Media conceals information on the Middle East

Western media coverage of the Middle East rarely portrays historical background, the geopolitical situation, brutal terrorist groups and dictatorships, antisemitism in the Muslim world, hostility toward a Jewish state, or ongoing genocides in the region. This omission obscures the existential threat Israel faces, contributing to rising antisemitism in the West.

Media often ignores key facts in their Middle East reporting, which makes Israel’s actions appear incomprehensible and evil. Photo: Pixabay

Here are some key facts that the media often overlooks in its reporting on the Middle East, making Israel’s actions seem incomprehensible and evil—fueling global antisemitism, much like in the 1930s:

• Over 3,000 years ago, Jerusalem became the capital of Israel and the spiritual and political center of the Jewish people, which it remained for 1,000 years. Biblical history is confirmed by modern archaeology.

• Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in the Bible but does not appear in the Quran or other religious scripts. Israel is mentioned over 1,800 times in the Bible. “Palestine” is not mentioned in the Quran, though Israel is referenced multiple times.

• The Roman Empire captured Jerusalem in 63 BC, placing Israel under Roman rule. It was subsequently occupied by Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the British before the Jewish people regained their homeland.

• There has never been an independent country called Palestine, and Jerusalem has never been the capital of any other nation besides Israel. The Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed the region “Syria Palaestina” in 132 AD to insult the Jews after turning Jerusalem into a Roman city and building a temple to Jupiter (Zeus) on the Temple Mount.

• During the 400 years of Ottoman rule (1516–1917), Jerusalem was a desolate and insignificant city, with a population of only 15,510 according to an 1845 census.

• On November 29, 1947, the UN proposed partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The Arabs rejected the UN resolution and launched a war against the Jewish state, which had been established with UN support.

• After the Arabs lost the war, the UN created the refugee agency UNRWA. While the UNHCR resolves refugee crises worldwide, UNRWA’s mission is to perpetuate the Palestinian refugee situation. The initial 700,000 refugees from 1948 have now grown to 5.9 million.

• Israel is surrounded by countries that sponsor terrorist groups seeking its destruction, including Syria, Sudan, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Pakistan.

• The terror groups operating around Israel are among the world’s most brutal, including Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Nusra Front, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Shabaab, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, PFLP, and PFLP-GC.

• On October 24, 2023, Ghazi Hamad of Hamas’s political bureau vowed that the October 7 massacre would be repeated multiple times until Israel is eradicated: “Israel is a country that has no place… We must eliminate it because it poses a security, military, and political catastrophe for the Arab and Islamic nations,” he told the Lebanese TV channel LBC.

• Fifteen countries in the Arab League and ten members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation do not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

• In Muslim countries, the term “occupation” often refers to the mere existence of a Jewish state in the region.

• The Organization of Islamic Cooperation today has about two billion people and controls 31.56 million square kilometers of land—1,433 times more land and 200 times more people than Israel.

• Since 1948, Arab dominance in the Middle East has led to the ethnic cleansing of Jews. As soon as Transjordan was removed from the British Mandate of Palestine, Jews were banned from living there. When Egypt and Jordan occupied Gaza and the West Bank (1948–1967), Jews were expelled.

• The approximately 8,000 Jews who lived in Gaza left when Israel withdrew from the area in 2005. Since the Palestinian takeover, Jewish presence in Gaza has been entirely unthinkable.

• When Israel was established, 140,000 Jews driven out of Algeria, 75,000 from Egypt, 135,000 from Iraq, 38,000 from Libya, 265,000 from Morocco, 30,000 from Syria, 105,000 from Tunisia, and 63,000 from Yemen.

• Israel’s enemies have launched dozens of wars since 1948, including the War of Independence (1948), the Sinai War (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973), the Lebanon War (1978), the Lebanon War (1982), the First Intifada (1987), the Gulf War (1991), the Second Intifada (2000), the Lebanon War (2006), the Gaza War (2014), and the war against Hamas and Hezbollah (2023).

• The Muslim world tolerates ongoing genocides in countries such as Sudan, Syria and Nigeria. In Syria, over 600,000 people have died, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and 13 million have become refugees inside or outside Syria. And when Sudanese President al-Bashir was wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide after hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, he was able to make unhindered state visits to countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Turkey.