Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration of President Donald Trump on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“Debate about how much tax billionaires pay is likely to grow as America’s fiscal situation deteriorates and its wealth gap widens.”
A report published Wednesday by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal outlined how billionaires’ tax evasion schemes are causing problems for the US economy.
The report, written by London-based columnist Carol Ryan, began by noting how completely the US economy has come to depend on the spending habits of its richest households, whose wealth is primarily tied to the fortunes of the stock market, which “could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction.”
Ryan then walked through some of the plusses and minuses of the wealth tax being debated in the state of California, which has more billionaires than any state in the nation.
Even while personally finding flaws with the California proposal, Ryan said that plans to extract wealth from the super-rich aren’t going away, even if the California tax plan is ultimately defeated.
“Debate about how much tax billionaires pay is likely to grow as America’s fiscal situation deteriorates and its wealth gap widens,” Ryan wrote. “Data from the Federal Reserve shows that only the richest 1% of households have grown their share of overall US wealth since 1990.”
Ryan also broke down how the very richest Americans have tax evasion options that mere multimillionaires don’t have.
“A common strategy is to avoid salaries, which are heavily taxed,” she wrote. “Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don’t need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral.”
Ryan added that “the interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be,” and billionaires compound this wealth by passing it off to their children as part of a “buy borrow die” tax avoidance plan.
Boston College law professor Ray Madoff told Ryan that the wealth at the very top has grown so concentrated that even “very well-off Americans with high incomes” are now aligned “much more with the middle class” than in the past.
Ryan’s report isn’t the only one published by the Journal in recent weeks to warn of dangerous levels of US wealth inequality.
Chief Wall Street Journal economics commentator Greg Ip last week posted data showing that corporate profits’ share of gross domestic income is now the highest it has been in more than 40 years, while the share of income paid out in workers’ wages is at the lowest.
“Profits have soared since the pandemic, and the market value attached to those profits even more,” wrote Ip. “The result: Capital, which includes businesses, shareholders, and superstar employees, is triumphant, while the average worker ekes out marginal gains.”
Ip also said that this problem could grow worse if artificial intelligence lives up to its creators’ hype and starts replacing human workers on a mass scale.
In such a scenario, wrote Ip, the “biggest winners” of the economy would be shareholders who, as Ryan explained in her piece, have ample tools to avoid paying taxes.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
As more and morescholars, and one rights groupafteranother, confirm that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, it’s becoming ever more obvious that those who deny the genocide are the intellectual and moral equivalents of people who deny other genocides, such as the ones inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the Holocaust, or the Armenian Genocide.
Yet the Wall Street Journal persists in running genocide denial. Looking at how the paper does so enables us to not only refute their falsehoods, but also to gain insight into the tactics Gaza genocide denialists, and genocide deniers in general, employ. These include:
Hand-waving: brushing off the cataclysmic damage Israel and the US have done to Palestinians as merely the unavoidable byproducts of war;
Victim-blaming: saying that Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas are to blame for the suffering in Gaza;
Inverting perpetrator and victim: presenting Palestinians, and not Israelis, as genocidal, with Israelis, rather than Palestinians, cast as the targets;
Obscurantism: offering dubious pieces of information, usually in a decontextualized manner, as if they showed that Israel has pursued its military objectives humanely;
Repudiation: flatly rejecting well-documented facts while offering little or no counter-evidence.
‘Justifiable, even necessary’
Avi Shafran (Wall Street Journal, 7/22/25): “When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters.”
Ami Magazine columnist Avi Shafran’s Journal piece (7/22/25) utilized both hand-waving and victim-blaming. He asserted:
When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters…. Civilians suffer and die in the prosecution of justifiable, even necessary, wars. That tragedy is intensified when you are fighting an enemy who hides behind human shields. Eradicating the engines of terror in Gaza requires attacking the places from which they operate: hospitals, schools and mosques.
Israel’s supposedly “justifiable, even necessary” war has entailed such policies (as Human Rights Watch—12/19/24—notes) as
intentionally depriv[ing] Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.
Rather than offering a reasoned, evidence-based defense of such Israeli conduct, Shafran blithely wrote as if consciously withholding drinking water from a civilian population were as natural and inevitable as water boiling at a hundred degrees Celsius.
