The CIA, Mossad, and Epstein: Unraveling the Intelligence Ties of the Maxwell Family
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | August 22, 2025
With speculation mounting that Trump could pardon her, MintPress profiles the family of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. From her media baron father, who acted as a high-level spy for Israel, her sister, working to push Tel Aviv’s interests in Silicon Valley, her brothers, who founded a dubious but highly influential anti-Islamic extremism think tank, and nephews in influential roles at the State Department and White House, the Maxwell clan have wide-ranging ties to U.S. and Israeli state power. This is their story.
Releasing Ghislaine, Burying the Epstein Files
Speculation is growing that Ghislaine Maxwell could soon be freed. Despite campaigning on the promise to release the Epstein Files, there are increasing signs that the Trump administration is considering pardoning the world’s most notorious convicted sex trafficker.
Last month, Trump (who contemplated the idea in his first term in office) repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon, stating to journalists that “I’m allowed to do it.” Just days later, Maxwell was transferred across states to a minimum-security facility in Bryan, Texas—a highly unusual practice. Neither women convicted of sex crimes nor those with more than 10 years remaining on their sentences are generally permitted to be transferred to such facilities. The move sparked equal measures of speculation and outrage.
The decision to relocate Maxwell came after somebody—potentially a source within her team itself—began leaking incriminating and embarrassing evidence linking Trump to Epstein. This included a birthday card Trump sent Epstein, featuring a hand-drawn nude woman, accompanied by the text: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
For years, Maxwell aided her partner Jeffrey Epstein in trafficking and raping girls and young women, creating a giant sex crime ring in the process. Epstein’s associates included billionaires, scientists, celebrities, and politicians, including President Trump, whom he considered his “closest friend.”
In 2021, two years after Epstein’s mysterious death in a Manhattan prison, Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking offenses and was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The news that Trump may soon free such an infamous criminal sent shockwaves through his base and drew charges of blatant corruption from the media. “Is there any reason to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell except to buy her silence?” ran the headline of one article in The Hill. Meanwhile, Tim Hogan, senior Democratic National Committee adviser, denounced what he claimed was a “government cover-up in real time.” “Donald Trump’s FBI, run by loyalist Kash Patel, redacted Trump’s name from the Epstein files—which have still not been released,” he said.
Robert Maxwell: Media Tycoon and Israeli Operative
While many of Ghislaine Maxwell’s crimes have come to light, less well-known are her family’s myriad connections to both the U.S. and Israeli national security states. Chief among these are those of her father, disgraced media baron and early tech entrepreneur, Robert Maxwell.
A Jewish refugee fleeing Hitler’s occupation of his native Czechoslovakia, Maxwell fought for Britain against Germany. After World War II, he used his Czech connections to help funnel arms to the nascent State of Israel, weapons that helped them win the 1948 war and carry out the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of nearly 800,000 Palestinians.
Maxwell’s biographers, Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, write that he was first recruited by Israeli intelligence in the 1960s and began buying up Israeli tech corporations. Israel used these companies and their software to carry out spying and other clandestine operations around the globe.
Maxwell amassed a vast business empire of 350 companies, employing 16,000 people. He owned an array of newspapers, including The New York Daily News, Britain’s Daily Mirror, and Maariv of Israel, in addition to some of the world’s most influential book and scientific publishing houses.
With business power came political power. He was elected to the U.K. parliament in 1964 and counted U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev among his closest friends.
He used this influence to advance Israeli interests, selling Israeli intelligence-gathering software to Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and many other countries. This software included a secret Israeli backdoor that allowed the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, to tap into classified information gathered by governments and intelligence agencies around the world.
At the same time, it was expanding its espionage capabilities, Israel was developing a secret nuclear weapons program. This project was exposed by Israeli peace activist Mordechai Vanunu, who, in 1986, leaked evidence to the British press. Maxwell—one of Britain’s most powerful press barons—spied on Vanunu, passing photographs and other information to the Israeli Embassy—intelligence that led to Vanunu’s international abduction by Mossad, and his subsequent imprisonment.
His death was also surrounded by controversy, similar to Epstein’s. In 1991, his lifeless body was found in the ocean, in what authorities ruled a bizarre accident whereby the tycoon had fallen from his luxury yacht. To this day, his children are split on whether they think he was murdered.
The rumors that Maxwell had, for decades, been acting as an Israeli “superspy” were all but confirmed by the lavish state funeral he received in Jerusalem. His body was interred at the Mount of Olives, one of the holiest sites in Judaism, the spot from which Jesus is said to have ascended to heaven.
Virtually the entirety of elite Israeli society–both government and opposition–attended the event, including no fewer than six living heads of Israeli intelligence organizations. President Chaim Herzog himself performed the eulogy. Also speaking at the event was Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who stated that “Robert Maxwell has done more for Israel than can today be said.”
In the United Kingdom, however, he is remembered less fondly. A man with a fearsome reputation, Maxwell ruled his media business with an iron fist, in a similar vein to Rupert Murdoch (another individual with extremely close links to Israel). After his death, it transpired that he had stolen more than $500 million from his employees’ pension fund to bail out other failing companies in his empire, leaving many of his workforce’s retirement plans in tatters. As the newspaper, The Scotsman, remarked ten years later in 2001:
If [Maxwell] was despised in life, he was hated in death when it emerged he had stolen 440 million [pounds] from the pension fund of Mirror Group Newspapers. He was, officially, the biggest thief in British criminal history.”
Isabel Maxwell: Israel’s Woman in Silicon Valley
Even before it had been published, Isabel Maxwell– Robert’s daughter and Ghislaine’s older sister– managed to obtain a copy of Thomas and Dillon’s biography. She immediately flew to Israel, The Times of London reported, where she showed it to a “family friend” and deputy director of Mossad, David Kimche. These actions did little to beat the book’s central allegation that her father was indeed a high-level Israeli “superspy.”
Isabel has enjoyed a long and successful career in the tech industry. In 1992, along with her twin sister, Christine, she founded a company that developed one of the internet’s first search engines.
After the pension scandal, however, she and her siblings shifted their focus to rebuilding every facet of their father’s collapsed business empire. The sisters sold the search engine, netting enormous profits.
As Israeli outlet Haaretz noted, in 2001, Isabel decided to dedicate her life to advancing the Jewish State’s interests, vowing to “work only on things involving Israel” as she “believes in Israel.” Described by former MintPress journalist and investigative reporter Whitney Webb as “Israel’s back door into Silicon Valley,” she has transformed herself into a key ambassador for the country in the tech world.
“Maxwell created a unique niche for herself in [tech] as a liaison between Israeli companies in the initial development stages and private angel investors in the U.S. At the same time, she helps U.S. companies interested in opening development centers in Israel,” wrote local business newspaper, Globes. “She lives intensively, including innumerable flights back and forth between Tel Aviv and San Francisco,” it added.
Israel is known to be the source of much of the world’s most controversial spyware and hacking tools, used by repressive governments the world over to surveil, harass, and even kill political opponents. This includes the notorious Pegasus software, used by the government of Saudi Arabia to track Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, before assassinating him in Türkiye.
Isabel built on her father’s political connections. “My father was most influential in my life. He was a very accomplished man and achieved many of his goals during his life. I learned very much from him and have made many of his ways my own,” she said. This included developing intimate ties to a myriad of Israeli leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates.
During the 2000s, she was a regular participant at the Herzliya Conference, an annual, closed-door gathering of the West’s most senior political, security and intelligence officials, in addition to being a “technology pioneer” at the World Economic Forum.
She was also placed on the board of the Israeli government-funded Shimon Peres Center for Peace and Innovation and the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israel Studies, two organizations closely associated with those former Israeli prime ministers.
