National Public Radio is doing damage control after inviting on a Middle Eastern studies professor who then claimed that there is no credible reporting proving that Hamas killers targeted innocent Israeli civilians during their October 7 attack.
Khaled Al-Hroub, a professor at Northwestern University in Qatar who has been accused in the past of glorifying terrorists and whitewashing Hamas, claimed during an On Point interview on Monday that Israelis has “fabricated” civilian deaths, and “has fed the media from Day 1 with kind of misinformation.”
In a statement posted on the interview, NPR says that it “did not meet our editorial standards” and that it is “paramount to acknowledge when our work falls short of our standards.”
“On Point Host Meghna Chakrabarti countered with statements of fact to correct the record,” NPR said. “But that does not negate the impact of hearing Professor Hroub’s statements.”
Hroub, the author of at least two books on Hamas — Hamas: A Beginners Guide; and Hamas: Political Thought and Practice — has been portrayed in the media as a voice for moderate Islam, who has proposed establishing an Islamic fund to aid victims of Islamic terrorism. He has called for moderate Muslims to stand up to “shameful terror acts in the name of their religion” and has said terrorist acts “are staining all those with ties to Arabs or Muslims.”
However, Canary Mission, a nonprofit that tracks antisemitism on college campuses, has documented a long list of statements from Al-Hroub spreading incitement, glorifying terrorism, whitewashing Hamas, promoting violence, and spreading the hatred of Israel and of the United States. Al-Hroub, for example, has said that “Hamas is doing good for Palestinians,” has referred to violent riots as “popular resistance,” and said that the “Jerusalem intifada must expand and move towards all the cancerous settlements that have devoured the Palestinian land.”
He has trivialized Hamas’s network of terror tunnels, according to Canary Mission, and has claimed that it can’t be taken for “granted that Hamas used people as human shields.”
NPR invited Al-Hroub on to “get a deeper understanding of Hamas, its creation, what it stands for, what its aims are, and what its capabilities are now,” Chakrabarti said.
During the interview, Al-Hroub insisted that Hamas official documents show that the terror group is open to accepting a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 war borders. When asked about the history of Hamas leaders calling for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, he said there are “contradictions” in their rhetoric, depending on the time and the audience.
The violent rhetoric, he said, isn’t a reflection of Hamas’s real goals, but is instead “meant for mobilizations, for internal kind of dynamic with the Palestinian people in the street and specifically in times of crisis, Israel attacks, aggressions, and wars.”
Chakrabarti noted that Hamas’s violent rhetoric has been consistent through the years. She then questioned Al-Hroub about what he thought Hamas hoped to gain in its attack on civilians.
Al-Hroub said he suspects the attack was supposed to be smaller, “a short, limited, swift operation, by which they could kidnap maybe two, three soldiers” which they could use as negotiating tools for the release of Palestinian prisoners. But, he said, he suspects that the Hamas killers “stunned themselves by the easiness of their success” and made “ad-hoc decisions” to expand the operation.
“The temptation of scoring a great victory against the most powerful army in the Middle East, I think seduced them,” Al-Hroub said.
But, of course, Hamas’s attack was not primarily against the Israeli army, but was targeted at civilians. Chakrabarti noted the “asymmetry of power” in the region, but then questioned why Hamas targeted Jewish children sleeping in their beds and center-left kibbutzes.
“What kind of victory does that give to Hamas other than just the sheer Islamist victory of having killed Jews?” she asked. Al-Hroub, claiming that he wasn’t apologizing for Hamas, said that the world has been “misled.”
“I haven’t seen any kind of credible media reporting, at least about the incident on the seventh of October, of killing civilians in this manner,” he said.
“We have read, of course, the beheading of 40 babies, the raping of women and all of that,” he continued. “Of course, when you hear these things, I myself, I was shocked. And then it turned out to be kind of fabricated and all of that. The only source for us, for me as an academic, is the Israeli source, which has fed the media from Day 1 with kind of misinformation.”
“I think we need kind of to pause for awhile, objectively speaking, and wait for some kind of credible second, maybe, party verification of what really happened on the ground,” he said.
On the day of the attack, he said, Hamas leaders told their men “don’t kill any child, any woman,” he said, alleging that the situation is more complicated than “black and white,” and that historically more Palestinian civilians have been killed than Israeli civilians.
Chakrabarti pushed back briefly, stating that “we do know for sure the targets of Hamas’s attack last week. There’s no denying that people in kibbutzes were attacked, that music lovers at an Israeli rave were attacked.”
Chakrabarti then added that Al-Hroub’s “point about disproportionate deaths is also well taken, over time,” before moving on with the interview.
Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,400 people in its attack from Gaza on October 7. Israel is now amassing troops on the Gaza border for an expected ground invasion. President Joe Biden is expected to visit Israel on Wednesday as a show of support for the country.