The Washington Post, which has faced increased criticism and scrutiny for its coverage of the ongoing war in the Middle East, employs at least half a dozen alumni of the Middle Eastern media outlet Al Jazeera.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the Post has come under fire for its war coverage skewing overwhelmingly anti-Israel ever since the October 7th terrorist attacks by the Islamic terror group Hamas last year, which left over 1,400 Israelis dead.
Following a recent Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rescue of four Israeli hostages held by Hamas, the Post headline instead focused on Palestinian casualties, declaring “More than 200 Palestinians killed in Israeli hostage raid in Gaza.” The article described the successful rescue as “a brazen operation” and “one of the bloodiest raids in the war,” claiming that it left “unimaginable devastation in its wake.”
“Residential blocks were destroyed, tanks menaced the streets and grievously wounded Palestinians, some without limbs, writhed in pain on the dusty roads of the camp’s central market, according to videos and images of the raid,” the article claims. The story’s first quote was not from the IDF, but from a Hamas spokesman, who described the rescue operation as “a massacre.” No quote from an Israeli source is given until the seventh paragraph down.
As with many clashes between the IDF and Hamas, the terrorist group deliberately used civilians and civilian buildings to hide the hostages, who were being held in crowded apartment buildings. The first shots were fired by Hamas fighters, not the IDF, thus making the Palestinians, not the Israelis, responsible for civilian casualties.
Critics of the Post’s anti-Israel coverage have found that the paper’s foreign desk currently employs at least six former employees of Al Jazeera, which is partially backed by the government of Qatar, a pro-Hamas nation.
Among these Al Jazeera alumni are: Jesse Mesner-Hage, the Post’s Middle East editor, who worked at Al Jazeera for over a decade; Louisa Loveluck, the paper’s London correspondent; Evan Hill, an investigative reporter; Reem Akkad, a visual enterprise editor; Libby Casey, host of WaPo Live; and Adela Suliman, a breaking news reporter.
Al Jazeera, founded in 1996, has long been accused of actively opposing Israel and promoting Islamic interests in the region. An Israeli court denounced the outlet as an “intelligence and propaganda arm” for Hamas, which has since led to the outlet being banned in Israel. Al Jazeera has also published numerous false stories for the purpose of portraying Israel as the aggressors; these include a false 2013 story claiming that Israel deliberately opened dams to flood portions of Gaza, as well as a 2014 story that questioned the authenticity of videos showing the beheading of American journalists by ISIS.
“Al Jazeera is nothing more than a Qatar project to exert influence and propaganda,” said Alberto Fernandez, vice president of the Middle East Media Research Institute. “This is not a media empire meant to make money that uses the language of the progressive left to reach a Western audience. Al Jazeera is basically Muslim Brotherhood Television. It has been intimately involved with an Islamist struggle since the beginning and that’s the dominant ideology there.”