In 2001, she became the CEO of iCognito, taking the job, in her words, “because it [the company] is in Israel, and because of its technology.” The technology in question was aimed at keeping children safe online—highly ironic, given that her sister was actively trafficking and abusing minors throughout that period.
Isabel was a much more serious and accomplished individual than Ghislaine. As Haaretz noted:
While her younger sister, Ghislaine, makes the gossip columns after breakfasting with Bill Clinton or because of her ties with another close friend, Britain’s Prince Andrew, Isabel wants to show photos taken of herself with the grand mufti of Egypt, or with Bedouin in a tent, or of visits to a Gaza refugee camp.”
In 1997, Isabel was appointed president of the Israeli tech security firm, Commtouch. Thanks to her connections, Commtouch was able to secure investment from many of the most prominent players in Silicon Valley, including Bill Gates, a close associate of both the Maxwell family and Jeffrey Epstein himself.
Christine Maxwell: Funded by Israel?
Isabel’s twin sister, Christine, is no less accomplished. A veteran of the publishing and tech industries, she co-founded data analytics firm Chiliad. As CEO, she helped oversee the production of a massive “counterterrorism” database that the company sold to the FBI during the height of the War on Terror. The software helped the Bush administration crack down on Muslim Americans and tear down domestic civil liberties in the wake of 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act. Today, she is the leader and co-founder of another big data corporation, Techtonic Insight.
Like her sister and father, Christine has a close relationship with the State of Israel. She is currently a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), where, her biography states,
She works to promote innovative academic research that leverages enabling technologies to empower proactive understanding and combatting the great dangers of contemporary antisemitism, and enhancing the ongoing relevance of the Holocaust for the 21st century and beyond.”
ISGAP’s board is a who’s who of Israeli national security state officials. This includes Natan Sharansky, former Minister of Internal Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, and Brigadier General Sima Vaknin-Gil, the former Chief Censor for the IDF and Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy. Also on the board is Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
The think tank was a key player in the U.S. government’s decision to repress the 2024 Gaza protests on university campuses nationwide. The group produced reports linking student leaders with foreign terrorist organizations and promoted dubious claims about a wave of anti-Semitism washing over American colleges. It met frequently with both Democratic and Republican leaders, and urged them to “investigate” (i.e., repress) the leaders of the demonstrations.
ISGAP has continually warned of foreign influence on American campuses, producing reports and holding seminars detailing Qatar’s supposed stranglehold over the U.S. higher education system, and linking that with growing anti-Israel sentiment among America’s youth.
Yet if ISGAP wished to investigate other foreign government influence operations, it would not have to look far, as its own funds overwhelmingly come from a single source: the Israeli state. In 2018, an investigation found that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs (then headed by Brigadier General Vaknin-Gil herself) channeled $445,000 to ISGAP, a sum representing nearly 80% of its entire revenues for that year. ISGAP failed to disclose that information to either the public or the federal government.
At the height of the concern over foreign interference in American politics, the news barely registered. Since then, the Israeli government has continued to bankroll the group to the tune of millions. In 2019, for example, it approved a grant of over $1.3 million to ISGAP. Thus, in her role as a fellow at the organization, Christine Maxwell is the direct beneficiary of Israeli government cash.
Third Generation Maxwells: Working In the US Government
While Robert Maxwell’s daughters were close to state power, some of the family’s third generation have taken up positions within the U.S. government itself. Shortly after graduating from college, Alex Djerassi (Isabel Maxwell’s only son) was employed by Hillary Clinton on her 2007-2008 presidential campaign. Djerassi drafted memos, briefings, and policy papers for the Clinton team and helped prepare her for more than 20 debates.
The Clinton and Maxwell families are closely intertwined. Ghislaine vacationed with Hillary’s daughter, Chelsea, and appeared prominently at her wedding. Both she and Jeffrey Epstein were invited multiple times to the Clinton White House. Long after Epstein was jailed, President Bill Clinton invited Ghislaine to an intimate dinner with him at an exclusive Los Angeles restaurant.
Although she failed in her bid for the White House, President Obama named Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, and one of her first actions was to appoint Djerassi to her team. He quickly rose in the ranks, becoming Chief of Staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. In this role, he specialized in developing the United States’ policy towards Israel and Iran, although he also worked on the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and accompanied Clinton on visits to Israel and the Arab world.
While at the State Department, he served as the U.S. government representative to the Friends of Libya and the Friends of the Syrian People Conferences. These were two organizations of hardline, hawkish groups working towards the overthrow of those two governments, and their replacement with U.S.-friendly regimes. Washington got what it wanted. In 2011, Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown, killed and replaced by Islamist warlords. And last December, longtime Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, fled to Russia and was replaced by the founder of al-Qaeda in Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.
Djerassi was later appointed an associate at the U.S.-government-funded think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. While there, he again specialized in Middle East policy, his bio noting that he “worked on matters relating to democratization and civil society in the Arab world, the Arab uprisings, and Israeli-Palestinian peace.” Today, he works in Silicon Valley.
While Djerassi’s fortunes were tied to the Clinton faction of the Democratic Party, his cousin Xavier Malina (Christine Maxwell’s eldest son) backed the right horse, working on the Obama-Biden 2008 presidential run.
He was rewarded for his good work with a position in the White House itself, where he became a Staff Assistant at the Executive Office of the President. Like his cousin, once his time in office was over, Malina also secured a position at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace before pursuing a career in the tech world, working for many years at Google in the Bay Area. He currently works for Disney.
While the actions of parents and grandparents should not determine the careers of later generations, the fact that two individuals who come from a multi-generational family of unrepentant spies and operatives of a foreign power secured positions at the center of the U.S. State is at least worthy of note.
The Maxwell Brothers: From Bankruptcy to Counterterrorism
Much of the Maxwell clan is most influential in American and Israeli politics. However, brothers Ian and Kevin also hold considerable sway over affairs in their native Great Britain. Although being acquitted of charges over widespread allegations that they helped their father, Robert, plunder over $160 million from his employees’ pension fund, the brothers kept a low profile for many years. Kevin, in particular, was known for little more than being Britain’s largest-ever bankrupt, with debts exceeding half a billion dollars.
However, in 2018, they launched Combating Jihadist Terrorism and Extremism (CoJiT), a controversial think tank pushing for a far more invasive and heavy-handed government approach to the question of radical Islam.
In his organization’s book, “Jihadist Terror: New Threats, New Responses,” Ian writes that CoJiT was set up to play a “catalyzing role in the national conversation,” and to answer “difficult questions” arising from the issue. Judging by the content of the rest of the book, this means pushing for even more extensive surveillance of Muslim communities.
Within Britain, CoJiT was a highly influential organization. Its editorial board and contributors are a who’s who of high state officials. Individuals participating in its inaugural conference in London in 2018 included Sara Khan, the government’s Lead Commissioner for Countering Extremism, and Jonathan Evans, the former Director General of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency.
Like so many Maxwell projects, CoJiT appears to have wrapped up its affairs. The organization has not updated its website or posted anything on its social media channels since 2022.
In fairness, in the past few years, the brothers have had other priorities, leading the campaign to free their sister Ghislaine from prison, insisting that she is entirely innocent. In a manner reminiscent of Robert Maxwell, however, it appears that Kevin may have failed to pay the defense team; in 2022, Maxwell’s lawyers sued him, seeking unpaid fees of nearly $900,000.
The Infamous Mr. Epstein
For years, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein ran a sex trafficking ring that exploited hundreds of girls and young women. They were also connected to vast networks of the global elite, including billionaire business owners, royalty, star academics, and foreign leaders, among their closest acquaintances, leading to intense speculation about the extent of their involvement in their many crimes.