The author’s next move was to blame Palestinians for Israel killing Palestinians. Shafran, of course, didn’t offer a scintilla of proof for his claim that Palestinian fighters force their own people to be human shields, probably because it’s Israel—not Hamas—that routinely uses Palestinians as shields (FAIR.org, 5/13/25).
‘Systematically and deliberately devastated’
From the health workers’ open letter (Common Dreams, 10/2/24): “The human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”
Equally weak is Shafran’s suggestion that it’s Palestinians’ fault that Israel attacks Palestinian hospitals, schools and mosques. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said that Israel damaged and destroyed more than 90% of the school and university buildings in Gaza, and found just one case where Hamas had also used a school for military purposes. The commission also said that Israeli attacks have damaged more than half of all religious and cultural sites in Gaza, and noted that
all ten religious and cultural sites in Gaza investigated by the Commission constituted civilian objects at the time of attack, and suffered devastating destruction for which the Commission could not identify a legitimate military need.
Similarly, the UN Human Rights Commission published a report late last year examining 136 Israeli strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, and said that Israel did not substantiate its claims that Palestinian armed groups were using the structures for military purposes. In some cases, the report pointed out, Israel’s “vague” allegations “appear contradicted by publicly available information.”
Moreover, 99 American healthcare professionals who volunteered in the Gaza Strip in the months following October 7, 2023, published a letter saying that the signatories
spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.
We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance and murder.
Shafran pretended such evidence doesn’t exist, perhaps hoping that his audience is racist enough to believe his diatribes about wily Arabs who use places of healing, learning, worship and sanctuary to conceal “engines of terror.”
‘That side isn’t Israel’
Israel blockades food going into the Gaza Strip, and the Wall Street Journal (8/5/25) blames Hamas.
Former Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker wrote a Journal piece (8/5/25) that inverted victim and perpetrator in Gaza. He asserted that, in the war between Israel “and its enemies in Gaza,” one side “would, if it could, conduct a genocide against the other, wiping every last remnant off the face of the planet. That side isn’t Israel.”
Baker’s strategy is to focus on what he claims Palestinian fighters “would” do in imaginary circumstances, rather than on the genocide that is actually taking place. Such speculation is pointless, because by definition it’s not possible to know what would happen in made-up scenarios. Since Baker doesn’t even bother to explain the reasons for his view that Palestinians “would” commit genocide if they could, his make-believe does not merit serious consideration.
While it is by definition impossible to decisively prove what might happen under nonexistent conditions, there is zero doubt that Israel has—in the really existing world—carried out a genocide and engaged in a pattern of conduct consistent with trying to “wip[e] every last remnant [of Palestinian life in Gaza] off the face of the planet.” Days before the Journal ran Baker’s screed, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report (7/25) documenting the Israeli genocide in Gaza:
Israel’s conduct of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which has included—among other things—massive, indiscriminate bombardment of population centers; starvation of more than 2 million people as a method of warfare; attempts at ethnic cleansing and formally including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s residents in the war aims; systematic destruction of hospitals and other medical facilities, which are entitled to special protection under international law, along with the vast majority of civilian infrastructure there; and the unprecedented killing of medical personnel, aid workers, persons in charge of maintaining public order, and journalists. Israel’s claim that Hamas fighters or members of other armed Palestinian groups were present in medical or civilian facilities, often made without providing any evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction.
Baker’s inversion of victim and perpetrator depends on ignoring the voluminous proof that Israel is carrying out a genocide, focusing instead on fantasies based on nothing more than orientalist depictions of Arabs as bloodthirsty savages.
‘Every martyr is a trophy’
Bernard-Henri Lévy (Wall Street Journal, 9/3/25): “To speak of genocide in Gaza is an offense to common sense, a maneuver to demonize Israel, and an insult to the victims of genocides past and present.”
The notorious French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy published an op-ed in the Journal (9/3/25) headlined “Three Big Lies About the Israel/Hamas War.” In his view, one such lie is that “Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.” He explained: “To say ‘genocide’ means a plan—a deliberate, targeted initiative to destroy a people. That isn’t what the Israeli army is doing.”
Here Lévy engaged in the repudiation approach to genocide denial, writing as if a well-established body of Israeli intent weren’t readily available to anyone with access to the internet. Just six days into the US/Israeli onslaught, Israeli historian Raz Segal wrote (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23) that what Israel had undertaken was “a textbook case of genocide.”
