Expelling Hostile Foreign Media

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/434077

Israel must expel hostile foreign media

Why on earth are we still allowing journalists from blatantly hostile, antisemitic networks to operate inside our borders?

Writing in Canada's National Post on October 3, Jesse Kline stripped away the polite fiction surrounding Western legacy media. "It has long been apparent that the CBC's coverage of the Middle East has had a clear anti-Israel bias," Klein observed. "But recent events hint at something much darker: an institutional willingness to downplay or minimize harms caused to Jews, including those living right here in Canada."

Klein's indictment exposes a systematic, malignant rot. We saw it laid bare when the CBC issued a cowardly directive forbidding its journalists from calling the Hamas monsters who slaughtered, raped, and decapitated Israelis on October 7 "terrorists." We saw it again in the media's disgraceful handling of the Natania Hospital case, where institutional reflexes consistently scrambled to minimize Jewish blood and twist the facts.

But while Kline correctly diagnoses the malice of legacy media operating safely from their comfortable Western bureaus, his observation forces us to confront a far more urgent, existential question for Israel's survival: Why on earth are we still allowing journalists from these blatantly hostile, antisemitic networks to operate inside our borders?

Israel took a necessary and correct step when it banned Al Jazeera- a state-sponsored bullhorn for terrorist propaganda. But it is flatly absurd to stop there. Outlets like Turkey's TRT World, a direct mouthpiece for an overtly antisemitic government, have no business operating here. The same hammer must fall on Western legacy giants like the CBC, the New York Times, and the BBC. These institutions do not practice journalism; they manufacture weaponized narratives that fuel global anti-Semitism and actively delegitimize the Jewish state.

Expelling these hostile organizations is not just justified - it is a national security imperative based on two undeniable realities.

First, reporting from Israel is a privilege, not an inherent right. Sovereignty means a nation has the absolute authority to decide who crosses its borders and who gets official state accreditation. For decades, Israel's Government Press Office ( GPO) has suffered from an elite inferiority complex, coddling hostile reporters and only delaying or revoking credentials in the most extreme domestic security cases. This pathetic policy of appeasement must end.

A news organization's behavior at its home headquarters--whether it peddles antisemitic tropes, launders terrorist talking points, or minimizes atrocities, must dictate its access to Israel. If an institution is fundamentally compromised in London, New York, or Toronto, it should be barred from Jerusalem.

Stop rewarding our enemies with front-row seats.

Second, information warfare is an active front in this multi-front war. Israel is fighting for its life against physical terrorists on its borders, but it is simultaneously fighting a war for its very legitimacy on the global stage. Outlets like the BBC and the New York Times routinely treat unverified data from genocidal terrorist groups as gospel, cook up grotesque false equivalencies, and print inflammatory headlines that directly spark violent antisemitic riots in Paris, London, and Toronto. By granting these activists press credentials, Israel is effectively hosting the scouts of an information army dedicated to its destruction. It is operational madness.

We cannot afford to be naive about history. During the Second World War, the New York Times intentionally and systematically buried news of the Holocaust, relegating the mass murder of Europe's Jews to back-page fragments to avoid drawing attention to Jewish suffering. Today, the modern press corps follows the exact same script. They minimize the genocidal ambitions of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran while hyper-focusing on and demonizing Israel's right to self-defense.

For too long, Israel's decisionmakers have cowered in fear of a public relations backlash if they restrict foreign press access. This is a loser's strategy. The backlash exists no matter what we do.

It is time to stop subsidizing and hosting, our own defamation. Foreign media networks that traffic in antisemitic framing and minimize the slaughter of Jews must face real consequences. Their global coverage must be weaponized against them by the GPO. Their credentials must be revoked and their bureaus must be permanently shut down. In a war for survival, you do not let the enemy camp inside your gates.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/434077

Christians Plant Millions of Israeli Flags in 14 Countries Ahead of Oct.7

 

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar (left) speaks with George Deek, special envoy to the Christian world (date unknown). Credit: Courtesy of Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

More than 1,000 Christian leaders and influencers from 117 countries arrived in Israel on Monday for the annual Friends of Zion Ambassador Summit.