It is still unclear when Epstein first met with the Maxwells, with some alleging that he was recruited into Israeli intelligence by Robert Maxwell. Others state the relationship only began after Robert’s death, when he saved the family from penury following its financial problems.
Only one month after his 2019 arrest, Epstein was found dead in his New York City prison cell. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although his family has rejected this interpretation.
Perhaps the two most powerful individuals in Epstein’s circle of confidants were Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Clinton, already infamous for the numerous accusations of sexual misconduct against him, is known to have flown at least 17 times on Epstein’s private jet, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” and was accused by Epstein victim, Virginia Giuffre, of visiting Little St. James Island, the multimillionaire’s private Caribbean residence, where many of his worst crimes took place.
Trump, arguably, was even closer to the disgraced financier. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” he said in 2002, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it.” Like Clinton, Trump flew on the Lolita Express. Epstein attended his wedding to Marla Maples in 1993, and claimed to have introduced him to his third wife, Melania.
Unfortunately, while Epstein’s ties incriminate the entire political spectrum, coverage has often been framed as a partisan issue. A MintPress study of over one year of Epstein coverage on MSNBC and Fox News found that each network downplayed his connections to their preferred president, while emphasizing and highlighting the links to the leader of the other major party. As a result, many in the United States see the affair as an indictment of their political rivals, rather than of the political system as a whole.
There also remains the question of Epstein’s links to intelligence, something that has been openly speculated about in the media for decades, even years before any allegations against him were made public. Throughout the 1990s, Epstein’s biographer Julie K. Brown noted, he openly boasted about working for both the CIA and Mossad, although the veracity of his claims remains in doubt. As Britain’s Sunday Times wrote in 2000, “He’s Mr. Enigmatic. Nobody knows whether he’s a concert pianist, property developer, a CIA agent, a math teacher or a member of Mossad.” It is possible that there is at least a grain of truth to all of these identities.
Epstein met with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns three times in 2014. Burns would later be named director of the CIA. Burns’ proximity to Epstein, however, pales in comparison to that of former Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Between 2013 and 2017 alone, Barak is known to have traveled to New York City and met with the convicted criminal at least 30 times, sometimes arriving at his Manhattan mansion incognito or wearing a mask to hide his identity.
Numerous sources have commented on Epstein’s connections to Israeli intelligence. A previous girlfriend and victim of his, referred in court documents as Jane Doe 200 to hide her identity, testified that Epstein boasted about being a Mossad operative and that, after he raped her, she could not go to the police because his position as a spy made her fear for her life.
“Doe genuinely believed that any reporting of the rape by what she believed to be a Mossad agent with some of the most unique connections in the world would result in significant bodily harm or death to her,” reads the court filing.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former senior official in Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, claimed that Epstein was a spy and that he and Ghislaine Maxwell were running a honeytrap operation on behalf of Israel. Four (anonymous) sources told Rolling Stone that Epstein had directly worked with the Israeli government.
Unlike much of the Maxwell family, however, his Israel and intelligence connections are based largely on testimony and unverified accounts. His only known trip to the country was in April 2008, just before his sentencing, a move that sparked fears he would seek refuge there.
Nevertheless, there has been intense public speculation that he could have been working for Tel Aviv. At the Turning Points USA Student Action Summit 2025, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson stated that there is nothing wrong, hateful or anti-Semitic about asking questions about Epstein’s foreign connections. “No one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel, because we’ve been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty,” he said, before expressing his exasperation about the media’s silence on the issue.
What the hell is this? You have the former Israeli prime minister living in your house, you have had all this contact with a foreign government, were you working on behalf of the Mossad? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government?”
Carlson’s comments drew harsh condemnation from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “The accusation that Jeffrey Epstein somehow worked for Israel or the Mossad running a blackmail ring is categorically and totally false. Epstein’s conduct, both the criminal and the merely despicable, had nothing whatsoever to do with the Mossad or the State of Israel,” he wrote.
“This accusation is a lie being peddled by prominent online personalities such as Tucker Carlson pretending they know things they don’t,” he added, concluding that Israel was under attack from a “vicious wave of slander and lies.”
Whatever the truth about Epstein, it is indisputable that the powerful Maxwell family holds wide-ranging connections to U.S., British and Israeli state power. It is also beyond doubt that if the full story of their activities were ever to reach the public, it would incriminate a significant number of the world’s most powerful people and organizations. Perhaps that is why Trump has, in short order, gone from promising to release the Epstein Files to potentially releasing his accomplice.
British investigation reveals Reuters’ Israel bias
Palestinian Information Center – August 22, 2025
GAZA – A British outlet, Declassified, has published an investigative report, based on testimonies from Reuters employees and journalists, highlighting a bias in Reuters’ coverage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The investigation pointed to a recent article titled “Israel kills Al-Jazeera journalist it says was a Hamas leader”, referring to the killing of Palestinian journalist Anas Sharif. According to the report, although Sharif had worked with Reuters and was part of their Pulitzer-winning 2024 news team, the headline was chosen over more accurate alternatives, suggesting an inclination to echo Israeli framing.
The report further noted that this headline, and similar instances, triggered backlash online and raised deep concerns among some staff at the influential news agency.
One email, published by a resigned Reuters journalist in August 2024, expressed disillusionment with the agency’s framing of the “Israel-Hamas war”, stating that their personal values no longer aligned with the outlet’s approach.
He, along with colleagues, had called internally for Reuters to uphold journalistic principles. However, he concluded that senior management was unlikely to reform and continued to suppress internal criticism.
An unnamed source at Reuters told Declassified that “several journalists felt coverage of the Gaza war lacked objectivity.” In response, these staff members conducted an extensive internal investigation, including both quantitative and qualitative analysis of Reuters’ reporting.
The results formed the basis of an internal open letter shared with newsroom staff, intended to strengthen and rebalance coverage of Gaza.
Reuters journalists were also reportedly questioning why the outlet had not published more stories referencing expert claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza, especially when these claims were treated differently compared to similar allegations concerning Russia’s conduct in Ukraine.
Working through 499 Reuters articles covering Israel and Palestine between October 7 and November 14, 2023, the analysis revealed a consistent pattern: Israel-centric stories received significantly more resources than those focused on Palestinian suffering. This was particularly striking given that over 11,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, a figure nearly 10 times higher than Israeli casualties at the time.
The report further noted that in May, Reuters seemed to show early signs of editorial shifts, perhaps reflecting internal criticisms.
Declassified also unveiled an email from Howard S. Goller, Reuters’ International Editor, introducing an update to the outlet’s editorial guidelines on the “War in the Middle East.” This update permits the use of the term “genocide,”but always with attribution—and continues to restrict the use of the term “Palestine.”
Critics told Declassified that Goller’s update reinforces an Israeli-never-critical framing. It omits key context, such as the roles of the U.S. and Israel in derailing ceasefire negotiations.
The investigation adds that these guidelines ignore the illegal colonial settlement enterprise, the Israeli apartheid regime, and dramatically downplay the scale of destruction in Palestine. They also omit how Gaza has become the deadliest place for journalists since the American Civil War in 1861.
Dehumanize and destroy: How western media helped target Gaza’s journalists
By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | August 14, 2025
On 29 September 2024, an Israeli airstrike targeted the home of displaced Palestinian journalist Wafa al-Udaini in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. She, her husband, and their two young daughters were killed. Her two sons survived but were left injured and orphaned.
Udaini had long been a target. At the start of the war on Gaza, she appeared on a TalkTV broadcast hosted by British anchor Julia Hartley-Brewer, who had just finished a soft interview with Israeli army spokesperson Peter Lerner. When Udaini described Israeli attacks on Palestinians as a “massacre” – using the same word Lerner had applied to Hamas – she was ridiculed and cut off. The segment went viral. Israeli media outlets weaponized the interview to smear Udaini. She was soon receiving direct threats from the Israeli military. In private conversations, she described herself as a marked woman. In the months that followed, when asked by The Cradle if she had moved from her home in Al-Rimal, Gaza City, she said, “I can’t say, sorry.” She added:
“The anchor killed me … They are using the interview to justify killing me.”
