One of the recurring characters in the history of anti-Israel media bias is The Unluckiest Lady In Lebanon. She was so-nicknamed because during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the wire services would run staged photos of her several times over the course of the month-long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, and each time the caption would tell us that she was standing on the rubble of her just-destroyed home.
It was of course possible that this woman owned half the houses in South Lebanon, and that the IDF followed her around blowing up whichever house she was in that day, leaving her unharmed but perfectly positioned for a newspaper photo. But it’s… unlikely. Either way, there she’d reliably be, fists raised to the heavens in disbelief.
Mass media has always been a deadlier weapon than Katyushas from Lebanon or Qassams from Gaza. The many-housed lady from Lebanon may have been unlucky, but Hezbollah was lucky to have her.
This happened routinely because wire services would hire local stringers and freelancers, do absolutely no vetting whatsoever, and publish whatever suited the anti-Israel cause. In doing so, these agencies ushered in an era of media irresponsibility from which we have yet to emerge: We called it The Age of Fauxtography.
We used that phrase playfully at first, because we naively assumed that once the practice was exposed, there would be a cascade of consequences: internal investigations, firings, rewritten ethics manuals and codes of conduct, perhaps revoked awards. That didn’t happen, of course; media companies did not care that their war coverage was entirely staged, and we had no National Conversation about the terrible path the Western press was headed down. Democracy dies in darkness, I think I once heard someone say.
Less than three years after that war in Lebanon, Israel went back to war in Gaza. A shaky cease-fire with Hamas had held until Hamas was caught expanding its war tunnels. The Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit had been taken in an attack facilitated by those tunnels in 2006, and in 2008 Hamas had backed out of negotiations to free Shalit. By late 2008, it had become clear what happened: Hamas had been stringing Israel along on a possible Shalit deal while taking advantage of Israel’s adherence to the cease-fire deal, and all the while Hamas was building up its underground infrastructure in preparation for the war it would launch to end the cease-fire.
Sound familiar?
During the course of the 2008-2009 war, Operation Cast Lead, Hamas hid among the civilian population and then ghoulishly embraced the fauxtography trend to deflect blame for the Palestinian deaths that Hamas was responsible for.
In early 2009, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a fiery post about the world’s “pornographic” obsession with anything that can be labeled Jewish moral failure. Goldberg specifically mentioned Hamas’s parading of dead Palestinian babies:
“Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I’ll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they’d learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.”
I recount all this because—as Oct. 7, 2023 and its aftermath showed—the amount of support for Hamas and the obsession with demonizing the Jews, all with the willing collaboration of the media, is a song played on repeat. The details get worse, sure: Both Hamas and the Western media reached new depths of depravity in their own ways over these past 16 months. Hamas’s supporters in the West, meanwhile, gathered in celebration of evil in unprecedented numbers.
One does not want to believe that all or most of these people know what it is they are supporting. One does not want to believe that members of the media are aware of the egregious ethics breaches their outlets routinely engage in. One does not want to believe that the only way to put a stop to this long-running cycle of horror is to destroy Hamas.
But we are now nearly two decades into the era inaugurated by Hezbollah and Hamas in 2006. Supporters of Hamas didn’t abandon their cause when they saw Hamasniks dancing around with the dead bodies of captive children, because it’s what one expects of Hamas. News organizations didn’t institute reforms in 2006 precisely because they expected to be using those same tactics again and again. And Hamas itself is immune to change.
Sure, there’s the occasional ignoramus on the Internet or a college campus. But for the most part, everyone knows what they’re doing here. It’s a depressing realization, but it is our unambiguous reality. And we cannot change that reality unless we face it.
