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Western Media Is Helping Hamas Win the Information War

(Daily Express-UK) Catherine Perez-Shakdam - In Gaza, truth was methodically suffocated by a terror regime that understood the power of images and the vanity of Western press culture. For nearly two years, much of the global media served as the willing mouthpiece of Hamas's grotesque narrative. Hamas waged an information war - and Western media helped it win. While Hamas rocketed Israeli civilians from schoolyards and hospitals, while its foot soldiers hoarded aid and filmed hostages as trophies of war, foreign journalists turned their cameras toward outright manufactured imagery. They almost universally reported casualty numbers sourced exclusively from Hamas's Gaza Health Ministry with no interest in truth and every interest in manipulation. When every casualty figure is taken at face value but every Israeli claim is treated as suspect, the scales of journalistic ethics are not merely unbalanced; they are weaponized. The press prides itself on being the watchdog of power. But in Gaza, it became the lapdog of tyranny. Journalists too often chose the narrative that would secure them praise on social media, not the truth that would cost them access. The consequence has not only been the distortion of public understanding - it has been the legitimization of Hamas's genocidal agenda. The press has created a theater of victimhood in which Hamas plays the hero and Israel the villain. This war has revealed that the free press, when faced with Islamist authoritarianism, is not free at all. The writer, executive director at the Forum for Foreign Relations, is an associate scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
2025-08-12 00:00:00
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