Months later, Israel killed Wafa.
Wafa’s assassination was not isolated. It was the culmination of a campaign to normalize the erasure of Palestinian journalists. The occupation army even has a special unit dedicated to this war crime, known as the ‘Legitimization Cell.’
The killing of Anas al-Sharif
The most prominent recent example was Israel’s assassination of one of Gaza’s most famous reporters, Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, and his entire crew. Nearly 270 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023. Western press has actively facilitated the cover-up of the murder of journalists in Gaza and failed to hold the occupation state accountable. Calls for accountability have been challenging Israel and western media outlets that have provided cover for the deliberate campaign to murder journalists.
Back in October 2024, the Israeli military published a hit list consisting of six Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera, claiming that the occupation state had obtained documents proving they were either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militants. Sharif was on that list.
Al Jazeera outright rejected the allegations. The so-called intelligence files released by Israel were riddled with contradictions, fabrications, and recycled narratives. One claimed Sharif had been a commander in the Qassam Brigades’ Nukhba unit; another stated he had been injured in a training exercise in early 2023 and deemed unfit for combat. Both cannot be true. In reality, neither is.
When the occupation state announced Sharif’s assassination, it escalated its smear campaign by accusing him of firing rockets. Speaking to The Cradle on condition of anonymity, a senior Hamas official dismisses the claim as “ridiculous,” noting that rocket units and Nukhba forces are not the same, and that Anas was never affiliated with either.
These were not the first threats Anas received. On 22 November 2023, he publicly revealed that Israeli officers had threatened him via WhatsApp, and pinpointed his location. Weeks later, his 90-year-old father was killed in an airstrike on the family home in Jabalia Refugee Camp.
The Israeli military’s documents alleging Anas was a militant have been available for almost a year. Yet no major media outlet attempted to verify them. On the contrary, both the UN Special Rapporteur on press freedom, Irene Khan, and the Committee to Protect Journalists dismissed the Israeli claims. But the disinformation campaign intensified.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry began circulating old images of Anas with Hamas figures. Pro-Israel social media accounts unearthed decade-old tweets in which he expressed support for resistance. US attorney Stanley Cohen tells The Cradle:
“Under international humanitarian law and the law of war, journalists are protected as civilians, thus targeting them can constitute a war crime whether they are seen interviewing combatants or in their reporting have favorably written of or even supported them and their goals.”
Collusion and amplification
Possessing access to all this information and Israel’s long record of fabricating stories, the western media continued to amplify Tel Aviv’s talking points and character assassinations of Gaza’s journalists.
While Israel produced a series of claims to justify the murder of Anas al-Sharif, no such justifications were issued to explain why they struck the well-known tent used by the Al Jazeera broadcast team – which included correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, assistant Mohammed Noufal, and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa.
Yet Reuters ran with the headline “Israel kills Al Jazeera journalist it says was Hamas leader,” a title triggering so much backlash that it forced them to change it to the sanitized “Israel strike kills Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza”. German outlet Bild, which is also the bestselling newspaper in Europe, published perhaps the most outrageous headline of all, entitled “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza,” also later altering their piece to read “Killed journalist allegedly was a terrorist.” Fox News and Canada’s National Post joined the chorus, parroting the occupation army’s narrative.
BBC coverage was equally complicit. In a profile-style article, the British broadcaster stated, “The BBC understands Sharif worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict.” This unverified claim contradicts Sharif’s own criticisms of Hamas, aired before the war. Even the Palestinian resistance movement has denied any formal affiliation. Hamas official Bassem Naim tells The Cradle that there is no known relationship between Sharif and “the movement or its military wing.”
Documented targeting and newsroom dissent
Western media failures began long before these assassinations. Israel’s systematic targeting of media workers has been copiously documented. In August 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published an open letter signed by over 60 rights groups and journalist unions, calling on the EU to take action against Israel’s “unprecedented killing of journalists and other violations of media freedom” in Gaza as part of “widespread and systematic abuses.”
Inside newsrooms, dissent has grown. Marina Watanabe, formerly of the LA Times, was barred from covering Palestine for three months after signing a petition against the killing of journalists. In July, over 100 BBC employees and 306 media professionals signed an open letter accusing the broadcaster of “anti-Palestinian racism.”
The BBC letter also states:
“The BBC’s editorial decisions seem increasingly out of step with reality. We have been forced to conclude that decisions are made to fit a political agenda rather than serve the needs of audiences. As industry insiders and as BBC staff, we have experienced this firsthand. The issue has become even more urgent with recent escalations in the region. Again, BBC coverage has appeared to downplay Israel’s role, reinforcing an ‘Israel first’ framing that compromises our credibility.”
According to Cohen, if media agencies or reporters are found to have willingly participated in propaganda that gives cover for targeting journalists in Gaza, “it could constitute conspiracy to further acts of genocide as it carries with it a state of mind and intent.” He argues that while such cases against the media and journalists can be difficult to win in court, there is precedent for punishment.
However, western corporate media has not only been accused of intentionally aiding Israel in whitewashing war crimes, but has also been implicated in specific cases of outright dehumanization of Gaza’s journalists that have directly correlated to threats and harassment.
Impunity paved by past killings
The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has been sounding the alarm on the murder of journalists in Gaza since 14 December 2023. Yet western corporate media has continued to feign ignorance and treat Israel’s repeated lies as if they are credible.
Reuters, which just published and then changed its biased headline covering the assassination of Sharif, is perhaps one of the worst offenders in willfully providing cover for Israel. On 13 October 2023, Tel Aviv targeted a group of journalists in southern Lebanon, killing Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah. At the time, Reuters refused to name the attacker, saying only that the munition came from the direction of Israel. It took until 7 December for the outlet to publish an investigation confirming what everyone already knew: Israel was responsible. By then, the window for accountability had closed.
On 11 May 2021, Al Jazeera‘s Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while covering an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. Despite overwhelming evidence and international outrage, her killers faced no consequences – a precedent that paved the way for today’s open season on Gaza’s journalists.
That silence, or worse, that complicity has consequences. Honest journalism demands scrutiny, not stenography. Every time western media echoes Tel Aviv’s lies, it helps normalize the slaughter of Palestinian journalists – not out of ignorance, but to deliberately spread propaganda.
How Western media aids Israel’s genocide and targeted killing of journalists in Gaza
Israel and the end of The Times
By Marzieh Hashemi | Press TV | August 12, 2025
Never in the history of mankind have human beings witnessed a genocide in real time, in the way we are watching what is unfolding in Gaza today.
We have seen people being sniped, hospitals being bulldozed, refugees in tents being burned alive, the starvation of the population, and so much more, on our screens.
Most of what we are witnessing is due to the tireless and courageous commitment of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who know that they can be killed at any time by the regime, but despite this, continue to show us the reality of what’s happening on the ground in Gaza.
It is an extremely difficult job for them; however, the streaming of videos and providing live coverage have finally helped change the narrative on Palestine and its occupation globally.
Before this latest round of genocide, no matter the type of brutality and oppression that Palestinians endured, they would be confronted with comments such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” or “the Israelis have no choice because of Hamas’ missiles raining down upon the innocent Israeli population.”
But now, the greatest fear of the Israeli regime is coming to fruition. Zionists are losing control of the narrative. The truth has been seeping out, one war crime after another. People around the world have awakened and many no longer believe in the hasbara version of events.