One piece of evidence Segal pointed to was Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s announcement that the state was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”
For Segal, Gallant’s use of the phrase
“complete siege”…explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.
Similarly, in February, US President Trump put forth a genocidal plan (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 2/5/25; Truthout, 2/9/25) to empty Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants so that the US could annex the territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by saying he was “committed to US President Trump’s plan for the creation of a different Gaza.” Subsequently, Netanyahu suggested that implementing Trump’s scheme was a condition for ending the conflict.
More recently, Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) commented that an Israeli government plan codenamed “Gideon’s Chariot” was designed “to demolish what remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and concentrate the Palestinian population into a tiny area,” and that this “would amount to an abhorrent escalation of its ongoing crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide.”
Thus Lévy’s denialism depends on repudiating the extensive record of Israeli leaders articulating “a plan” to “destroy a people.”
Lévy’s next move was to victim-blame: “Perhaps [Israel] is waging the war badly,” he wrote, but wondering, “who would do better in an asymmetric conflict when the enemy’s goal isn’t to minimize casualties on its own side but to maximize them, so that every martyr is a trophy?” Here Lévy traded on the racist myth that Palestinians are fanatical barbarians indifferent to the suffering of their own people.
His language is vague, so it’s hard to know for sure what he’s talking about, but it sounds like he might be invoking, as Shafran did, what Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), calls the “double lie of ‘human shields’” (Mondoweiss, 9/21/24).
‘A genocidal army doesn’t take two years’
Al Jazeera (9/14/25): “Fifteen out of 17 doctors described encountering children under 15 with single bullet wounds to the head or chest. Together, they identified 114 such cases during their missions in Gaza.”
Lévy then engaged in obscurantism, denying the genocide by selecting questionable tidbits that he seems to think cast Israel in a positive light:
A genocidal army doesn’t take two years to win a war in a territory the size of Las Vegas. A genocidal army doesn’t send SMS warnings before firing or facilitate the passage of those trying to escape the strikes. A genocidal army wouldn’t evacuate, every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer, sending them to hospitals in Abu Dhabi as part of a medical airlift set up right after October 7.
That Israel hasn’t conquered Gaza to this point is a non sequitur. What Israel’s inability to subjugate Gaza shows is that Israel isn’t omnipotent, and that Palestinian fighters and their allies have mounted an effective resistance to the attempt to exterminate Gaza-based Palestinians (FAIR.org, 1/24/25). That tells us nothing about Israel’s intent or the severity of the devastation it has inflicted. (It’s worth recalling that the Warsaw Ghetto survived more than two and a half years under siege from genocidal Nazi forces.)
The SMS warnings that Lévy hails add to the “confusion, chaos and mass displacement” characterizing life in Gaza for the last two years (NPR, 12/7/23). More to the point, any “warnings before firing” that Israel has sent out aren’t going to save many Gaza residents when these messages are disseminated in the context of Israel leveling much of the Strip (BBC, 7/18/25; Guardian, 1/18/25) by bombing it with the “equivalent to six Hiroshimas,” leaving the population with effectively nowhere safe to go.
Approximately 70,000 Palestinians—the overwhelming majority of them civilians—are known to be dead, or are presumed dead under the rubble (to say nothing of the many more dead due to starvation, disease, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to clean water), so it’s as absurd as it is obscene for Lévy to suggest that Israel is making a sincere effort to reduce Palestinian casualties. That’s what Lévy’s paragraph seems to be suggesting, irrespective of all data to the contrary.
For instance, a group of 45 American physicians and nurses who volunteered in Gaza wrote a letter to the Biden/Harris administration describing treating children whose injuries the medical professionals were sure had been intentionally inflicted; “specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” the letter said (CNN, 7/26/24). Deliberately sniping children every day is, to paraphrase Lévy, something a genocidal army does.
‘Delayed or denied’
Bragging about the IDF evacuating “hundreds of Palestinian children” is actually an admission of the inadequacy of Israeli relief efforts (MSF, 7/17/25).