(Oct. 6, 2026 / JNS)

More than 5.2 million Israeli flags are being planted worldwide to remember the victims of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews said on Monday. The initiative also seeks to strengthen ties between Israel and Christian communities around the world.

The Flags of Fellowship campaign runs Oct. 2-11 and involves 4,375 churches, synagogues and other organizations, up from 1,300 last year, the NGO said.

More than 1,775 churches in 12 countries outside the United States and Canada are taking part, including in Australia, England, Kenya, South Africa, India and the United Arab Emirates.

George Deek, Israel’s special envoy to the Christian world, on Monday hailed the campaign as “a powerful reminder that friendship can speak louder than hatred.”

“To our Christian friends around the world: thank you for standing with Israel,” Deek wrote on X.

More than 1,000 Christian leaders and influencers from 117 countries arrived in Israel on Monday for the annual Friends of Zion Ambassador Summit, which is scheduled to run through Oct. 11.

The summit, founded by American Christian evangelist Mike Evans, is being held for the second consecutive year in cooperation with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Friends of Zion said in a press release.

Some 300 of the participants are aged 18 to 29, the organization noted.

Evans said he wants young Christian leaders to “see Israel for themselves, hear directly from those whose lives were changed forever on October 7,” when Hamas terrorists invaded the Jewish state and murdered some 1,200 people.

“We are bringing together a new generation of leaders alongside experienced voices to bear witness, to remember and to strengthen the bonds between Israel and Christian communities around the world,” stated Evans.

At the summit, participants will hear from released hostages, survivors of the Oct. 7 massacre and bereaved families. During the week, they will meet Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, among other officials.

After the conference, participants are expected to serve as Friends of Zion ambassadors in their communities.

Deek said the event “carries a powerful message: Israel does not stand alone.”

“The bond between Israel and Christians around the world must be built on truth, courage and a shared determination to confront antisemitism and hatred wherever they appear,” he added.

https://www.jns.org/news/world/christians-plant-millions-of-israeli-flags-in-14-countries-ahead-of-oct-7

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Interview With Feiglin

https://www.jpost.com/israel-election-2026/article-910585

‘I want to see it empty’: Feiglin calls for annexation of Gaza during next gov’t's term - interview

“I want to see Gaza empty. I am not afraid when they’re hiding behind their own babies. And this is what they do,” Feiglin said.

Israel should have left Gaza “empty” after the Hamas-led October 7 massacre and annexed the area, Zehut party chairman Moshe Feiglin told The Jerusalem Post in a recent interview, saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not taken decisive enough military action since the attack.

“I want to see Gaza empty. I am not afraid when they’re hiding behind their own babies. And this is what they do,” Feiglin said.

“Occupation, transfer all, all the Arabs. I don’t care. They cannot stay there after what they did,” he said.

Feiglin is running in the October elections with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who leads the Religious Zionist Party (RZP). The two right-wing party leaders signed an agreement to run as a technical bloc that can split after entering the Knesset.

He holds the second slot on the RZP list, meaning he would enter the Knesset if the party passes the electoral threshold. RZP has been polling around four to six seats.

Finance Minister and Religious Zionist Party head Bezalel Smotrich and right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin sign agreement for joint run in October elections, September 1, 2026. (credit: Religious Zionist party)

Zehut and RZP both advocate right-wing security policies, including the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. Zehut also supports libertarian economic policies and the legalization of cannabis.

Gov't should have used October 7 to annex Gaza, Feiglin says

Feiglin said that he believes the current government should have viewed October 7 as an opportunity to annex Gaza.

Feiglin said that children growing up in Gaza would continue to pose a threat to Israel, and that there was no way to change or educate them differently.

“The baby that will be born in Gaza tomorrow will do exactly the same [as the October 7 massacre], God forbid, to your baby that will be born tomorrow in Jerusalem,” he said.

“There’s no other way. That’s the reason they live for. That’s what they learn with their mother’s milk.”

“You’re not going to change them. You’re not going to educate them,” he added.

“They’re saying openly that they want the kids to be killed together with the Jews. This is what Islam is all about,” he said.

Feiglin said that October 7 had shown that there was no other alternative to his plan for Gaza.

He said he would have opened Gaza’s borders and allowed Gazans to leave, preventing them from remaining in Gaza.

