(JNS) Dramatic evidence was produced this week to illustrate the hijacking of the Western media by Hamas in its attempt to turn Israel into the pariah of the world and accelerate the destruction of the Jewish state.

The German publications Bild and Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed that Western media outlets had been publishing images purporting to be of starving Gazans but which were in fact staged and manipulated by Hamas as part of its propaganda offensive to blacken Israel’s name.

Bild showed how a widely circulated picture of apparently desperate Gazan women and children holding out empty pots for food had been staged. Photographs taken from other angles revealed the Gaza photographer, Anas Zayed Fteiha, orchestrating the tableau by getting the women and children to pose beseechingly with their pots being offered not toward the food site but toward him.

Fteiha, whose pictures have been published by CNN, the BBC and Reuters, has a record of posting hatred toward Israel and the Jews.

He has also worked with the Europe Palestine Network, which says it conducts “global actions in Europe,” portraying hardship in Gaza while promoting “resistance” against Israel internationally.

As an activist posing as a journalist, he is far from alone. Süddeutsche Zeitung found that many of the Arab photographers operating within the Gaza Strip have Hamas connections. A historian and photography expert, Gerhard Paul, told the paper that, in southern Gaza, “Hamas controls 100 percent of image production” to generate Western sympathy while inflaming anger toward Israel.

In other words, major Western media outlets have been perpetrating a systematic journalistic fraud on the public by promoting as the truth images generated by a jihadi terrorist group intent on exterminating Israel and murdering Jews.

Even without the German papers’ investigation, the deceit has been obvious enough to anyone whose grip on reality has not been loosened by hatred of Israel.

The pictures of skeletal Gazan children allegedly being starved by Israel were in fact of children with terrible congenital diseases. The “starving” women and children in Fteiha’s picture were conspicuously well fed.

There is zero evidence of Israel’s deliberately starving the Gazans, because that claim is a lie. The only people being starved to death are the Israeli hostages.

The fraud doesn’t stop at the published images. Media outlets constantly use as reliable the Hamas totals of those killed in the war, even though these ludicrously fail to acknowledge that any of the dead were Hamas terrorists.

The near daily reports by the BBC and other outlets falsely accusing Israel of deliberately firing on civilians queuing for food ignore the video coverage of Hamas deliberately shooting them dead for receiving this aid.

They ignore the evidence of Hamas gunmen stealing the food from the trucks for themselves. And they ignore the Gazans in orderly queues at the American-Israeli aid points cheering President Trump and the Israel Defense Forces for safely providing them with food by preventing it from being stolen by Hamas.

The media ignore all this, because Western journalists refuse to acknowledge anything that challenges their core narrative of Israeli abuses and “Palestinian” victimization.

Back in 2014, journalist Matti Friedman, who worked for the Associated Press from 2006 to 2011, blew the whistle about a media class that was determined to push a story of Jewish moral failure in the Middle East.

As he recounted, media outlets systematically erased news about Israel that put it in a good light, distorted Middle East history and reversed cause and effect to promote Palestinian-Arab propaganda. Acting in concert, they portrayed Israel as a country “whose motivations could only be malevolent, and one responsible not only for its own actions but also for provoking the actions of its enemies.”

They were backed up by an interchangeable world of progressive NGOs and academics who were referred to as experts, “creating a thought-loop nearly impervious to external information.”

The result—as Friedman wrote last year in The Free Press, when the Oct. 7 atrocities and the war that followed put this malevolent onslaught on steroids—was “the creation of a news story that happens to press one of the deepest buttons in Western civilization: the idea that the evils of a given time are personified by Jews, and thus doing something about Jews isn’t bigotry but virtue.”

Many are now claiming absurdly that this sustained journalistic corruption and moral collapse are the product of Israel’s not allowing Western journalists into Gaza. A number of reporters are embedded with the IDF, but foreign journalists aren’t allowed to move freely around the Strip.

The logic of such critics is non-existent. The fact that Israel doesn’t let the media roam around Gaza hardly explains why the press and broadcasters therefore publish Hamas lies and “Pallywood” theatrics day in, day out.

The critics assume that Western journalists in Gaza would produce enlightenment about the war because they would be reporting in good faith. This is fanciful and naive.

All journalists in Gaza work on terms dictated by Hamas. Arab reporters and photographers who supply Western media outlets with material either fear or support Hamas. Any Gazan reporter or photographer who steps out of line faces being removed or killed.

Yet the media have never once publicly acknowledged that every report or image from Gaza is produced under Hamas censorship. As Friedman noted in 2014, it’s why AP would censor certain information from Gaza because Hamas had threatened the agency’s reporters if it appeared, but failed to inform its readers about those threats and told them instead that Hamas was “becoming more moderate.”

News desks collude in these lies because they are ravenous for the story their Gaza fixers, stringers or photographers provide—the story of “Palestinian” suffering and Israeli evil.

Not one of their reports or images from Gaza can ever be assumed to be truthful, because their sources are all Hamas mouthpieces or sympathizers.

On today’s Gaza battlefield, the risks posed by this media corruption, both to Israel’s security and to the truth, are magnified many times over.

It’s not just that opening up Gaza to Western journalists would mean even more Hamas-dictated propaganda bamboozling even larger swaths of the Western public, and playing into their own innate prejudices against Israel and the Jewish people.

Given the obsessive and malignant partisanship by Western journalists in support of the “Palestinian” cause, they might well pass on to Hamas information they discover about IDF positions, intentions or army units.

The despicable behavior by the Western media is not some marginal sideshow. The media is itself an active front in this war, a crucial weapon being wielded by the Islamic world against Israel through Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar and Iran.

This axis has been waging a cognitive war against Israel by suborning and weaponizing the entire liberal internationalist establishment through the United Nations, human-rights law, international courts, NGOs, the universities and, above all, the Western media.

Whether they realize it or not, all have been harnessed to the same cause—to bring about the darkest and most deeply embedded desire of the West to knock the Jews off their moral pinnacle and cast them instead as the cancer of the world.

The Western media must therefore be regarded as an enemy force in the service of a great evil. Rather than giving it more access and privileges, it must accordingly be fought, along with the Islamic forces that have deployed it as a key front in the war they are waging against civilization itself.

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