Nor was Lévy on solid ground when he denied that Israel policies are genocidal by claiming that it “evacuate[s], every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer.” Compare that to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières report (7/17/25) that
an estimated 11,000–13,000 people—including more than 4,500 children—require medical evacuation to access care unavailable in the Strip. Yet Israeli authorities have allowed only a few of those requesting medical evacuation to do so, with many critical cases being delayed or denied regardless of medical urgency….
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has only managed to medically evacuate 22 patients, including 13 children to our reconstructive surgery hospital in Amman, Jordan, for comprehensive rehabilitative care.
The World Health Organization (WHO) told a similar story (4/14/25):
Far too few patients have been able to leave Gaza for the urgent care they so desperately need. We estimate that up to 12,000 patients need medical evacuation but, since [Israel intensified its blockade of aid in March] we have only been able to evacuate 121 people, including 73 children.
The number of people allowed to leave Gaza for healthcare has been a minuscule portion of those who need it—never mind that the reason Palestinians need to leave Gaza for medical treatment could have something to do with destroying the Strip’s health system by “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care” in the territory. Because that’s the reality of Israel’s assaults on Palestinian healthcare, and because Lévy’s project is genocide denial, he has no choice but to obscure what Israel has done and is continuing to do.
‘Charges are a travesty’
Alan Dershowitz (9/16/25) combines two of the Wall Street Journal‘s favorite causes: defending genocide and demonizing New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (FAIR.org, 7/30/25).
Attorney Alan Dershowitz—himself rathernotorious—also engaged in genocide denial on the Journal’s op-ed page (9/16/25), selecting obscurantism and repudiation as his rhetorical weapons. Dershowitz mocked New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for saying that, if elected, he will enforce the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Netanyahu, should the prime minister visit the city:
The ICC’s charges against Mr. Netanyahu are a travesty. Its arrest warrant accuses him of intentionally starving civilians in Gaza—never mind that Israel has facilitated the delivery of more than a million tons of food to the strip. Mr. Mamdani also accuses the Jewish state of “genocide,” a charge that not even the ICC levies.
Dershowitz wrote as though it is self-evidently absurd for Mamdani to say that Israel is carrying out genocide, pointing to the fact that the ICC has not charged Israel with doing so. Yet the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide, and is working toward a definitive ruling (Guardian, 7/27/25). This is to say nothing of the many scholars and rights groups, already cited in this piece, who have concluded that the term aptly characterizes Israel’s actions. Dershowitz simply pretended this evidence doesn’t exist.
Dershowitz obfuscated Israeli policies by celebrating the volume of food allowed into Gaza, as though it were sufficient. A “million tons of food” sounds like a lot, but divided among 2 million people over two years, it amounts to a little more than one and a third pounds of food per day. (A pound and a third of rice has about 800 calories,while “the standard humanitarian ration is 2,100 calories per person per day”—London Review of Books, 5/14/25.)
It’s uncontroversial that Israel is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza. The UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessed that “half a million people—a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza—are suffering from famine,” a catastrophe resulting from Israeli policies, including what aid groups describe as its “systematic obstruction” of food entering the Strip (BBC, 8/22/25).
Even more contemptible
As I’ve argued previously (Electronic Intifada, 7/15/24), denying an unfolding genocide like the one in Palestine is even more contemptible than denying genocides that happened in the past, because an ongoing genocide can be stopped before even more people in the targeted population are killed, maimed and bereaved. That’s why every genocide denial is at the same time pro-genocide propaganda: Fewer people with an accurate grasp of the US/Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a people means fewer people to try and stop it from happening.
Fortunately, despite all the lies from outlets like the Journal, millions of people around the world have made Palestine solidarity activism a regular part of their lives. The more widely genocide-enabling mendacities can be exposed, the more likely to succeed will be the movements to stop the crime of crimes—and to achieve peace through liberation across the Middle East.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAVote Labour for Genocide.
In his last dispatch for Al Jazeera (8/10/25), journalist Anas al-Sharif reported, “For the past two hours, the Israeli aggression on Gaza City has intensified.”
Israel’s targeted assassination of six Palestinian media members in the Gaza Strip on August 10 sent shockwaves through the journalism community. Though the murder of journalists has been a common tool of the Israeli’s government’s suppression of information coming out of Gaza, the loss of Al Jazeera‘s Anas al-Sharif was particularly harrowing.
Many of us had been moved by al-Sharif’s heart-wrenching coverage, from watching him remove his press vest in relief when a ceasefire was announced (1/19/25), to seeing a languid al-Sharif reporting on the famine (7/21/25) as people fainted around him. “Keep going, Anas, don’t stop,” said a voice off-camera. “You are our voice.”
Three of the victims were al-Sharif’s colleagues at Al Jazeera, one of the few media outlets that was able to keep journalists reporting in Gaza despite Israel’s blockade. As millions around the world grieved not just for al-Sharif but for his colleagues Mohammed Qreiqeh, Mohammed Noufal and Ibrahim Zaher, and freelancers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammad al-Khaldi, we were also gravely concerned about the vacuum their murders created of on-the-ground coverage of the genocide.
Establishment media, however, used these courageous journalists’ murders as an opportunity to continue parroting the same Zionist talking points that contributed to manufacturing consent for their killings. FAIR looked at 15 different news outlets’ initial coverage of the murders: the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, BBC, Politico, Newsweek, Associated Press and Reuters.
We found that they overwhelmingly centered Israel’s narrative, attempted to delegitimize pro-Palestinian sources, and failed to contextualize the killings within the larger context of the genocide.
Prioritizing Israel’s pretext
Fox News (8/11/25) went farthest in embracing Israel’s “terrorist” narrative.
Four of the 15 articles (New York Times, 8/10/25; NBC,8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) mentioned the allegations in either the headline or subhead. “Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalists in Airstrike, Claiming One Worked for Hamas,” was NBC‘s headline, with Israel’s smear that al-Sharif “posed as a journalist” in the subhead. Fox offered “Israel Says Al Jazeera Journalist Killed in Airstrike Was Head of Hamas ‘Terrorist Cell.’”
Reuters’ original headline (8/11/25) was “Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” only later changed to “Israel Strike Kills Al Jazeera Journalists in Gaza.”
Al-Sharif had been targeted and smeared by the Israeli Defense Forces for months prior to his murder, and had written a statement in anticipation of his killing. “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice,” he wrote. He asked the world to continue fighting for justice in Palestine: “Do not forget Gaza.”
Six of the articles (ABC, 8/11/25; BBC, 8/11/25; New York Times, 8/10/25; NBC, 8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) completely omitted references to or quotes from al-Sharif’s final statement. Of those six articles, the New York Times, BBC, NBC and Fox did include quotes from Israeli government representatives—perplexingly choosing to prioritize the voices of al-Sharif’s killers over his own.
The New York Times (8/10/25) gave the Israeli government ample space to smear one of the journalists it had just killed, claiming he was “the head of a terrorist cell” who was “responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians.”
Coverage by the Wall Street Journal and New YorkTimes devoted the most space to advancing Israel’s pretext for the killings. The Journal’s Anat Peled dedicated the first three paragraphs of her article to detailing al-Sharif’s supposed Hamas affiliation. Ephrat Livni of the Times also spent three paragraphs on the bogus allegations, allowing only one paragraph for a rebuttal from Al Jazeera and CPJ.
Every article except the ones from the New York Times (8/10/25) and Fox (8/11/25) cited the historically high number of Palestinian journalists that have been killed since October 7, 2023. The death toll currently stands at 192, according to the CPJ. However, only four articles (ABC, 8/11/25; CNN, 8/10/25; Politico, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25) listed Israel as the primary perpetrator of these murders. More typically, the AP (8/11/25) wrote that “at least 192 journalists have been killed since Israel’s war in Gaza began,” leaving the identities of both these journalists and their killers unmentioned.
Six (ABC, 8/11/25; BBC, 8/11/25; Newsweek, 8/10/25; Fox, 8/11/25; CBS, 8/11/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; LA Times, 8/11/25) of the 15 articles failed to mention Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and none mentioned the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against him for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder and intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.
Critically, only two articles (Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; Washington Post, 8/11/25) even noted the fact that the other five slain journalists had not been accused of belonging to Hamas. With this omission, the other outlets accepted and transmitted to audiences Israel’s premise that any number of bystanders can legitimately be killed in order to target a supposed Hamas member.
Unnecessary qualifiers
Including the October 7, 2023, breakout as background for the killing of journalists, NBC (8/10/25) specified that “many of the targets of those attacks were civilians, including people attending a music festival.” Palestinians killed subsequently by Israel, by contrast, were just described as “people…in the Hamas-run enclave.”