The child-murdering regime tried to prevent this from happening. Thus, from the very beginning of this latest round of genocidal war against the Palestinian people, international journalists were not allowed by the Israeli regime to enter Gaza.
The regime gave the excuse of protecting the journalists’ safety, but the reality is that it did not want the real story of what is happening in Gaza to be exposed.
Thus, the primary responsibility of showing the reality on the ground fell on the backs of Palestinian journalists, whom the Israeli regime continues to try to control, discredit or silence.
Due to this, the deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists by the regime has been ruthless and has intensified with time.
The cold-blooded assassinations of journalists have been taken to a whole new level in Gaza. Journalists have never been targeted in the way they are today.
As of the writing of this article, 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza, with the latest five murders taking place just on Sunday night. A tent housing Al Jazeera journalists was deliberately targeted by the regime, killing all five members of the crew. Israel has taken responsibility for the assassinations, saying that the tent housed a “Hamas cell.”
This is the action of a regime to which Western powers have given impunity. Israel is not sanctioned due to killing babies in incubators. It is not even held accountable for starving a whole population of people. It is not pressured in any way.
Thus, during the last 22 months, we have seen the targeting of journalists expand throughout the region, including the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, where the main news building of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) was targeted, killing three people.
Why? Because it can. It is not held accountable. If any condemnations are made, they are simply some verbal jargon on the international level, resulting in no consequences for the regime to stop its illegal actions.
Thus, the Western political machine and its corporate media are totally complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One day after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, many Western outlets such as BBC, Reuters, and Fox News repeated Israeli accusations that Anas was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell or that he once worked for Hamas’ media office.
Instead of showing its outrage at the targeting of fellow journalists, the BBC, which prides itself on being the largest broadcast corporation in the world, simply repeated Israeli hasbara.
This is the reason 238 journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past 22 months and their colleagues in Western countries have done nothing about it or have instead magnified the lies of the Zionist regime. These so-called journalists are toeing the line of the Zionists.
Why haven’t the BBC, Reuters, New York Times or other media entities called Israel out for preventing them from sending journalists to Gaza?
Why try to demonize the messenger who has just been assassinated, unless you too, like the Israeli regime, want to keep the message from getting out?
Is the exposure of the real narrative of Palestine and Israel fatal for you too? You are all complicit in genocide and your efforts to stifle the truth are too late, as too many people have awakened.
The narrative has changed. Increasingly more people are realizing that Palestine was not a land without a people, as they had been taught, nor had Palestinians agreed upon their land being taken.
There was a Nakba that has never ended and all parties complicit in it are being exposed, as the world awakens and shows its disdain for genocide and its supporters.
Marzieh Hashemi is a US-born, Iran-based journalist, commentator and documentary filmmaker.
Germany’s leading newspaper calls murdered Al Jazeera reporter ‘terrorist posing as journalist’
The Cradle | August 11, 2025
German newspaper Bild has parroted the Israeli army’s claims that slain Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was “terrorist disguised as a journalist,” hours after the prominent reporter was targeted and killed in a strike on Gaza City.
Bild is Germany’s highest-circulation newspaper. It had approximately 6.93 million readers per issue in 2023 – and sells around 1.02 million copies a day.
The article cited documents published by Israel claiming Sharif was a member of the Qassam Brigades’ Jabalia battalion.
“The IDF attacked terrorist Anas al-Sharif in the Gaza City area. The terrorist was operating under the guise of an Al Jazeera journalist. The terrorist Anas al-Sharif served as a cell leader in Hamas and promoted rocket fire against citizens of the State of Israel and IDF,” the Israeli army said.
The army points to previously published, unverified documents, including salary documentations, personnel spreadsheets, and a list of training courses, which it says “unequivocally” prove Sharif’s involvement with Hamas.
The documents claim Sharif was recruited into Hamas at the age of 17, despite membership in the group officially requiring a minimum age of 18 years.
Another inconsistency is that joining the Qassam Brigades takes years of training.
Sharif had been covering Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza since it started in October 2023. He was given the 2024 Human Rights Defender award by Amnesty International Australia for his coverage.
Tel Aviv had been inciting against him for months.
A headline by The Telegraph on Monday also referred to Sharif as a “journalist accused of leading a Hamas terror cell.” Israeli news site i24’s headline called him a “Hamas-affiliated Al Jazeera journalist” who was “eliminated.”
The documents cited by Israel also listed Hosam Shabat, an Al Jazeera reporter accused of Hamas ties, who was killed in an Israeli strike in March.
Several other journalists are listed as either members of Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement.
“I, Anas al-Sharif, am a journalist with no political affiliations. My only mission is to report the truth from the ground – as it is, without bias. At a time when a deadly famine is ravaging Gaza, speaking the truth has become, in the eyes of the occupation, a threat,” Sharif wrote weeks before his assassination.
Since the start of the war, 238 Palestinian journalists have been targeted and killed by the Israeli army.
The real Russiagate scandal blows away Watergate for crimes and treason by U.S. establishment
Strategic Culture Foundation | August 1, 2025
So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.
The potential impact is not confined solely to the violation of U.S. laws and the democratic process – bad enough as that is. The Russiagate scandal that began in 2016 has had a lasting, damaging effect on U.S. and European relations with Russia. The frightfully dangerous NATO proxy war incited in Ukraine, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale world war, was fueled in large part by the hostility generated from the false claims of Russian interference in the U.S. elections.
The allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a subversion campaign against the 2016 U.S. election and colluded with Donald Trump to get him elected were always specious. The scandal was based on shoddy intel claims to purportedly explain how Trump defeated his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, the scandal was hyped into a seemingly credible narrative by U.S. intelligence chiefs at the direction of then-President Barack Obama as a way to delegitimize Trump’s incoming first-term presidency.
Years before the recent intelligence disclosures, many independent journalists, including Aaron Maté, and former intelligence analysts like Ray MacGovern and William Binney, had cogently disproven the official Russiagate claims. Not only were these claims false, they were knowingly false. That is, lies and deliberate distortions. Russia did not hack emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee to discredit Clinton. Clinton’s corruption was exposed by a DNC internal leak to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblower site. That was partly why Assange was persecuted with years-long incarceration.
A large enough number of voters simply despised Clinton and her warmongering psychopathy, as well as her sell-out of working-class Americans for Wall Street largesse.
Furthermore, Moscow consistently denied any involvement in trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election or attempts to favor Trump. Putin has said more than once that Russia has no preference about who becomes U.S. president, implying that they’re all the same and controlled by deeper state forces. Laughably, too, while Washington accused Moscow of election interference, the actual record shows that the United States has habitually interfered in scores of foreign elections over many decades, including those of Russia. No other nation comes close to the U.S. – the self-declared “leader of the free world” – in sabotaging foreign elections.
In any case, it is instructive to compare the Russiagate farce with the Watergate scandal. Watergate involved spying by the White House of President Richard Nixon against a Democrat rival in the 1972 election. The political crisis that ensued led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. The U.S. nation was shocked by the dirty tricks. Several senior White House officials were later convicted and served time in jail for crimes related to the affair. Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and avoided prosecution. Nevertheless, Watergate indelibly disgraced U.S. politics and, at the time, was described as “the worst political scandal of the 20th century.”
Subsequent cases of corruption and malfeasance are often dubbed with the suffix “gate” in a nod to Watergate as a momentous political downfall. Hence, “Russiagate.”
There are hugely important differences, however. While Watergate was a scandal based on factual crimes and wrongdoing, Russiagate was always a contrived propaganda deception. The real scandal behind Russiagate was not Trump’s alleged misdeeds or those of Russia, but the criminal conspiracy by Obama and his administration to sabotage the 2016 election and subsequently to overthrow the Trump presidency and the democratic will of the American people. Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s most senior intelligence chief, has said that this amounts to “treason,” and she has called for the prosecution of Obama and other former senior aides.
