In a report published on Thursday, the media watchdog Honest Reporting exposed how a prominent Middle East contributor for leading news outlets, including The New York Times, has reportedly been spreading Palestinian terrorist propaganda and vile antisemitic content on social media.
“Hanona, a freelance producer and fixer who has also been hired by the BBC, The Guardian, and VICE News, appears to be working to further the anti-Israel narrative promoted by Palestinian terror organizations that seek the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state,” the Honest Reporting noted.
While reporting on the Gaza conflict for some of the world’s top media outlets, Hanona has apparently been publicly promoting terror attacks on Israeli civilians on his social media accounts, the media watchdog uncovered. According to his Facebook feed, mainstream media’s favorite go-to person on Gaza has been supporting Palestinian terrorists, praising Hitler, and even calling for the genocide of Jews, the media watchdog reported.
“I don’t accept a Jew, Israeli or Zionist, or anyone else who speaks Hebrew. I’m with killing them wherever they are: children, elderly people, and soldiers,” Hanona wrote in one of his vile social media posts, cited by Honest Reporting.
Exposing Hanona social media activities, Honest Reporting wrote on Thursday:
Out of the eight articles produced by The New York Times during the three-day PIJ-initiated conflict, six credit Fady Hanona as having contributed from Gaza City (…).Hanona, a freelance producer and fixer who has also been hired by the BBC, The Guardian, and VICE News, appears to be working to further the anti-Israel narrative promoted by Palestinian terror organizations that seek the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.For one, he supports arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti, having backed him repeatedly on Facebook (…). Prior to his incarceration, Barghouti co-founded and headed the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, an organization that murdered dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and shooting attacks during the Second Intifada (2000-2005).Hanona moreover made light of the escape from prison of members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in September of last year (…).Most of the escapees were serving life sentences for their roles in attacks on Israeli citizens. Ayham Kamamji, for example, was convicted of kidnapping and murdering teenager Eliyahu Asheri. Indeed,Hanona makes no attempt to hide his desire that Israel be removed from the map, referring to the country’s sovereign territory as the “[19]48 lands,” while putting “Israel” in scare quotes.During 2014’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza, the New York Times freelancer took to social media to threaten the murder of Ghassan Alian, an Israeli Druze who commanded the IDF’s Golani Brigade at the time.
Then, on August 18, 2014 — days before a ceasefire took effect between Israel and Hamas — Hanona urged the Palestinian “resistance” to reject a truce and continue its missile attacks on Tel Aviv, which had at that point already cost the lives of five civilians.
In another online post from the same month, he went as far as invoking Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to support his point about the strength of Gazan fighters. “As Hitler said, give me a Palestinian soldier and a German weapon, and I will make Europe crawl on its fingertips,” Hanona’s post read, citing an unconfirmed quote attributed to the man responsible for the murder of six million Jews.
In an attempt to cover his tracks, Hanona seems to have deleted his social media accounts. But the screenshots of his posts can still be accessed via Honest Reporting‘s exposé.
As Honest Reporting’s analyst Akiva Van Koningsveld writes in his report, this is not an isolated case but systemic for the media landscape regarding covering Israel. As Legal Insurrection has repeatedly highlighted in its coverage, the mainstream media is replete with jihad supporters and Israel-haters posing as independent journalists and commentators.
Koningsveld rightly notes that “fixers and translators with a political agenda can be selective with the information they feed the journalist or, at worst, mistranslate the words of interview subjects, resulting in skewed news coverage about the Arab-Israeli conflict.”
The problem is not limited to biased and tainted journalists on the ground. The international media outlets often rely on Palestinian charities and NGOs linked to terrorist organizations for verifying the facts on the ground. Needless to say, they are fed with misinformation and Palestinian terrorist and Islamist propaganda.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY