Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism slammed recent media coverage that "rushed" to put Israel "on the docket of the accused" after Hamas launched war on the nation.
"The irresponsibility of making [false] statements … whether it's in mainstream media or anybody's sort of echo chamber, we saw what that led to in the entire world," Israel’s Michal Cotler-Wunsh told Fox News Digital in an interview this week.
"We see demonstrations, not just in the streets of New York, Melbourne and Europe. We see demonstrations in the Arab world that took that piece of misinformation, disinformation, false information and channeled it to absolutely launch a continued attack on our shared humanity and on civilization."
Cotler-Wunsh serves as Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism and reacted to recent U.S. news coverage of a blast at a Gaza hospital that killed hundreds of people Tuesday. Some initial headlines pinned blame on Israel for carrying out an attack that killed civilian Palestinians, including young children, taking shelter at the hospital.
Hours later, Israel said intelligence indicated the blast was due to a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) attack intended for Israel. The PIJ is a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization backed by Iran.
President Biden said Wednesday while in Israel that Pentagon intelligence also supported Israel’s assertion that the destruction at the hospital originated from rocket fire in Gaza.
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Cotler-Wunsh took issue with how some media coverage of the war has omitted pinning blame for civilian casualties on Hamas and instead has "rushed" to put Israel on "the docket of the accused." She cited how the "same media" that waited to report on the deaths of children in Israel "rushed" to accuse Israel of bombing a hospital.
"That same media rushed to place the State of Israel, a democratic state doing what every Democratic state must — which is to defend its civilians and its borders — rushed to place that country protecting its civilians on the docket of the accused," she said, "rather than unequivocally stating that the single entity to blame for both the massacre that occurred on Oct. 7 and any loss to Palestinian human life is one entity only.
"And that is the Hamas genocidal terror organization and its supporting regime, the genocidal regime in Iran."
She argued that a history of news coverage hastily putting Israel in a negative light is "a manifestation of the misunderstanding of the dangers of false moral equivalency."
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"I think that what we’re seeing over and over is a manifestation of the misunderstanding of the dangers of false moral equivalency," she said. "When you enable a genocidal terror organization openly stating its commitment to annihilate Israel and murder Jews, to dictate the information you disseminate and way that you cover or write about what is unfolding, you create the situation in which that genocidal organization takes advantage of what we view of as humanity, as civilization, and uses it cynically as a weapon to amplify its message and actions."
Cotler-Wunsh said she doesn't believe such coverage is "intentional," but rather a "misunderstanding that terror cannot be appeased."
She argued that during the height of U.S. war on ISIS, there was "no comparison between ISIS and between the United States of America defending its citizens and the world from ISIS." Or, during World War II, there was "no comparison between Nazis" and world allies.
"There was no comparison between Nazis and between the world, the allies, that defended the world from Nazis. It does not mean there were no innocent civilians killed or that there were no innocent civilians harmed when the United States of America went to war on ISIS. It just means that only the Nazis, only ISIS, only Hamas are responsible for causing loss of human life," she argued.
Feeding an echo chamber without calling out the "false moral equivalency," she argued, actually empowers "the war of terror."
"It doesn’t matter if it's through mainstream channels or on social media platforms, [the moment people] don't call out false moral equivalency, what that does is actually empower the war of terror on civilization," she said. "It's what terror uses. It uses fear and distrust and disinformation. Those are part of its weapons. And I would expect more of journalistic ethics. Absolutely. And fact checking."