Arguably, the real Russiagate scandal is far more criminal and devastating in its political implications than Watergate. The latter involved illegal spying and dirty tricks. Whereas, Russiagate involved a president and his intelligence chiefs trying to subvert the entire democratic process. Not only that, but the U.S. mainstream media are also now exposed for perpetrating a propaganda heist on the American public. All of the major U.S. media outlets amplified the politicised intelligence orchestrated by the Obama administration, claiming that Russia interfered in the election and that Trump was a “Kremlin stooge.” The hoax became an obsession in the U.S. media for years and piled up severe damage in international relations, a nefarious legacy that we are living with today.
The New York Times and Washington Post, reputedly two of the finest exponents of American journalism, jointly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for their reporting on Russiagate, the official version, that is, which lent credibility to the hoax. In light of what we know now, these newspapers should be hanging their heads in shame for running a Goebbels-like Big Lie campaign to not only deceive the U.S. public but to subvert the democratic process and poison international relations. Their reputations are shredded, as well as those of other major media outlets, including ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
Ironically, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its reporting on the Watergate scandal. The story was made into a best-selling book, All The President’s Men, and a hit Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing the roles of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post were acclaimed as the finest in U.S. journalism for exposing Watergate and bringing a crooked president to book.
How shameful and absurd that an even greater assault on American democracy and international relations in the form of Russiagate is ignored and buried by “America’s finest”. That the scandal is ignored and buried should be of no surprise because to properly reveal it would shatter the foundations of the U.S. political establishment and the sinister role of the deep state and its mainstream media propaganda system.
How much is shoddy, pro-Israel journalism worth? Ask Bari Weiss.
As her Free Press is poised to seal a $200 million deal with the mainstream news giant CBS, let us reflect on why
By Branko Marcetic | Responsible Statecraft | July 29, 2025
A thought experiment: would anyone who referred to the killing of 50 Jewish people, many of them “entirely innocent non-combatants, including children,” as “one of the unavoidable burdens of political power, of Palestinian liberation’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination,” ever be hired by a major television news network?
Would their news outlet ever be potentially offered more than $200 million to merge with that major news network?
Of course not, and for good reason. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening, only with one small but major difference: the writer and her news outlet responsible for this statement, Bari Weiss and The Free Press, were not talking about Hamas’ murder of Israelis, but rather about Israel’s killing of 50 Palestinians — “Zionism’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination,” as Weiss described it in 2021.
Weiss is currently in talks to sell The Free Press to CBS News for between $200-$250 million, after reportedly winning over its new owner, David Ellison, “by taking a pro-Israel stance,” according to the Financial Times. Ellison “wants to position The Free Press alongside CBS News,” the paper reported, while another source told the New York Times that Ellison is weighing up giving Weiss “an influential role in shaping the editorial sensibilities of CBS News.”
If so, it would be a major new development in a pervasive double standard we’ve seen in the past nearly two years. Weiss and her outlet have engaged in rhetoric and professional behavior that would ordinarily never pass muster in a newsroom — but are considered acceptable because they are in support of Israel’s war against Palestinians.
For one, The Free Press has repeatedly spread misinformation. In May 2024, the outlet charged that the UN had “admit” the civilian death toll was 50 percent lower than what was being claimed, a quickly debunked and borderline willful misreading of a UN document, a misreading that the UN secretary-general’s office swiftly came forward to correct (a fact left out of The Free Press’ piece).
One year later, The Free Press declared the idea that Israel was engineering a man-made famine that was underway in Gaza a “myth,” even as Israel was in its third month of blocking all food, fuel, and medicine into the territory and at least 57 civilians had already starved to death, most of them children. As recently as this past Sunday, another Free Press article argued that “there isn’t mass starvation as claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda,” which flies in the face of not just basic reality, but testimony from doctors, major news organizations with journalists on the ground, and even the conclusion of President Donald Trump, a supporter of the war.
Just this past June, The Free Press charged simultaneously that there had both been no massacre of Palestinian aid seekers, and that, if there was, Hamas may have been responsible. Of course, since then, not only have Israeli soldiers admitted to shooting aid-seekers but U.S. contractors are coming forward to back up their gruesome stories. These accounts are becoming a near-daily occurrence, with over 1,000 Gazans killed at or close to aid distribution sites in the past two months.
In late May, The Free Press even published a puff piece on the group running these virtual slaughterhouses, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), painting it as an unsung success story, despite ample controversy at the time over its reliance on mercenaries and lack of independence. Two months of bloodshed later, condemnation and calls for GHF’s dismantling are widespread, with one former GHF staffer — a retired U.S. special forces officer — saying he had never witnessed such brutality and indiscriminate violence against “an unarmed, starving population” as at GHF’s distribution centers.
All of these pieces are still up, uncorrected on The Free Press website. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.
When it’s not spreading outright misinformation, The Free Press engages in more insidious propaganda. For instance, it has, depending on the public relations needs of the moment, shifted between ignoring, indignantly denying, and justifying Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s hospitals.
When a blast in the war’s first month that killed hundreds at al-Ahli Hospital ignited global outrage, The Free Press jumped on evidence that it may have been an errant Hamas rocket to charge again and again and again, even as recently as two days ago, that the media were rampantly defaming Israel through fake news of crimes it had never committed.
Since then, The Free Press has simply ignored the Israeli attacks on hospitals, often openly done and fully admitted to by the IDF, that have left 94 percent of hospitals in Gaza damaged or destroyed, including just this year attacking al-Ahli at least twice. In fact, both the outlet and Weiss personally pivoted quickly from denying Israel would do such a terrible thing to actively justifying its targeting of hospitals.
Of course, the vast majority of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza are simply never discussed by the outlet. The same goes for Palestinian suffering more generally and the massive and ever-mounting Palestinian death toll, which a group of experts last year concluded is likely undercounted by hundreds of thousands. Typically, the only time these topics are discussed by the outlet is to deny them and to lament their negative effect on Israel.
This is hardly surprising, considering new revelations that The Free Press has serially regurgitated content pushed by the Center for Peace Communications — an organization staffed by figures from pro-Israel think tanks and funded by money from pro-Israel donors.
Another largely absent topic: antisemitism, which is a charge The Free Press exclusively reserves for antiwar protesters, college campuses, teachers unions, Peter Beinart, Ireland, and anyone else who expresses pro-Palestinian sentiment, while it dutifully ignores accusations of antisemitism among Trump appointees and nominees and allies who also happen to be supporters of Israel’s war.
That brings us to the conduct of Weiss herself. She has a personal history of both playing fast and loose with the truth and what can only be described as a high degree of tolerance for anti-Arab and Islamophobic bigotry.
Weiss first rose to prominence due to her efforts to get Muslim and Arab professors at Columbia University fired by accusing them of racism, only for the resulting investigation to find “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.” She then later misleadingly claimed she had never tried to get them fired.
The supposedly rabid bigotry of ordinary Muslims is a favorite topic of Weiss, who has previously blamed rising antisemitism in Europe on the Muslim presence there, and warned that European Jews have “reason to worry” because of it. Soon after October 7, she approvingly shared a Free Press article whose central argument was that protests against Israel’s war — dishonestly characterized as hateful antisemitic rallies “celebrat[ing] mass murder in the streets” — were thanks to immigrants from Middle Eastern countries who could be either “80-year-old Armenian retirees or jihadi terrorists plotting another 9/11.” The Free Press later published an error-riddled article explicitly blaming a surge in Canadian antisemitism on Muslim immigration.