“I would open the borders and let them all go, but no one can stay. And it has to be a part of the Jewish state,” he said.

“We should have seen now the Gush Katif villages built already. We should have seen now the new Israeli international airport almost finished, done, created in the Gaza Strip,” he added.

Feiglin said that this would have sent a message to Israel’s enemies that, “when you attack us from any part of the land, you’re going to lose it.”

“And we’re going to expand,” he added.

Feiglin says his approach would have brought peace to entire region

Feiglin said that if his approach was taken after the October 7 attacks, it would have ended the subsequent war.

“That would have [brought] peace to the entire region because they don’t care about being killed. Life means nothing to them.”

He said that Netanayhu’s approach “did exactly the opposite, poured gasoline on the fire and gave them temptation to continue the war because they have nothing to lose.”

“Now, I’m not saying to kill all of Gaza, but you could open the borders and push them out, and the world would accept it,” he said.

He also said that the government had failed to view October 7 as an “opportunity to finish with this concept of [the Oslo Accords] and take back full control of Gaza. And see how we’re getting rid of these monsters, Islam Nazi monsters, and rebuild this land, which is obviously part of Israel.”

When asked about the spike in violence by settlers in the West Bank, Feiglin said he opposed people taking the law into their own hands while arguing that Jews living in the area were defending themselves.

“Jews feel that they have to defend themselves. And when the Arab attacks them, they know how to bring the media and immediately give you the end picture where you don’t understand what really happened. And it happens again and again.”

Feiglin said he hoped to serve as defense minister in the next government and believed he was qualified for the position.

Despite differences with Netanyahu, Feiglin said he would recommend the prime minister over any other candidate, sharply criticizing the opposition bloc seeking to replace Netanyahu and describing its members as left-wing.

“The Left is represented very well by [prime ministerial candidate and Yashar party leader Gadi] Eisenkot, and don’t tell me they are not leftists. This is who they are,” he said.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-election-2026/article-910585

The real lesson of Oct. 7? Stop appealing for sympathy

After three years of rejection and antisemitism, Jews must cease asking for pity and second-guessing failed efforts at explaining themselves, and instead project strength.

(Oct. 5, 2026 / JNS)

After three years of failure, it’s time to try something else. That’s the lesson that Jews and those who purport to speak for them and/or the pro-Israel community should be thinking about on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre.

For three years, the Jewish world has been stunned by the reaction to the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. But it’s time to stop. More to the point, it’s also necessary to cease appealing for sympathy or understanding.

The expectation on the part of most Jews and Israelis, as well as those who are their friends in the days that followed, was that world opinion would swing behind the Jewish state in the aftermath of that horrific orgy of mass murder, torture, rape, kidnapping and wanton destruction. And there was, in fact, some initial sympathy for Israel, even in the media that is so quick to denounce it.

The turn against Israel

Within days, however, that changed. Once it was clear that Israelis were not going to simply accept their victimization and would act to end the threat of more such atrocities, what passes for enlightened liberal opinion, along with some elements on the far right, voiced outrage. That outrage was not aimed at the crimes of the Palestinians. Nor was it a response to the evidence that their leaders and most of the population have meant what they said when they repeatedly rejected an independent state alongside Israel and would settle for nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state.

Instead, the spectacle of Jews defending themselves and moving to eliminate a threat that no sovereign nation would tolerate on its border was too much for a world that has largely regarded Jewish power of any kind as intolerable. Even before the Israel Defense Forces began their offensive into Gaza to attempt to eliminate Hamas’s ability to make good on their promises to repeat Oct. 7-style massacres, anti-Israel protests began. More importantly, world leaders called for caution and restraint that they would never demand of their own countries under similar circumstances.

The United States was an initial exception to that rule. Yet within weeks, the administration of President Joe Biden, which had supported Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas, shifted to a more equivocal stance. What ensued was a year-long dance in which the United States sought to pressure the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop seeking victory. Washington even demanded that Jerusalem accept an outcome in which the continued hold on power on the part of the Islamist terrorists who had ruled Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name since 2007 was to be tolerated.

