. As explained by one legal expert, Olivia Flasch, “the court has tended to simply react with a legal determination to the facts presented to it, rather than seeking to verify those facts.” In past advisory opinions relating to Israel, the court revealed “no effort to consider any of the facts that might have justified Israeli defensive measures, even to discount those facts as inadequate.”
But even the legal conclusions made in these ICJ advisory opinions are dubious. This brings us to the ICJ’s 2004 advisory opinion on Israel’s security barrier, which claimed that there is no right to self-defense against terrorist organizations, stating: “Article 51 of the Charter thus recognizes the existence of an inherent right of self-defence in the case of armed attack by one State against another State. However, Israel does not claim that the attacks against it are imputable to a foreign State.”
In the American Journal of International Law, legal scholar Sean Murphy described this claim as, at best, “imprecise drafting,” and at worst, in conflict with “common sense.”
Since the 2004 advisory opinion, the international community has both ignored and contradicted this absurd interpretation. One need only look at, for example, one of Israel’s harshest critics: Turkey. In October 2019, in justifying its military intervention on Syrian territory, Turkey cited its “right of self-defense as outlined in Article 51 of the Charter” against armed Kurdish groups and the Islamic State terrorist organization. The United Kingdom and United States have done so in relation to the Houthis, alongside five Arab states. France, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, and Australia have also done so in relation to the Islamic State.