When Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an illegal immigrant from Egypt, tried to incinerate pro-Israeli marchers in the “sanctuary city” of Boulder, Colorado, using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktail, the legacy media did everything they could to downplay and euphemize the attack. In their international coverage, the media not only spread but manufacture the “genocide” myth, which fuels and sustains the “Free Palestine” movement. When it inevitably manifests in violence, they do everything possible to distance the terrorists from the ideology.

“Attack on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall in Colorado burns several people,” CBS News said after the firebombing. This is true in the vaguest sense. A more imaginative editor at NBC News described the victims, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, as “Gaza hostage awareness marchers.”

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NBC News ran another story with the headline “Lone wolf attacks in Boulder and D.C. highlight the difficulties in securing public spaces.” The pluralizing of the word “attack” speaks to the risible nature of the claim. A “lone wolf” is a metaphorical description of a person who acts alone and independently, often without any coherent ideological cause. If you’re using the identical rhetoric and are driven by identical aims, and you’re trying to murder the same people for the same reasons, then guess what? You’re part of a movement. You don’t have to swap ideas at a Hamas convention in Doha to participate.

The Boulder attack was the third antisemitic “Free Palestine” terrorism attack on U.S. soil. Of course, there was the heinous execution of two Israeli Embassy workers in Washington, D.C., last month. A couple of weeks earlier, a pro-Palestinian arsonist attempted to burn down the mansion of Jewish Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA). This is called a trend.

When racist marchers with tiki torches descended on Charlottesville, every conservative was asked to denounce the event as if they attended and championed the white supremacist cause. When the Egyptian firebomber and alleged D.C. assassin used the same slogan chanted by protesters across the nation, representing a cause championed by reporters, pundits, and politicians, we are supposed to pretend one has nothing to do with the other. Indeed, the opposite.

Instead, like all things, they try to make it about President Donald Trump.

“Trump responds to Boulder attack in social media post, seizes on suspect’s immigration status,” ABC News said.

“Antisemitism does not respect national borders — Trump says the Boulder attack suspect should not have been here. He is missing the point,” a Washington Post house editorial said.

Is he, though? There’s nothing we can do about domestic extremists, but do we really have to import more of them?

Then again, the Washington Post, which a few weeks ago ran an op-ed by a former employee of a Qatari “think tank” charging Israel with “genocide,” is right about antisemitism transcending borders. The outlet’s “global opinions editor,” Karen Attiah, who, on Oct. 7, 2023, liked a post celebrating the “decolonization” of Israel, sounds like an unhinged Al Jazeera pundit.

More dangerously, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen the most obvious and blatant attempts by the Washington Post and others to fuel hatred. It is the modus operandi of propagandists to overwhelm the audience with disinformation and create enough confusion to make it virtually impossible for the average person to distinguish between truth and falsehood.

It began early and has only gotten worse. On Oct. 17, 2023, as the Israelis were still identifying the slain and hostages, the New York Times ran an above-the-fold story blaming the Israel Defense Forces for the bombing of the al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza, in which 200 Palestinians allegedly perished. Soon after, we learned that the bombing was attributable to a misfired rocket by the Islamic Jihad. The New York Times was forced to retract its story and admit to relying “heavily” on unverified Hamas claims. Yet, within days, it and virtually every other Western media outlet returned to quoting the “Gaza Health Ministry” on a near-daily basis.

This has been going on for years. The Palestinians have been notorious for not only creating civilian death totals and martyrs but also for lying about massacres. Recall that last year, media outlets such as CNN reported that the IDF threw nearly 400 bodies into a mass grave. The story gained traction across media until the Israelis provided video evidence that the Palestinians had dug the graves for those bodies. There are scores of similar stories. How many exist that are impossible to disprove?

For instance, numerous data scientists have already pointed out that the evenly spaced increments of Palestinian casualty numbers do not correspond with any kind of reality of war. Yet, a recent inquiry by Tablet Magazine found that major news organizations are up to nine times as likely to describe what is happening in Gaza as “genocide” than they were in genuine instances in Darfur, Rwanda, Myanmar, and with the Yazidi. How many consumers of legacy media are aware there is a brutal civil war in Sudan right now that has mass murder, famine, and rampant child rape?

A few days before two Israeli Embassy employees were gunned down by an alleged “Free Palestine” terrorist in Washington, the BBC reported that the United Nations, hardly reliable to begin with, was warning that 14,000 Palestinian babies in Gaza faced imminent death within a 48-hour window. Any newsroom intern with a modicum of common sense would have instantaneously been skeptical of such a fantastical contention. However, NBC News decided to run an entire insane story based on the claim, and it was spread across social media. Within a day, the U.N. retracted the contention, and NBC News was compelled to follow. What the report said was that 14,000 children could have suffered malnutrition over an entire year had aid been withheld. 

A few days after the Boulder attack, the Washington Post was also forced to retract a false claim that at least 31 people were killed in southern Gaza when Israeli troops opened fire on people traveling to collect aid. When the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, and other outlets are forced to withdraw unverified accusations that portray Israelis as genocidal maniacs, they act as if they are motivated by accountability and professionalism. Of course, the problem is that the reporting “errors” always, and I mean always, skew in the same direction. The probability that every mistake happens to reinforce Hamas’s narrative is implausible. Either you are endlessly fooled because you’re hopelessly irresponsible and terrible at your job, or you’re a willing participant in propaganda. Evidence strongly points toward the latter.

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Anti-Israel bias isn’t new. We have known for a long time that journalists allowed to operate in Gaza are largely sympathetic to the jihadi movement. I don’t just mean the former Qatari government employees of Al Jazeera who now litter the U.S. media landscape. Former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman once recounted that the outlet’s staff, which shared an office building with Hamas in Gaza City for years, would witness rocket launches at Israel right next to their office and fail to report it. Sometimes, Hamas officials would “burst into AP’s Gaza Bureau and threaten the staff” if they reported the truth. They did not.

We didn’t get the truth then. We’re certainly not getting it now. And there are starting to be deadly repercussions.