00:00Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan made an astonishing claim last week at the Together for Palestine rally in London's Wembley Stadium.
00:09270! That's how many Palestinian journalists Israel has killed in Gaza, he told the cheering crowd of 12,000.
00:16That's more than were killed in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, combined!
00:26What an incredible statistic. Could it be that five bloody wars, which killed at least 110 million people across the globe, caused the death of fewer reporters than have occurred in the tiny Gaza Strip in the last two years?
00:44If Hassan's claim sounds off, it's because he is lying.
00:47He is knowingly repeating a grotesque falsehood that doesn't pass the sniff test, and that any reputable journalist would dismiss upon two minutes of fact-checking.
00:58It's not just Hassan. This preposterous factoid has been spreading around the Internet for some time,
01:04and is attributed to reporter Nick Terse, who published it in a paper on a Brown University website.
01:11Well, that might be good enough for a journalist of Hassan's caliber, but Terse's footnote shows that he got the information from a web page for the Freedom Forum, a First Amendment advocacy organization.
01:24Now, the Freedom Forum, which ran the defunct Newseum, features on its website a Journalists' Memorial database, which lists reporters who have died in the line of duty since 1837.
01:37But the Journalists' Memorial doesn't even pretend to be an authoritative compendium of all reporters killed in action.
01:45It lists some reporters, mostly American and British.
01:49The memorial counts a grand total of two reporters as having been killed in World War I,
01:56which is substantially less than the number of famous poets killed in that war.
02:00It lists 66 reporters who died in World War II, a conflict in which roughly 85 million people died.
02:10For World War II, it counts no Chinese, German, or Japanese reporters, and lists only two French and two Soviet reporters.
02:19It doesn't count any of the hundreds of Yiddish-language reporters killed in the Holocaust,
02:24or any of the Cambodian journalists murdered by the Khmer Rouge.
02:29No responsible adult would cite this data in good faith.
02:33But Hassan isn't the only one doing so.
02:36Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, says it all the time, as does Al Jazeera.
02:43Chris Hedges, widely hailed on the left as the conscience of American journalism, unblinkingly repeats this libel.
02:51Senator Peter Welch of Vermont posted it on X.
02:54The other side of the ledger, namely the number of Palestinian journalists who've been killed, is also highly suspect.
03:01An enormous number of these journalists have been identified as either closely affiliated with Hamas or outright Hamas militants.
03:10Reporters Without Borders mourned the death of journalist Abdullah al-Jamal, a freelance writer who wrote occasionally for Al Jazeera.
03:19He was killed when Israeli special forces stormed his home, where he happened to be keeping three hostages.
03:26Nevertheless, the Guardian included al-Jamal in a photo spread of murdered Palestinian journalists.
03:32Anas al-Sharif's video reporting for Al Jazeera made him the face of the war in Gaza, per CNN.
03:39His death in August 2025 was met by an international outcry.
03:43But Israel provided substantial evidence that al-Sharif was an active member of Hamas, and in fact a cell leader in a guided rocket platoon.
03:52Fact is, if you're reporting from Gaza, the chances are high that you're somehow in bed with Hamas, either as a collaborator or a soldier using a press vest as cover.
04:03And that's been true even before the war.
04:06The Foreign Press Association, the oldest and largest organization for foreign correspondents,
04:12has long protested the pressure and threats of violence that Hamas routinely imposes on visiting journalists.
04:18In a 2014 statement, the FPA denounced the, quote,
04:22blatant, incessant, forceful, and unorthodox, unquote, methods that Hamas uses to control the dissemination of information in and out of Gaza.
04:32Professionals who've worked in the region know that Hamas, a totalitarian regime,
04:38will not permit neutral observers, or even aid workers, to exist in Gaza.
04:43The Hamas propaganda machine has been running full steam since October 7th,
04:48with the assistance of its fifth column in the West.
04:51It has promulgated lies about the bombing of hospitals, the targeting of children,
04:56the outbreak of famine, massacres at aid sites, and a genocidal death toll,
05:02ten times larger than what Hamas itself reports.
05:05The fog of war inevitably generates uncertainty, and that is no different in Gaza.
05:10But outright lies, such as Mehdi Hassan's, about the unprecedented death of journalists in Gaza,
05:17shine so brightly that they offer a beacon by which we can begin to discern the truth.
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