Those Shameful Thoughts and What They Really Say about You
8 min read
A new book exposes the media machine behind anti-Israel lies and what you can do about it.
Israeli journalist Gil Hoffman began writing his latest book, The Blood Libel Machine: Exposing the Anti-Israel Hate Network, and How to Fight Back, in a bomb shelter as Iran rained down ballistic missiles on Israel. While Israel’s defense forces worked to deflect the bombs that threatened Israelis outside, Gil realized another war was raging for people’s hearts and minds as they ingested anti-Israel lies and propaganda.
It is “a war fought on social media and AI platforms,” Gil explained in an Aish.com interview. “Everyone can do their part. So as long as we had good Wifi (even in the bomb shelter), we could do it.”
Online anti-Israel smears have real life consequences. Take the outrageous case of The New York Times’ decision to publish a picture of a skeletal child named Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub Al-Matouq on its front page in July 2025, falsely claiming that the sickly child was so thin because Israel was starving Gazan children.
“A New York Times editor found the picture of Al-Matouq and did not bother to check whether he was really starving and not sick,” Gil describes in his book. “He did not even look at the original uncropped photo to see that his brother in the same room appeared surprisingly well fed.”
In fact, Al-Matouq was painfully thin and ill because he suffered from congenital diseases including cerebral palsy and hypoxemia. The New York Times eventually published a fuller article explaining this, but the damage was done. The picture was reprinted countless times online, in other media reports, and in social media feeding a false narrative that Israel had engineered a famine. It was a major PR victory for Hamas, whose role in attacking Israel, embedding itself in civilian structures, and stealing aid was entirely erased.
As the misleading photo spread, Hamas hardened its positions and the 20 hostages who were really starving remained in Gazan tunnels for three and a half more miserable months.
At the time the New York Times published this libelous photo, Israel and Hamas were in indirect negotiations to free the 20 remaining living Israeli hostages. “I think we’ll have a deal next week,” US President Donald Trump cautioned. Instead, as Al-Matouq’s misleading photo became a symbol of the conflict, “Hamas hardened its positions, and the people who were really starving - 20 remaining live hostages - unnecessarily remained terribly malnourished underground in Gazan tunnels for three and a half more miserable months.”
The Blood Libel Machine details in detail how “reporting that is biased against the Jewish state is a major contributing factor to the rise of attacks against Jews around the world.”
On May 21, 2025, gunman Elias Rodriguez murdered Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, two young employees of the Israeli embassy who’d just attended a Young Diplomats Reception at the Capital Jewish Museum. Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he pumped 20 bullets into them at close range. “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza,” he told the police, and wrote in a manifesto that he was motivated in part by the fact that “public opinion has shifted against” Israel and Zionists.
The following month, Mohamed Sabry Soliman threw Molotov cocktails into a pro-Israel gathering. He’d been following constant (false) news reports that claimed that Israelis were targeting children in Gaza, and later told the police he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.” As he shouted “Free Palestine,” and “How many children killed?” one of his homemade bombs killed 82-year-old Karen Diamond and injured over a dozen people, including a Holocaust survivor.
Gil’s book title draws a direct parallel between the Medieval false accusation that Jews killed non-Jewish children and today’s slanders against Israel, which inaccurately paint Israel and Zionists as targeting children. “A blood libel back then affected one town at a time…. Now these lies can spread in seconds. Incorrect reporting can lead to death. The blood libel is spread constantly by news media and social media today.”
The Blood Libel Machine documents example after example of media bias against Israel. In the case of Al-Matouq, the sick child featured by the New York Times, Editor in Chief Joseph Kahan had “asked his staff to choose from what he thought would be countless pictures of starving children in Gaza. There was only one problem: Such images did not exist because the Gaza famine was a myth promoted by his own newspaper and other media outlets. Israel was not actually starving Gazan children - not indirectly and certainly not on purpose.” Undeterred, his staffers ran the misleading photo instead.
Gil Hoffman
Hoffman builds up a damning portrait of the way some of the most prestigious English language media outlets promote outrageous slanders about Israel. Immediately after Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, The Washington Post, and other sites “began echoing Hamas’s talking points blaming Israel for October 7.” (AP seemed to know about October 7 ahead of time: it instructed its reporters to cover Hamas’s attack.) Reuters omitted descriptions of Hamas atrocities in some of its reports. CNN’s Christina Amanpour outrageously called Hamas’s brutal attack “round five in a back and forth” between Israel and Hamas. BBC presenter Anjana Gadgil, during an interview with former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, falsely stated that the Israeli military was “happy to kill children.”
Yet this anti-Israel hostility pale in comparison to the lies produced by the Qatari-based news organization Al Jazeera, which acts as a direct mouthpiece for Hamas and its apologists.
In the media battlefield, Israel’s greatest foe is the rich nation of Qatar.
On recent battlefields, Hoffman observes, Israel is fighting Iran and its proxies. “In the media landscape,” however, Israel’s greatest foe is the tiny Gulf nation of Qatar, which “very much directs the narrative war” against Israel.
Qatar is one of the world’s wealthiest nations - by one recent count, it ranks fifth globally - because of its vast oil and gas reserves, and uses its riches to buy influence globally. The tiny kingdom has donated nearly $9 billion to universities in the United States, and paid $235 million to American lobbyists to burnish its image. It funds Al Jazeera, which was founded in 1996. In 2006, it launched an English language service, and in 2014, created AJ+, an online news company which produces short form videos for social media.