Biden’s shift was clearly a reaction to liberal and left-wing opinion in his own Democratic Party. After Oct. 7, Democrats, who had already been turning against Israel over the course of the previous decade under the administration of President Barack Obama, overwhelmingly took the side of the Palestinians against the Israelis.

The same was true around the globe as Western European nations—influenced by both the influx of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, and by Marxist and left-wing parties that reviled Zionism—expressed their horror at the idea of Israel pursuing a war to defeat Hamas.

Disingenuous ‘criticism’

Israel’s foes claim that the revulsion was the product of an unusually harsh and “disproportionate” offensive in Gaza in which its military indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians, including women and children. The Jewish state was accused of “genocide” and causing mass starvation. Indeed, so ubiquitous were these accusations in mainstream media outlets and popular culture that few liberals or left-wingers dared to question them or consider them debatable.

This critique was—and remains—entirely disingenuous. Israel’s military used more restraint in the difficult conditions of urban warfare and, as impartial military experts testified, killed a far lower percentage of civilians than in any other such confrontation in modern-day history.

Hamas hid behind Palestinian civilians and did everything to expose them to death. They stored weapons in schools and hospitals. They stole food meant for residents that the Israelis moved from one part of the Strip to another to keep them out of the way of airstrikes and other military efforts to bring back men, women and children dragged by Hamas on Oct. 7 into the coastal enclave. With the international aid it had received prior to Oct. 7, Hamas had built a tunnel network under Gaza that might be termed the world’s largest bomb shelter, the size of the New York City subway system. But no civilians (other than the hostages, many of whom were hid there) were allowed into them. They were only for terrorist fighters, their commanders and their supplies.

There was no “genocide” or Gaza famine. There isn’t any such thing going on today. Nonetheless, much of the world believes it.

Anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators march through central London in support of the Hamas terrorist group, Oct. 14, 2023. Credit: Andy Soloman/Shutterstock

The atrocities of Oct. 7 were denied, even though Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists had documented them with GoPro cameras and social-media uploads (one infamously called his parents to brag about how many Jews he killed that day). The victims, including raped women and men, were ignored or not believed. Posters of the kidnapped, even of a 9-month-old baby, were torn down on the streets of American and European cities. Mass rallies were held to bolster support for Hamas on the streets of those cities and on college campuses.

The main reason for the lack of sympathy for Israel wasn’t because Netanyahu or members of his cabinet were unlikable or too truculent, or because his government failed to mount an effective public diplomacy campaign (though it should have done better). Nor was it because pro-Israel supporters in the United States were equally ineffective in making the case for the Jewish state or against intransigent Palestinian Arabs and their terrorist leaders.

The deck was stacked against Israel long before Oct. 7. Like the American education system, the corporate media had largely been captured by left-wing ideologues who believed in political activism, not journalism. And it, too, adopted the skewed ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that exacerbated racial tensions among the general population, as well as falsely labeled Israelis and Jews as “white” oppressors and their Palestinian opponents as “people of color.” That meant the former were always in the wrong, no matter what they did, and the latter in the right, no matter how awful their crimes.

They’re not listening

While Israel and its supporters might have done better in their efforts to inform the world about Oct. 7 and the century of Palestinian rejectionism that preceded it, the notion that the global audience or even the bulk of the base of the Democratic Party was open to being educated about any of this was unfounded. The red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists that are skewing European politics and ideas about Israel and the Jews has also secured a beachhead in America, as the success of antisemitic figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed demonstrates.

A world that had decided that the Jews and their state were singular villains, and thus guilty of horrible crimes, was certainly influenced by social-media algorithms and biased media. But their receptiveness to the blood libels about genocide and famine in Gaza or to the lie that Israel is an “apartheid” state wasn’t due to the lack of a proactive information task force in the Israeli prime minister’s office or the failure of much of the organized Jewish world. Having been marinated in the toxic doctrines that taught them the Israelis were the bad guys, liberal opinion was already lost to the Jewish state even before the bodies were buried after Oct. 7.

The only sectors of global or American society that remain impervious, or at least less vulnerable, to the onslaught of Hamas propaganda masquerading as progressivism are among those on the right who have already rejected these doctrines. That’s provided that they are not also being seduced by the wave of Jew-hatred on the far right that employs traditional antisemitic tropes.