At the same time, Weiss has often promoted, often through The Free Press, her “friend” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali believes that “we are at war with Islam,” which she has called “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” that “there is no moderate Islam,” and that it must be “defeated” and “crush[ed],” including by closing all Muslim schools.
Ali has been a favorite of Islamphobic think tanks and neoconservative activists since the Global War on Terror. She has written that “every devout Muslim” at the very least “approved” of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks and wrote a book that argued that Muslim immigration threatens the rights of Western women, partly because of Muslim men’s supposedly rapacious appetite for sexual violence.
Weiss eagerly promoted that book, spending an hour teeing Hirsi Ali up in a question and answer session to hold forth unchallenged about the dangers of ordinary Muslim men. Elsewhere, Weiss has waxed lyrical about her pride in associating with Hirsi Ali, and that she regards someone’s support for her as a “litmus test.”
If Weiss expressed or promoted any of these same views about Jewish immigrants and Judaism, she would likely be blacklisted in U.S. media, and for good reason. Instead, because they are aimed at Muslims, she is now being richly rewarded.
That a major network like CBS is seriously considering giving Weiss and The Free Press an even bigger platform and the imprimatur of mainstream legitimacy — given not just its promotion of anti-Muslim views, but its history of spreading outright, uncorrected falsehoods — is a sad reflection of the degradation of press standards.
And it seems to only be happening because a top media executive regards Weiss’ history of shoddy journalism less important than her support for Israel’s wars.
US media owe Putin an apology – Fox News host
RT | July 29, 2025
The US media need to make “serious” amends to many people, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, for their active role in spreading the Russiagate hoax following the 2016 presidential election, according to popular Fox News host Greg Gutfeld.
The political commentator, comedian, and author was responding to recent revelations made by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who released a trove of documents she described as “overwhelming evidence” of a coordinated effort by senior Obama-era officials – allegedly led by Barack Obama himself – to politicize intelligence and falsely accuse Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to win the election.
“We cannot let this go. They need to make serious amends because we are still living with the aftermath,” Gutfeld said on his latest show, aired last weekend. “People lost jobs, careers, friends. There need to be consequences.”
“They owe a lot of people an apology. Hell, they even include Putin.”
According to Gutfeld, major American news media outlets “played the starring role in amplifying the subversive plot against the president of the United States.” He dismissed recent claims by the press accusing the Trump administration of trying to “rewrite history,” calling them an “attempt to shift culpability away from themselves and hide the lie they perpetuated for almost a decade.”
Earlier this month, a similar assessment was made by former CIA Director John Ratcliffe. In an interview with the New York Post, he cited an internal review suggesting that American public opinion had been manipulated through repeated media leaks and anonymous sources quoted by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other major outlets.
Allegations of “Russian collusion” persisted in mainstream media coverage even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no evidence to support the claims. Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the US election.
Gabbard described the Trump-Russia probe, widely referred to as Russiagate, as “a years-long coup” against Trump. The US president himself, who has consistently dismissed accusations of ties to Russia as fabricated, praised Gabbard for “exposing” the alleged plot and urged her to “keep it coming.”
Hamas denies operating camp in Aley, asserts Lebanese sovereignty
Al Mayadeen | July 28, 2025
Hamas has firmly denied claims circulating in the media that the Lebanese Army dismantled a Hamas armed training camp in Aley, Lebanon, and called on journalists to prioritize accuracy and professional integrity in their coverage.
In a statement, the Palestinian Resistance movement responded to reports circulated by some media outlets, newspapers, and websites claiming that “the Lebanese army dismantled an armed training camp in the Aley region belonging to Hamas.”
Hamas firmly denied having any armed training camp in the mentioned area or elsewhere in Lebanon, emphasizing that it has no intention of establishing such facilities in the first place.
The movement further emphasized its strong commitment to cooperation and coordination with the Lebanese state and its relevant authorities, as this contributes to maintaining civil peace and strengthening the fraternal Palestinian-Lebanese relationship. It also asserted respect for Lebanese sovereignty under all circumstances.
Hamas also called on all media outlets to adhere to accuracy and objectivity, ensuring that their reporting is guided by professional responsibility to avoid potentially severe repercussions that could further escalate tensions in Lebanon at the hands of the Israeli enemy.
Climate Change Is Reducing, Not Increasing Food Costs, Mainstream Media
By Linnea Lueken | ClimateRealism | July 23, 2025
A flurry of mainstream media reports, from Bloomberg, The Guardian, Financial Times, and CNN, among other outlets, claim that climate change is causing rising food prices “worldwide,” based on a single new study. This is false. Bad weather has always impacted crop production, and there is no actual evidence that extreme weather is increasing. Globalization of media coverage is simply making it easier to hear about bad weather elsewhere in the world, meanwhile crop production and yields globally continue to set records – a fact the same media outlets largely ignore.
Focusing on the coverage by Bloomberg, in an article titled “How Climate Change Is Raising Your Grocery Bill,” Bloomberg writers report on a study from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the European Central Bank, which claims price jumps in certain food products are due to “extreme weather they say is linked to climate change.”
Bloomberg claims that consumers around the world “say they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.” If true at all, this is almost certainly the effect of media coverage like Bloomberg’s insisting that climate change is responsible, instead of observational evidence of crop production.
It is worth noting that the study uses the term “unprecedented” eight times in the mere four pages of content. To justify their use of the term unprecedented to describe global weather events in the last few years they reference ERA5 surface temperature data going back to 1940, and the standardized precipitation index from CRU going back to 1901. The reason why this is non-scientific and misleading will become clear when we go over the weather events they claim were so “unprecedented.”
Bloomberg discussed a few of the weather events mentioned in the study linking them to increases in the price for specific crops. They first highlighted increases in lettuce and vegetable prices in the United States, driven by droughts in California and Arizona, the former of which Bloomberg claims saw the “driest three-year period ever recorded.” Also mentioned was hurricane Ian. The problem, of course, is that California’s drought was anything but unprecedented. As discussed in the post “Mega-droughts and Mega-floods in the West All Occurred Well Before ‘climate change’ Was Blamed for Every Weather Event,” historical data and proxies show that California has experienced far more widespread and severe periods of drought in the past, some of which lasted as long as two hundred years.
In Asia, Bloomberg says a heatwave impacted South Korean cabbage production. While UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data indicate that cabbage production has been slowly declining after a massive spike in the 1970s, yields have remained stable or increased since 2000. This suggests that economic considerations or political decisions made about the relative benefits of growing cabbage versus other crops that could be grown, or uses the land could be put too, rather than climate, are responsible for changes in production.
Australia also saw high lettuce costs due to flooding in the eastern part of the country in recent years, but the year Bloomberg and the study highlight, 2022, was not unprecedented as they implied. In fact, 2022 was only the sixth “wettest” year on available Australian rainfall records, the wettest year on record was in 1950.
Figure 1: Australian rainfall records, chart from Jennifer Marohasy
Bloomberg goes on to explain how the study allegedly “found that heat, drought and floods were occurring at an increased intensity and frequency,” which is at odds with available data and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th assessment report, which though it claims an increase in extreme heat has been detected, finds no emergence of increased flooding or drought in the current historical period.
In short, Bloomberg, and the other mainstream media outlets hyping the BSC report, failed to do any fact checking, failed to examine crop trends, and illegitimately linked individual weather events to long-term climate change, despite such events being common in history and there being no discernable trend in an increase in such events amid the slight warming that has occurred in recent years. To be clear, weather is not climate and, despite what unscientific attribution studies claim, no specific weather event can be tied to long-term climate change.
In short, none of the weather events Bloomberg referred to as unprecedented were in fact unique or even rare historically.
