The ‘Moderate’ Genocidal Madmen of Hamas

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at more sympathetic media reporting on Hamas and cover more media misses.

Attention Reporters: There’s Nothing Moderate about Hamas

Israel’s latest attacks on Hamas will not permanently wipe the group out, the New York Times reports. Instead, the group may gather itself and come back “more radicalized.”

“The assassinations of two Hamas leaders may be a short-term setback, analysts say, not enough to prevent the group from re-emerging intact — and possibly more radicalized,” a subheading reads.

“Israel’s decades-long targeted killing campaigns against its Palestinian and regional rivals have a contested record: Critics have long argued the tactic has simply created room for new parties or leaders to emerge as Israel’s main foes — often with ever more radical forces replacing them,” the story goes on to explain.

How, exactly, this group could become any more radical than it already is remains a mystery. It’s been just ten months since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took nearly 250 hostages during its infamous October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.

But the article continues a line of rhetoric seen in several recent obituaries of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who has been described by a handful of outlets as “moderate.”

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Tehran. While no one has claimed credit for the attack, Israel is believed to have been behind the Hamas leader’s death. A separate New York Times report suggests Haniyeh was killed by an explosive device that was “covertly smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying.” The bomb had reportedly been stashed in the guesthouse two months before its detonation.

Reuters reported, “Tough-talking Haniyeh was seen as the more moderate face of Hamas.” But after receiving backlash, it amended the headline to read: “Who was Ismail Haniyeh and why is his assassination a blow to Hamas?”

Yet the story still says that Haniyeh was seen as a “moderate,” and it calls him “relatively pragmatic” compared with other Hamas leaders. He was “the tough-talking face of the Palestinian group’s international diplomacy,” the obituary says.

The Guardian, meanwhile, said Haniyeh was a “moderate figure within the [Hamas] movement, one whose role had become vital in sustained diplomatic efforts to secure a ceasefire.”

And the BBC reported on Haniyeh’s “pragmatic” ways and “tough rhetoric.”

Here at National Review, readers could find an appropriate message about the death of the terror group’s leader: “Good riddance.”

As NR’s editors wrote:

While branded as a “moderate” by the media, that was a relative term, as he still was committed to Hamas’s goal of destroying Israel, supported their terrorist attacks, and helped raise money from Iran to further their objective. He condemned the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden and was seen on video celebrating the October 7 attacks as they were unfolding. In a speech in January, he said, “We should hold on to the victory that took place on October 7 and build upon it.”

Media watchdog Honest Reporting also quickly refuted reporting that there was anything “moderate” about the Hamas leader, who as stated above, could be seen on video saying “God is Good” in response to the October 7 terrorist attack.

CNN reported that Haniyeh had “felt the personal toll of the war in Gaza,” explaining that Israeli airstrikes had killed three of his sons and four of his grandchildren. And yet, CNN writes, “Haniyeh insisted their deaths would not affect ongoing ceasefire and hostage talks.”

“Whoever thinks that by targeting my kids during the negotiation talks and before a deal is agreed upon that it will force Hamas to back down on its demands is delusional,” he said at the time.

Yet the real reason why is chilling. After the October 7 attack, he appeared on television to say: “The blood of the children, women and elderly . . . we need this blood so that it will ignite within us the spirit of revolution, so that it will arouse within us persistence, so that it will arouse within us defiance and advance . . .”

Haniyeh also promised the group would “lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine.”

And then there’s the time he said the quiet part out loud: “The time has come for jihad of the swords; this is the battle for Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque, and not the battle of the Palestinian people,  or Gaza, or the people in Gaza.”

In that same speech, he called for financial donations to support jihad, which he called even more important than humanitarian aid. “Dear brothers and sisters, let us call this ‘financial Jihad’ . . . despite the immense importance and Gaza’s need for any aid it can get. This Is financial Jihad . . . the notion of waging Jihad with one’s life and one’s money.”

Headline Fail of the Week

In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”

“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.

Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.

“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.

After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”

Media Misses

• MSNBC anchor Katie Phang recently claimed that Trump “never” brought home several Americans who were imprisoned when he was in office — despite two of the three Americans having been detained during the Biden administration. When a social-media user brought this to Phang’s attention, she doubled down: “Trump never conditioned his ability to return any American hostage on being President,” she wrote in a post on X. “You got a problem with it? Take it up with Trump, who, again, didn’t bring them home. President Biden did.”

• Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins claims there was no reason to be offended over the drag-queen-parody performance of Leonardo da Vinci’s rendition of the Last Supper at the Olympic opening ceremonies last month.

“All the religious police see are phantom insults,” Jenkins said, arguing that the ceremony’s theatrical director, Thomas Jolly, is more Christian than the ceremony’s detractors are. “Perhaps, just perhaps, Jolly is a better, truer worshiper than his critics. At the least, he did something they have failed to do: He saw faces and framed them with interest, rather than hostility.”

• Bloomberg reporter Jennifer Jacobs has reportedly been fired by the outlet after she was one of two reporters who jumped the gun and published a story about Evan Gershkovich’s release from Russia before he had safely deplaned. Bloomberg published its piece at 7:41 a.m. on August 1 before updating it a little over an hour later to correct the record: “An earlier version of this story was corrected to reflect that the Americans have not been released yet.”

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported the news shortly after 11 a.m. when Gershkovich and the other Americans released as part of a prisoner swap were actually on the ground in Turkey. A reporter for the Journal told New York magazine that the outlet actually had a reporter on the ground with binoculars waiting to see Gershkovich step off the plane, and only then did the Journal publish its story. Outlets had agreed to an embargo as prisoner swaps could change at any time. Bloomberg has received widespread criticism for publishing its story before that embargo lifted.