Associated Press under fire for calling antisemitic anti-Israel demonstrations ‘anti-war’ protests
May 2, 2024
The Associated Press is under fire for portraying the protests wracking college campuses across the United States as “anti-war demonstrations” while omitting how many of the demonstrations include violent rhetoric and have been connected to the assault of Jews.
“When people are chanting in their protests, ‘intifada now,’ simply look up the definition of ‘intifada’ – that is not anti war,” said Natalie Sanandaji, a New Yorker who survived the Nova music festival massacre, where more than 360 people were killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. “To downplay it is to make these people feel like what they’re doing is okay. We need to talk about how serious it is. Downplaying it is just putting more people at risk,” she said on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show.
“Intifada,” an Arabic word for “uprising,” is used to refer to two violent periods, one in the late 1980s and the other in the early 2000s, where nearly 1,000 Israelis were killed or injured in Palestinian terror attacks, including suicide attacks in civilian areas. Chants in support of the intifada have been heard at anti-Israel protests multiple times since Oct. 7, when about 1,200 people in Israel were murdered and 250 others were kidnapped.
“Nobody is pro-war. To call this an anti-war protest is absurd,” said Dan Schneider, the vice president of Media Research Center’s Free Speech America, a conservative-leaning nonprofit media watchdog. “This is not about war. This is about the extermination of Jews and the elimination of Israel as a legal state.”