“The media firestorm over whether Israel attacked the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza is over,” but Jonathan Schanzer at Commentary warns that “another media firestorm is brewing” around Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City — long identified as “a Hamas base of military operations.” Hamas is “using the medical staff and patients as ‘human shields,’ ” a war crime. “Israel should continue to clear the northern Gaza Strip and even bombard the entire area surrounding Shifa once civilians have been evacuated.” “When it is safe for Israeli forces to enter,” the troops “must emerge from this compound with photos, videos, captured weapons, and other evidence of Hamas military activities.” That could be “a dramatic moment that swings world opinion against the Iran-backed terrorist organization, once and for all.”
“Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel should be the final nail in the coffin of the West’s attempts at an appeasement policy with Iran,” thunders The Boston Globe’s Carine Hajjar. “Despite two years of concessions from the US meant to schmooze the Iranians into good behavior and avoid provocations, Iran has continued to test missiles, pursue near-weapons grade uranium, and, most of all, pump money and weapons to its ‘Axis of Resistance,’ which includes Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.” So much for “President Biden’s promise for a ‘smart way to be tough on Iran.’ ” Tehran has simply used the “windfall of the Biden administration’s appeasement measures” to fund its bad behavior.
After “student groups at America’s elite universities came together to make excuses for the bloody pogroms” in Israel, notes Mary Katherine Ham at Outkick, students like NYU Law’s Ryna Workman lost job offers. Is this “cancel culture” from the right? Yes, “Hate speech is free speech,” but: “We’ve always had consequences for speech.” We “needed a name for cancel culture” when “it became something new, more operationalized and unforgiving.” Anti-Israel students need “to notice that embracing oppressor vs. oppressed ideology has left them without a sense of right and wrong.” We know Klansmen and terrorists can change, “so it seems unwise to assume college students cannot.” But in light of some “student actions since October 7th, I understand the lack of confidence.”
Pope Francis has “affirmed the right of Israelis to defend themselves and called for the release of Israeli hostages,” but a later papal “address calling for humanitarian law to be respected in Gaza” lacked “any appreciation that Israeli forces will invade Gaza to ensure that Hamas can never pull off such a barbarous attack on their people again,” grumbles The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn. And: “Vatican incoherence is also sowing confusion in Ukraine. As with Gaza, the pope’s insistence on defining the problem as war itself — not Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion of a neighbor — also suggests moral equivalence.” In all, “Every time the pope speaks of war, the Vatican’s credibility takes another hit because of his failure to make basic distinctions” as “justice appears to carry no weight in his moral calculus.”
In June 2020, Sen. Tom Cotton’s New York Times opinion piece arguing to use the National Guard to restore order amid urban riots “led to a crisis at the paper,” remembers The Free Press’ Bari Weiss. Though it had “not a single correctable error,” staff erupted, and “in the course of 48 hours, jobs were lost, and people were smeared and demoted.” Yet after the Times “sent a false report to all of its readers that presented, as fact, Hamas talking points” about the Oct. 17 Gaza hospital bombing, “there was no uproar at the Times.” The paper’s only response: “a soft non-apology, lamenting that the story should have been presented more carefully.” “The real question” is “if news organizations like the Times will continue to take the word of Hamas uncritically.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board