A common practice for Western media has been the use of unnecessary qualifiers to delegitimize information that comes from Palestinian sources. The coverage of al-Sharif’s assassination was no exception.
The BBC (8/11/25) wrote, “More than 61,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli military operation began, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.” Western media have taken it upon themselves to seemingly rename the Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) in order to cast doubt on the extent of Israel’s atrocities. They rarely note that a Lancet study (2/8/25) has found that the death toll could be up to 40% higher than what the GHM is reporting. The New York Times (8/10/25) and Reuters (8/11/25) also utilized “Hamas-run” to describe figures from the Gazan government.
These outlets also showed a clear bias as to how they characterize casualties. The New York Times (8/10/25), when reporting on the death toll in Gaza, wrote that the GHM doesn’t “distinguish between civilians and combatants.” Later on, the Times reported on Israeli deaths—and failed to distinguish between Israeli civilian and combatant deaths.
The implication is that some Palestinian deaths might be considered to be of lesser importance, or even justified, based on victims’ potential “combatant” status. Israeli deaths, meanwhile, are to be counted simply as human beings. The Washington Post (8/11/25) exhibited the same double standard in its reporting.
NBC (8/10/25) wrote, “Many of the targets of [the October 7] attacks were civilians, including people attending a music festival.” When reporting Palestinian deaths, NBC made no mention that over half of those killed by Israel have been women, children and the elderly. A more recent investigation found that civilians make up 83% of deaths, according to the IDF’s own data. The report also didn’t describe what Palestinian victims might have been doing when they were killed, such as the almost 1,400 who have been shot while seeking aid.
In addition to the usual rhetoric, eight of the 15 articles cast doubt on Al Jazeera by repeatedly mentioning its ownership by the Qatari government. (Qatar, like Israel, is one of 20 countries worldwide officially designated as a “major non-NATO ally” by the United States.) Three of the articles (New York Times, 8/10/25; Wall Street Journal, 8/11/25; LA Times, 8/11/25) mention the Israeli government’s adversarial relationship with Al Jazeera, with the New York Times and the Journal dedicating several paragraphs to the outlet’s alleged ties to Hamas as the presumed basis for the conflict, rather than Al Jazeera‘s critical coverage of Israeli actions.
False equivalences
Reuters‘ original headline (8/11/25) was written from the point of view of al-Sharif’s killers.
Only three of the articles use the word “famine” (Financial Times, 8/10/25; CNN, 8/10/25; Newsweek, 8/10/25), and only the Financial Times mentions the word outside of quotes. Reuters (8/11/25) and the Wall Street Journal (8/11/25) called the situation “a hunger crisis” and “a humanitarian crisis that has pushed many Palestinians toward starvation,” respectively.
Media outlets continue to push the narrative that this so-called conflict began less than two years ago, as when NBC (8/10/25) wrote, “Israel launched the offensive in Gaza, targeting Hamas, after the Hamas-led terror attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023.”
Though the rate of killing greatly escalated after the October 7 operation, Israeli violence against Palestinians goes back to before the founding of the state, as many historians have carefully explained. In the decades immediately prior to the Hamas operation, the Israeli human rights group B’tselem counts more than 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces between September 2000 and September 2023—most of them noncombatants, over 2,400 of them children under 18. (Over the same period, some 1,300 Israelis—civilians and military—were killed by Palestinians.)
The Financial Times (8/10/25) described the ongoing genocide as “triggered” by the October 7 attacks, as if the al-Aqsa Flood operation were a random act of violence unrelated to the apartheid system that Israel imposes on Palestinians. The BBC (8/11/25) described Israeli violence as a “response to the Hamas-led attack,” completely erasing Israel’s history of occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that long precedes the existence of Hamas. Obscuring this sort of context is part of the motivation for Israel’s systematic murder of Palestinian journalists, including al-Sharif and his colleagues.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
Even as media report more regularly on starvation in Gaza, coverage still tends to obscure responsibility—as with this CNN headline (7/26/25) blaming the baby’s death on the “starvation crisis” rather than on the US-backed Israeli government.
The headlines are increasingly dire.
