Terrorist Cheerleaders Are Not Good Journalists

For years, Hosam Salem has been covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance journalist for The New York Times. That was until this week, when the Times chose to dismiss Salem from his post due to a collection of recently uncovered Facebook posts. With thunderous applause, to the tune of thousands of likes and retweets, Salem took to Twitter to blame his recent unemployment on an international conspiracy to silence Palestinian journalists, the result of a smear campaign to paint anyone who is “against the Israeli occupation” as being antisemitic. From Salem’s long Twitter thread, we see that the internet loves nothing more than portraying the State of Israel and its supporters as censorious tyrants, directing mobs to undermine anyone who dares challenge their agenda. This idea, rooted in anti-Jewish tropes, is irresistible, regardless of how, for example in the case of Salem, preposterous it is. 

Salem describes his work for the Times in respectable language. He notes his coverage of protests at the Gaza-Israel border in 2018, the investigation into the death of a field nurse during one of these protests, and the recent Guardian of the Walls operation in May of 2021. From this, one might assume that Salem is an objective, professional journalist, simply reporting what is happening on the ground in one of the most contentious regions of the world. One also might assume that the decision to sack him because of his Palestinian heritage or perhaps because of his sympathy for the Palestinian cause is unreasonable. However, one look at his aforementioned Facebook page would suggest otherwise. 

Salem uses Facebook to advocate constantly for the Palestinian cause, which, based on his rhetoric, we can only assume means the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel and its replacement with an Arab-majority state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Examples of Salem’s activism include his continual glorification of “martyrs,” that is, Palestinians who “resist” Israel by killing innocent civilians. In 2021, he eulogized Mahmoud Salem and Nabil Masoud, two Palestinians responsible for a 2004 terrorist attack that killed ten workers in the Israeli city of Ashdod. He wrote of the attack: “May Allah have mercy on them and have mercy on those who planned, prepared, and participated.” Earlier, in 2014, Salem expressed support for the massacre of four rabbis and an Israeli-Druze police officer in northern Israel, writing (quoting the Qur’an): “Those who are killed in the way of Allah will not be misled … strike the rivals until you exalt them.”  

The organization responsible for bringing these comments to light is Honest Reporting. HR, an NGO with the mission of “monitoring media bias against Israel,” certainly did its job. Their report on Salem, which they provided to The New York Times, was clearly in response to bias and unfair double standards against Israel from those who are paid to be impartial. Yet in Salem’s point of view, Honest Reporting is part of “a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity, simply because we cover the human rights violations that the Palestinian people undergo on a daily basis at hands of the Israeli army.” Salem decried the editor of Honest Reporting for branding him and other Palestinian journalists as “antisemitic,” using quotes around the word to impose an air of disbelief at the claim that he does not like Jewish people. Apparently, sympathizing with terrorists who indiscriminately kill civilians and expressing approval for a violent jihadist campaign to eliminate Israel is “covering human rights violations,” and not bigoted radicalism.

This trick provides cover to those who engage in antisemitic behavior, for they now have an excuse, and if they are held accountable, they can “punch-up” at nefarious, powerful forces working against them.

Though the online firestorm was mostly related to Salem’s previous support for terrorism, Salem’s placement of word “antisemitic” in scare quotes reveals more of the game that is actually being played here. Detractors of the Jewish people, mainly from the left—from Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party to progressive organizations on American college campuses—have made a habit of attaching suspicion to accusations of antisemitism. They have successfully trained their followers to distrust Jewish people who claim to be the target of vilification, especially when it comes to Israel. This lies in stark contrast to the left’s usual reactions to complaints of prejudice, which typically consist of proper investigations and solidarity with the aggrieved marginalized community. In normalizing the narrative that “the Jews are constantly crying wolf,” and that the Jews deserve to be investigated when they shout “antisemitism,” rather than the people at whom they are shouting it, stories like Salem’s become incredibly popular, and sensationalized to fit the broader conspiracy theory of a Jewish-led witch-hunt to silence their own critics. This trick provides cover to those who engage in antisemitic behavior, for they now have an excuse, and if they are held accountable, they can “punch-up” at nefarious, powerful forces working against them.

It bears repeating that the Jewish people, and Israel for that matter, are not trying to silence their critics. In a seminal 2014 essay for Tablet Magazine, author Matti Friedman describes his time as a correspondent for the Associated Press in Israel, and notes that during his work, “the agency had more than 40 staffers covering the Israeli-Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’ eventually erupted.” Friedman acknowledges the absurdity of how saturated Israel’s press attention was in 2014, during a war that claimed 42 lives, as opposed to the smaller media presence in zones with much higher casualty rates, including in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, where every month more people are killed than in the entire span of Operation Protective Edge. 

From simply looking at how many cameras and notebooks are between the river and the sea at any given time, it is obvious that criticism of Israel is not swept under the rug, but constantly front and center, constantly available to those who wish to engage in it, and reliably handed a microphone by organizations, institutions, media outlets and governments. The insinuation that a cabal of Zionists are working overtime to whitewash any deviation from a pro-Israel worldview is rooted not in fact but in lies about the Jewish people that have existed for centuries (if you need proof, just look at Kanye West’s recently deleted tweets.) The New York Times’s decision to fire a dignified shill for one side of the conflict who was hired to be an objective observer is the bare minimum of journalistic standards and does nothing to imply the existence of a sinister plot to undermine pro-Palestinian politics. 

I consider myself a pro-Israel advocate, and because of this label, it would be undoubtedly inappropriate for a major news corporation to hire me as a news reporter on Middle Eastern affairs. Based on my previous activism and writing, nobody speaking truthfully should concede that I could be neutral on Israel and Palestine, whether I be taking pictures or interviewing soldiers. I am not a victim because of this, and I am certainly not being silenced. Neither is Hosam Salem.

Blake Flayton is the New Media Director and columnist for the Jewish Journal.