Terrorists who kill Jews are not ‘journalists’

This week, Danny Danon, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, made a powerful speech at the Security Council. During the address, he held up photographs of Palestinian ‘journalists’ Mohamed Naser Abu Huwaidi and Ahmed Wishah, as well as UNRWA worker Mohammad Abu Itiwi.

These three men had all been killed by Israel. Last week, Wishah was lamented by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani. In 2024, UN secretary-general António Guterres mourned Itiwi’s death. But Danon put them to shame: when he turned the pictures around, the same ‘journalists’ and ‘aid workers’ were seen respectively posing as a Hamas sniper, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander and a member of the elite Nukhba force, which spearheaded the atrocities of October 7.

Only he didn’t put them to shame, did he? If men like Mamdani and Guterres were capable of such self-reflection, our culture would not be so saturated with jihadist propaganda. It was a poignant thing to watch Danon braving the hostility of the world armed with something as flimsy as the truth. Of course, it has made little difference.

The fact that Palestinian terrorists habitually masquerade as journalists, medics and aid workers is both widely known and well documented. For years, Israel’s detractors and defenders have been locked in a macabre merry-go-round in which those pushing a jihadi narrative – whether jihadis themselves or their enablers in the media, international organisations and the leftist reaches of politics – pretend that dead terrorists were not really terrorists, while those doughty bearers of truth insist that they were.

Weirdly enough, Western journalists with large followings have been among the most zealous in lending their authority to these unexamined and contested claims. Some of Britain’s most prominent foreign correspondents, from the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen to Alex Crawford of Sky News, have repeatedly presented Gaza as a place where Israel systematically targets journalists, while giving scant attention to Israeli evidence that militant organisations embed operatives within the press.

Round and round we go. Well, this week provided an unexpected and happy little victory. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) – one of the world’s leading press-freedom organisations – was forced to concede that, after all this time, the Israelis had a point. ‘The [CPJ] is conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War’, it said in a statement, ‘after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists’.

Hallelujah! The irony of all this, of course, is that the CPJ and the rest of the media-NGO complex believe jihadis far more readily than they believe the Middle East’s only democracy. Israel has been telling them for years that terrorists were masquerading as civilians, only to be pooh-poohed – it’s only when the head-choppers let the cat out of the bag themselves that the matter is taken seriously.

The same dynamic was in play, of course, with the casualty figures during the Gaza war (which ended last year, by the way). According to a study by Andrew Fox for the Henry Jackson Society in 2024, only five per cent of the media organisations surveyed cited casualty figures issued by the Israeli authorities. By contrast, 98 per cent used those provided by the Hamas-controlled health ministry.

This means that almost all Western media outlets have unflinchingly disseminated Hamas propaganda to their tens of millions of viewers, while disregarding Israeli figures almost entirely. The world’s journalists have taken the word of jihadi butchers above the evidence-based testimony of a friendly democracy and shared this narrative with the world.

It is no exaggeration to say that this comprises one of the gravest failures of journalistic scepticism in modern times. The same story has been told at the UN and in other international organisations and charities. The uncomfortable truth is that we have been living through the most intense age of propaganda since Soviet times, made only more appalling by the fact that it has been spread voluntarily within supposedly free societies.

So good on the Committee to Protect Journalists, I suppose, for finally admitting – if only begrudgingly, and only in part – its role in spreading the most vicious anti-Western propaganda since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given the volume of misinformation to which we have been subjected, and the way the public now believes lies as fact, this is little more than a drop in the ocean. These days, however, that is all we have.

Jake Wallis Simons is co-host of The Brink, with former parachute-regiment officer Andrew Fox. It is available on all platforms now.