OPINION:
In October 2023, as Israel sought to recover the hostages taken in the murderous Oct. 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas, the mainstream media went full-bore with a story about an attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
Reporters emphasized the high number of casualties — hundreds, by most accounts — and turned an unflinching accusatory finger on Israel as the perpetrator of the attack.
Most of the media, relying on reports from the propaganda arm of Hamas, immediately charged that Israel had intentionally bombed a facility devoted to health care. Israelis, the press implied, had no respect for Muslim lives and viewed residents of the Gaza Strip as subhuman.
The angry response spread rapidly around the world. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres promptly denounced the blast, calling it “totally unacceptable” on the part of Israel.
Leaders everywhere joined in the condemnation.
American college campuses, already in a fervor against Israel’s defensive campaign against Hamas, went into paroxysms of anger. Hatred of the Jewish state reached a fever pitch, with anti-Zionist and accompanying antisemitic demonstrations growing in energy and emotion by the day.
Soon, however, the accusations proved entirely false. The blast was the result not of any Israeli action but of a failed Palestinian rocket that had fallen in the hospital parking lot. The number of deaths was in the dozens, not hundreds, as Hamas had claimed.
It took months for the press to confront their erroneous reporting and complicity with claims made by the terrorist group.
Still, the damage to Israel’s public image had been done. In the minds of many people worldwide, Israel stood accused and condemned of a terrible human rights violation. The corrections to the impassioned early stories did not receive the same level of attention as the original accusations.
In many cases, no corrections seem to have been made at all.
Of course, it is not merely the fact that so much of the mainstream media was complicit in this inaccurate reporting that is reprehensible. Bona fide errors can happen. That was clearly not the case with the hospital incident.
The notion that the rush to judgment was a mere error doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The ferocity of the press attacks made clear this was a deliberate campaign to smear Israel and the Jewish community with falsehoods that echoed centuries of defamation.
Let us now look at a contrasting situation. Last week, amid a raging war between Pakistan and Afghanistan, a Pakistani airstrike dropped a powerful bomb on the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital in Kabul. Reportedly, at least 400 people were killed.
The mainstream press has provided only nominal coverage of the war between these nations, and it barely mentioned the bombing. Unlike the unending cycle of vitriolic reports against Israel’s alleged bombing of the Gaza hospital, the apparently intentional killing of hundreds of Afghan patients has been reported in only a handful of articles. Otherwise, news outlets have basically ignored it.
It is virtually certain that most of the victims of the Pakistani attack were Muslims. Yet world leaders have issued hardly any declarations of indignation, nor have members of the public staged demonstrations against the Pakistanis or in support of the Afghans. There has been no unending cycle of accusatory reporting against the government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
In this case, Muslim lives do not seem to matter.
The double standard here is unambiguous. When Muslims kill Muslims, it is of no consequence. When Muslims can accuse Jews of killing Muslims, even if falsely, it is front-page news for weeks.
Beyond engendering hatred and discrimination against Jews, such a double standard is a betrayal of the public trust. It demeans the value of a free press, and it destroys the faith that people should have in journalists. It is a tribute to ancient prejudice and to its enduring existence.
The absence of shame by media for engaging in such deplorable activity merely compounds the nefarious impact of such comportment. There is a label for this kind of behavior: antisemitism.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.
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