“Child Dies of Malnutrition as Starvation in Gaza Grows” (CNN, 7/21/25)
“More Than 100 Aid Groups Warn of Starvation in Gaza as Israeli Strikes Kill 29, Officials Say” (AP, 7/23/25)
“No Formula, No Food: Mothers and Babies Starve Together in Gaza” (NBC, 7/25/25)
“Five-Month-Old Baby Dies in Mother’s Arms in Gaza, a New Victim of Escalating Starvation Crisis” (CNN, 7/26/25)
“Gaza’s Children Are Looking Through Trash to Avoid Starving” (New York, 7/28/25)
This media coverage is urgent and necessary—and criminally late.
Devastatingly late to care
An informative Wall Street Journal chart (7/27/25) shows the complete cutoff of food into Gaza at the beginning of 2025—a genocidal policy decision by Israel that was not accompanied by increased coverage in US media of famine in the Strip.
Since the October 7 attacks, Israel has severely restricted humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, using starvation of civilians as a tool of war, a war crime for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant have been charged by the International Criminal Court. Gallant proclaimed a “complete siege” of Gaza on October 9, 2023: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
Aid groups warned of famine conditions in parts of Gaza as early as December 2023. By April 2024, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) found it “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.”
A modest increase in food aid was allowed into the Strip during a ceasefire in early 2025. But on March 2, 2025, Netanyahu announced a complete blockade on the occupied territory. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.”
After more than two months of a total blockade, Israel on May 19 began allowing in a trickle of aid through US/Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) centers (FAIR.org, 6/6/25)—while targeting with snipers those who came for it—but it is not anywhere near enough, and the population in Gaza is now on the brink of mass death, experts warn. According to UNICEF (7/27/25):
The entire population of over 2 million people in Gaza is severely food insecure. One out of every three people has not eaten for days, and 80% of all reported deaths by starvation are children.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 147 Gazans have died from malnutrition since the start of Israel’s post–October 7 assault. Most have been in the past few weeks.
Mainstream politicians are finally starting to speak out—even Donald Trump has acknowledged “real starvation” in Gaza—but as critical observers have pointed out, it is devastatingly late to begin to profess concern. Jack Mirkinson’s Discourse Blog (7/28/25) quoted Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk:
I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality…. Once a famine gathers momentum, the effort required to contain it increases exponentially. It would now take an overwhelmingly large aid operation to reverse the coming wave of mortality, and it would take months.
And there are long-term, permanent health consequences to famine, even when lives are saved (NPR, 7/29/25). Mirkinson lambasted leaders like Cory Booker and Hillary Clinton for failing to speak up before now: “It is too late for them to wash the blood from their hands.”
Barely newsworthy
Major US media, likewise, bear a share of responsibility for the hunger-related deaths in Gaza. The conditions of famine have been out in the open for well over a year, and yet it was considered barely newsworthy in US news media.
A MediaCloud search of online US news reports mentioning “Gaza” and either “famine” or “starvation” shows that since Netanyahu’s March 2 announcement of a total blockade—which could only mean rapidly increasing famine conditions—there was a brief blip of media attention, and then even less news coverage than usual for the rest of March and April. Media attention rose modestly in May, at a time when the world body that classifies famines announced in May that one in five people in Gaza were “likely to face starvation between May 11 and September 30″—in other words, that flooding Gaza with aid was of the highest urgency.
But as aid continued to be held up, and Gazans were shot by Israeli snipers when attempting to retrieve the little offered them, that coverage eventually dwindled, until the current spike that began on July 21.
FAIR (e.g., 3/22/24, 4/25/25, 5/16/25, 5/16/25) has repeatedly criticized US media for coverage that largely absolves Israel of responsibility for its policy of forced starvation—what Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) called “a tool of extermination”—implemented with the backing of the US government.
The current headlines reveal that the coverage still largely diverts attention from Israeli (let alone US) responsibility, but it’s a positive development that major US news media are beginning to devote serious coverage to the issue. Imagine how different this all could have looked had they given it the attention it has warranted, and the accountability it has demanded, when alarms were first raised.
The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).
As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.
In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).
The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”
In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)
The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).
‘An uncertain end’
The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”
The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.
In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”
At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”
The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:
Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.
But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.
These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).
House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).
In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.
‘Constitutional crisis is here’
“Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”
Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.
Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).
This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.
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Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
