Collin Anderson of the Washington Free Beacon reports inconvenient facts about mainstream media outlets’ key sources on human rights.
The Washington Post recently tapped two human rights experts, Omar Shakir and Raji Sourani, to lambast Israel over viral photographs of Palestinian prisoners clad in their underwear. In that story, headlined, “Hungry, Thirsty, and Humiliated: Israel’s Mass Arrest Campaign Sows Fear in Northern Gaza,” Shakir called for an international investigation of the Jewish state. Sourani condemned Israel for littering Gaza with “corpses all over the place.”
Both men are also routinely cited in the New York Times, where Shakir in particular is a mainstay. The Times quoted Shakir in a Dec. 13 story headlined, “Under Rules of War, ‘Proportionality’ in Gaza Is Not About Evening the Score,” in which the activist raised “‘serious questions’ about whether Israel has committed war crimes.”
Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch, and Sourani, who bills himself as a human rights lawyer in Gaza, are hardly even-handed human rights experts. Both blamed Hamas’s terrorist rampage on Israeli conduct, and Shakir called for the dismantling of Israel’s so-called apartheid state even before Israel began its retaliatory attacks.
The elevation of Shakir and Sourani in the Times and Post reflects the mainstream media’s effort to put the democratic state of Israel and the terrorist group Hamas on the same moral playing field.
In his first tweet after Oct. 7, Shakir blamed the violence on Israeli “apartheid,” writing in a tweet on Oct. 9: “So long as there’s impunity, Gaza remains an open-air prison and Israel’s apartheid isn’t dismantled, bloodshed and repression will continue.”
Sourani responded to Hamas’s slaughtering of Israeli civilians in a similar manner. In his first tweet after the attack, he accused Israel of launching “the boldest and most cruel unprecedented attack” in “the heart of Gaza.”
