Antisemitism, the late scholar Robert Wistrich observed, is a lethal obsession. And events in recent months and weeks prove as much.
On June 1, 2025, an Egyptian illegal immigrant threw Molotov cocktails at Jews in Boulder, Colorado, severely maiming several, including a Holocaust survivor. A little more than a week prior, on May 22, a Chicago man named Elias Rodriguez flew to Washington D.C. and murdered a young couple, Zionists on the verge of being married, at an American Jewish Committee (AJC) event. The previous month a part of the Pennsylvania Governor’s residence was set on fire and a suspect, Cody Allen Balmer, charged with arson.
All of these crimes—terrorist attacks—were motivated by antisemitism. And dishonest media coverage has been fueling the fire. The Washington Post is among the worst offenders.
As CAMERA has documented, the Washington Post treats Hamas not as a genocidal terrorist group, but as a trusted source. Time and again, the Post regurgitates casualty claims made by the “Gaza Health Ministry”—an entity that is wholesale controlled by Hamas, which has a clear interest in inflating casualty statistics and a demonstrated track record of doing precisely that. As CAMERA noted in a recent Washington Times podcast (“Politically Unstable,” June 2), former U.S. administration officials as well as journalists themselves, have been warned not to treat terror propaganda as truth.
Time and again, the Post has done just that. And as CAMERA told the Washington Times’s Kelly Sadler, the Post knows better; mere months before the October 7 massacre the newspaper published a warning from CAMERA that “trusting a Hamas-run ‘ministry’ to provide reliable casualty counts is like trusting a fox to guard a henhouse.” While some outlets, like the Washington Times, decry the mainstreaming of Hamas propaganda, too many do otherwise.
Indeed, the Washington Post itself is unbowed. All of the aforementioned terrorist attacks were committed by suspects who repeated the media’s Hamas talking points. This should be cause for reflection, but a recent Washington Post news report shows that the newspaper isn’t interested in learning.
The Post’s June 1 dispatch, “Israeli troops kill over 30 near U.S. aid site in Gaza, health officials say,” put faith in the Hamas-run Ministry in its very headline. Predictably, it was a bad bet. Hamas’s claims of a massacre were false. The Post itself later mildly revised its headline to read “more than 30 killed by gunfire near U.S. aid site,” but the news report still relied on the Hamas-run Ministry. But this too was a lie. Indeed, the entire story was predicated on laundered lies from Hamas. And this too is no surprise. It was, the Washington Free Beacon observed, the “latest example” of the newspaper’s “anti-Israel bias.”
As CAMERA noted a year ago: a May 27, 2024 Post article entitled “Israeli strikes on Rafah safe zone kill at least 35, Gaza officials say” also echoed Hamas claims of a massacre. And that story also fell apart within hours.
More than a day after the June 1 article’s publication, the Post belatedly issued a correction, noting that they’d deleted the social media post “because it and early versions of the article didn’t meet Post fairness standards.” The Post did so shortly after CAMERA flagged its concerns to the newspaper’s standards and editor’s department. The correction, however, left a lot to be desired. The paper admitted that it didn’t give “proper weight” to Israeli statements that a massacre didn’t occur. There was “improper certitude about what was known about any Israeli role in the shooting,” the Post said. Yet once again the paper failed to reckon with, or acknowledge, its decision to trust the Hamas-run Ministry.
As Omri Ceren noted: “it’s striking that Washington Post journalists make what used to be career-ending factual errors about the Gaza War, always in an anti-Israel and pro-Hamas direction. It’s even more striking that they’re allowed by the paper to keep making them.” Yes.
The Washington Post can’t quit its Hamas habit. And by echoing terror propaganda that is fueling attacks, the newspaper’s complicity is undeniable.