Concerning the crops, BSC and the media focuses on the most, lettuce and cabbage, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that between 1993 and 2023 (the most recent 30-year period of climate change for which we have available data):
- Lettuce (and chicory – the FAO combines them) production grew approximately 112 percent;
- Lettuce and chicory yields increased by about 4 percent;
- Cabbage production expanded by nearly 75 percent;
- And cabbage yield grew by more than 37 percent. (see the graph below)
Bloomberg does briefly concede that other factors, like El Niño, a totally natural phenomenon, played a role in weather in 2023 and 2024, impacting certain crops. The outlet also begrudgingly admits that “food price shocks typically turn out to be short-term in nature, because high prices incentivize more production, which brings prices back down,” though they try to say that coffee and cattle are exceptions to this rule. Although Bloomberg reports that coffee futures are high, there is no evidence that climate change is actually damaging global coffee production, as explained in Climate Realism posts here, here, and here.
Bloomberg ends with a warning from the study authors, claiming that “slashing greenhouse gas emissions and containing global warming will be key to reducing food price inflation risks,” but this ignores another key aspect of food costs. They are also impacted by the cost to produce food, like when governments increase the price farmers pay for fossil fuel derived pesticides and fertilizers or try to restrict their use. Fossil fuel derived chemicals increase yields with less labor and using much less land. Take a look at Sri Lanka for a good example of what happens when climate action is prioritized over food production.
Never before has it been so easy for the media to report on various weather disasters and crop failures globally, and this certainly has an impact on peoples’ perceptions as well as the ability for studies to try to draw connections that aren’t really backed by data. This Bloomberg piece is nothing more than climate fearmongering; taking disconnected crop shortages from around the world from localized weather events and trying to blame them on climate change, when the truth is that there have always been crops failing somewhere in the world at any given time.
FT hit job on Zelensky is a clue as to Trump’s thinking
By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 25, 2025
It’s finally happened. After months of pundits wondering when would the moment come when western media would finally take a clear and decisive stand against Ukraine’s venal president, it has finally happened – and by the most ardent pro-EU broadsheet to note. The all-out hit piece on Zelensky recently by the Financial Times should indicate that something is about to happen in Ukraine and it will probably involve the president either having his own Ceausescu moment or simply fleeing the country. How long has he got?
Legacy media always likes to be on the right side of history and for the FT to come out like this with the piece that they’ve written must be ominous. It was published at the same time as the British conservative political chronicle The Spectator did much the same thing. Timing seems to be worth noting given that a few days beforehand unconfirmed ‘reports’ on social media were claiming that Trump had indicated to Zelensky that he needs to step down with even suggestions of who would take his role. It also comes amidst a series of reports which show that Zelensky’s panicking has reached an all-time high with the recent arrest of the of the anti-corruption activist Shabunin. Interestingly, that same day, ex-Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov was also targeted. In both raids at their homes, armed men showed no warrants and blocked lawyers from attending the searches, it is claimed. The arrest of the anti-graft campaigner is significant as is the take of the FT itself: The article says: “A crackdown on the country’s most famous anti-corruption crusader can’t be happening without at least the silent approval from President Zelenskyy, if not active permission,” it explains.
The significance and timing of the FT piece should not be underestimated. It’s not simply that on the battlefield itself that the Russians are advancing and that it becomes more openly accepted that the Ukrainians simply don’t have the men to fight this war, but more about Zelensky himself who is beginning to be portrayed as a dictator now clinging onto power and using all of the vestiges of martial law to crack down on even the faintest trace of dissent. Ukraine is now a totalitarian state with the level of Zelensky’s paranoia now starting to become widely known and discussed. The FT, one of those media giants which largely supported Zelensky and which barely considered elements of his brutal measures worth even reporting, such as the appalling murder of U.S. blogger Gonzalo Lira, is now reporting on even campaigners merely being roughed up by Zelensky’s henchmen – a considerable U-turn and worth noting is the detail it goes into with its zeal. Indeed, it has been the FT which has chosen not to cover a number of stories since the beginning of the war which many would argue created a positive aura around Zelensky which can be noted even as recently as in May when a key opponent of Zelensky was assassinated in broad daylight by a gunman in front of the victim’s children’s school in Madrid. In this case, the murder of Andriy Portnov was covered, but he was portrayed as a criminal “wanted in Kiev for treason”.
The FT’s support of Zelensky is over, we can assume.
It noted that “Shabunin and Kubrakov labelled the recent raids as politically motivated, adding that the SBU had presented no court-issued warrants and would not allow time for their lawyers to be present for the searches”.
Vitaliy Shabunin even is quoted in the article as explaining what the stunt was supposed to achieve. He told the paper, “Zelenskyy is using my case to send a message to two groups that could pose a threat to him. The message is this: if I can go after Shabunin publicly — under the scrutiny of the media and despite public support — then I can go after any one of you”.
The FT goes even further in its analysis of the situation and could even be assessed of being a catalyst to a revolution in the making.
“This is a straight-up, Russian-style scenario of dividing society, which could lead to protests in the streets”, Oleksandra Ustinova MP was quoted in the piece as saying.
The author suggests that the West has little interest any more in keeping up any pretence up that Ukraine is some sort of western democratic country which has had to give up on some of its democratic tenets. This apathy, it claims, is responsible for Zelensky now pushing his authoritarian, brutal control to new levels.
A western diplomat in Kiev who has worked closely with Ukraine’s civil society said the cases of Shabunin and Kubrakov “aren’t isolated events”.
“There’s a sense inside Ukraine’s presidential office that the west and especially the U.S. has shifted its focus,” the diplomat said. “That rule of law and good governance no longer matter as much.” With U.S. attention elsewhere, Zelensky is testing how far he can go, the FT claims, but doesn’t say that this is because he is in his last days and believes he can stay in power if he cracks down even further against those who could potentially pose a threat to him or even question his strategy. The recent dispatch of anti-aircraft missiles from Trump is not expected to do anything as the gesture represents way too little, way too late for it to have any impact. The corner that Trump is backing himself into with this 50-day deadline with Putin is more likely going to result in the man child in the Oval office looking for an easy victim which can distract voters away from the real story of him having to back down from the outlandish threats he has made to Putin.
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Book Summary
Medicalized Motherhood (2026)
Unbekoming | January 15, 2026
A healthy woman downloads a fertility app before she’s even trying to conceive. The algorithm tells her she’s “irregular,” suggests she might have a problem, builds a referral pathway to a fertility clinic directly into the interface. She arrives at pregnancy already a patient—monitored, tested, supplemented, optimized. Forty weeks later, she’s induced for passing an arbitrary due date, monitored continuously, confined to bed, augmented with synthetic hormones, numbed with an epidural, and delivered by cesarean for “failure to progress.” Her newborn is immediately clamped, separated, injected, tested, and supplemented with formula. A year later, her baby has a diagnosis for falling below the 10th percentile on a growth chart. Five years later, she’s still in the system—annual screenings, ongoing surveillance, carrying diagnoses that originated in pregnancy. She entered healthy. She never exits.
Medicalized Motherhood: From First Pill to Permanent Patient documents 123 medical interventions that operate through a single logic: each one creates conditions requiring the next. The induction requires monitoring. The monitoring requires confinement. The confinement slows labor. The slowed labor requires drugs. The drugs intensify pain. The pain requires anesthesia. The anesthesia impairs pushing. The impaired pushing requires surgery. This isn’t system failure—it’s the system functioning exactly as designed, converting healthy women into lifelong patients while generating revenue at every step. The book maps this cascade across six phases: pre-conception capture, pregnancy surveillance, labor management, immediate newborn intervention, infant pathologizing, and postpartum capture. No other single resource traces how a fertility tracking app connects to a cesarean scar connects to a “failure to thrive” diagnosis connects to permanent patient status. … continue
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