Although Al Jazeera enjoys global prestige, “Al Jazeera and AJ+ are state-run propaganda channels of the terror-supporting Qatari government, no different from the state TV channels of Russia (RT), China (CGTN), or Iran (Press TV).” Al Jazeera reflects the views of the Qatari royal family, with their strong support for the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamist movement that is a designated terrorist organization in the United States.
One of the most shocking facts in Hoffman’s book is the fact that throughout Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, “Hamas and Al Jazeera maintained a communications pipeline…including a ‘secure phone line’ referred to as the ‘Al Jazeera phone,’ which linked Hamas’s military operations in Gaza directly to Al Jazeera’s management offices in Doha.”
The result has been outrageously inaccurate reporting that paints Israel as a depraved aggressor and whitewashes Hamas. In March 2024, as Israel battled Hamas terrorists who were holed up in Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, Al Jazeera’s Arabic service falsely reported that Israeli soldiers were raping Palestinian women and murdering others inside the hospital. The false story went viral. When Hamas itself stated that the rapes and murders had not occurred, Al Jazeera Arabic’s main television reporter, Elsy Abi Assi, was unrepentant: she admitted she’d made up lurid details about Israeli conduct to “arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood” and turn public opinion even more against Israel.
Examples of Al Jazeera’s hatred of Israel and willingness to foment violence abound. Al Jazeera anchorman M’hamed Krichen has posted on X that Jews are inherently untrustworthy. Al Jazeera analyst Saeed Ziad railed against Gazans who protested against Hamas, calling them “traitors,” and urging Palestinians to attack Israel “with the flesh of their children.” The network ignores anti-Hamas protests in Gaza and elsewhere, treating Hamas in its news reporting with kid gloves. An Al-Jazeera documentary about the Israeli-Hamas war “disputed whether Hamas terrorists raped Israelis (and) concluded that ‘many of the worst stories that come out in the days following (Hamas’s October 7, 2023) attack were false.’”
Israel was strongly criticized for banning Al Jazeera in 2024. Less noted in international press reports was the fact that many Arab countries have also banned Al Jazeera in protest against its obvious radicalism and bias. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have all banned it. The Palestinian Authority (PA), which is ruled by Fatah, an alternative group to Hamas, has tried to ban Al Jazeera in its territory, given Al Jazeera’s blatant pro-Hamas sentiment, but has been unsuccessful in keeping them out of areas under PA control.
The protests against Israel which swept the world immediately after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023 were no accident. Lawyer Mark Goldfeder has launched numerous lawsuits against Hamas and its supporters and has studied the way that Hamas infiltrated western universities and other spaces years ago. “They had systems in place well in advance” of October 7, 2023, “both in terms of how they were going to break the algorithm on social media and how they were going to disrupt the status quo on campuses. Someone paid for those tents. Thousands of college students across the country don’t all of a sudden have matching signs. All of that takes coordination and preparation….”
Hoffman features this research and traces the organizations and funding behind much of today’s anti-Israel activists to a network of state actors and fanatics based in Iran, China, Qatar, and elsewhere. Far from being a home-grown phenomenon, anti-Israel protests are carefully staged and funded operations directed by terrorists abroad and their supporters here in the West.
Journalists take what they get from well-funded anti-Israel organizations at face value without verifying evidence. What they write then gets cited in places like the International Court of Justice.
Rhetoric from Hamas-affiliated groups is often swallowed whole by Western news organizations. “In a vicious circle,” Hoffman observes, “journalists take what they get from well-funded anti-Israel organizations at face value without verifying evidence, magnifying even easily disprovable charges. What they write then gets cited in places like the International Court of Justice.”
One high-profile example is the false claim made by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Hamas-affiliated pressure group in Europe, that Israel was training dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. This slanderous claim was timed to eclipse a major Israeli report documenting Hamas’s sexual abuse of Israeli women on October 7, 2023, employing similar wording to the Israeli report.
Euro-Med’s false dog rape story was a great success for Hamas. It was immediately repeated by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in May 2026, and was subsequently included in an official UN report. Today, online searches for the Israeli report on Hamas’s widespread sexual violence often turn up Hamas’s baseless claims that Israeli dogs are raping Palestinian prisoners instead. It’s just one of many, many cases in which Hamas lies and propaganda are swamping the truth online - and leading to record levels of antizionist and antisemitic hate.
Hoffman points out that as Large Language Models use newspapers and UN reports to train themselves, lies about Israel are being incorporated into popular AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Gemini, and other LLMs. The virulently anti-Israel Al Jazeera network is one of the most frequently cited sources for ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity AI, baking anti-Israel falsehoods into some of the most widely used AI tools today.
The Blood Libel Machine is “not a gloom and doom book,” Hoffman insists. “It highlights lots of heroes” who have worked tirelessly to counter misinformation about Israel. He also includes thirty practical steps that ordinary people can take to help counter anti-Israel lies, from educating our kids to learning how Large Language Models work, and asking them to consult pro-Israel sources when answering questions.
Ordinary people need to become soldiers in the army of truth
“Ordinary people have become soldiers in the army of truth,” Hoffman explains. We all have to up our game, educating ourselves more about Israel and making sure our families, friends, and colleagues are educated as well. He urges us to read online Israeli sources in English. Follow Israeli government agencies on social media. Discuss Israeli news as a family during mealtimes. Demand that our kids - and ourselves - become politically literate and informed. “Quiz your kids if you have to,” he notes.
Most importantly, we can all be proud Jews. As Jews, Hoffman observes, “we’re never done learning. We can always learn more and understand more: that’s the quest of a Jew in life.” His newest book is a great place to begin learning about the challenges Israel is facing online today and how we can all help battle for truth.
Click here to purchase a copy of The Blood Libel Machine.