Once we acknowledge all of this, the question remains: What do we do about it?

The first thing is for the Jews to stop appealing for sympathy that isn’t coming.

It should have been apparent from the outset that centering pro-Israel advocacy on the victimization of Jews on Oct. 7 or on the appalling treatment of the hostages taken that day was a mistake. It only excited antisemites. And, rather than elicit empathy, it seems to have convinced many others to believe that the Palestinians had a good reason to murder the Jews.

A futile quest

In this sense, it was much like Israel’s misguided and failed efforts to trade “land for peace” throughout the previous three decades. That did more to convince world opinion that the Jews were possessors of stolen property, rather than high-minded people who were willing to compromise their rights and even their security to achieve an end to the conflict. But now, the pleas for understanding seem only to have reinforced the growing chorus of those who believe Zionism—the anti-colonial and national liberation movement of the Jews—equals racism.

Unlike the recent past, the real debate about the Middle East isn’t about a two-state solution the Palestinians never wanted. It now centers on whether all of the Jewish state, including the kibbutzim and other communities near the Gaza Strip whose liberal-minded inhabitants were slaughtered along with everyone else on Oct. 7, is stolen land. That goes hand in hand with the idea that its occupants are foreign colonizers in their homeland, where they are the indigenous people who are only getting what they deserve.

Rather than members of the Jewish community wracking their brains trying to solve the puzzle about how to convince those who aren’t listening to hear sound historical arguments, they need to stop centering so much of their efforts on this futile quest.

It’s true that losses in the information world have real consequences, and that the attempts to isolate Israel diplomatically and economically pose a grave danger to it. But if the Jews should have learned anything in the last century when the world stood by as the Holocaust went on for years, it’s that the most important task facing them is to strengthen their state and its ability to defend Jewish life.

As horrible as the catastrophe of Oct. 7 was, in the three years that have followed, Israel’s defeats of Hamas and Hezbollah—plus the fall of a longtime brutal dictator in Syria—and their Iranian paymasters and sponsors have done more to make Jewish lives safer than all of the clever arguments put forward by its most able public information advocates.

That doesn’t give the Israeli government—or Diaspora leaders and groups—a pass for doing so poorly at explaining the situation. And it certainly doesn’t excuse a tech-savvy Jewish state for not being as nimble as it should have been in employing new media and Internet technologies to make their arguments against those spreading blood libels and antisemitism.

Still, delusions should be discarded about the chances that appeals aimed at inspiring sympathy for Jewish victims will move the needle on international or even American public opinion for those who have bought the pro-Hamas narrative hook, line and sinker. As Dara Horn has written, the world may “love dead Jews,” but what that really means for us today is that their abhorrence of Jews with power is undiminished.

A just cause

What Israel and its defenders must exude is strength, confidence in their justice of their cause, and a willingness to be undaunted by the lies and smears spread about them. Rather than seeking to debate or persuade those crying “genocide” primarily to give the world a pass for permitting the actual genocide of European Jewry during the Holocaust, we must dismiss them as hate-mongers unworthy of intellectual refutations.

As much as Jews everywhere must continue to mourn the victims of Oct. 7, as well as the heroic soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces who fell or were wounded in the ongoing effort to defeat terrorists, they should quit waiting for others to join them.

The real lesson of Oct. 7 is no different from that of the thousands of years of Jewish history that preceded it. Weakness and faith in the kindness of those ready to believe that Jews are the cause of whatever it is they fear most or the greatest societal problems they face is a formula for disaster.

Just as in the past, those who think that destroying the Jewish state will be the first step toward the liberation of the world’s oppressed peoples are not persuadable. But they can be defeated.

A proud declaration of Jewish rights and faith is far more likely to inspire friendship and alliances. That’s a lesson that should resonate for Israelis. But it must also be one adopted by Diaspora Jews perplexed by a wave of bigotry and vitriol they never anticipated and struggle to cope with. Unless and until they realize that they must defend themselves first—and worry about what everyone else thinks later—will they find a way to live in a world where Jew-hatred has again become fashionable.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/column/jonathan-s-tobin/the-real-lesson-of-oct-7-stop-appealing-for-sympathy

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