The question of how you can be said to “infiltrate” your own land is never answered.

‘Honest Reporting’ is a pro-Israel ‘media monitoring’ group that’s been around since its early days as an email list in 2000, after some Zionist British college students were triggered by slightly fair coverage of Israel’s gross human rights violations during the Second Intifada.

Suffice to say, it’s a serial Palestinian demonization organization and “happy to help” propaganda arm of the Israeli government. They don’t go after genuinely biased media reports as much as they go after any slightly positive coverage of the Palestinian people and try to undermine accurate coverage of the dire situation in the occupied territories.

They particularly hate photojournalists, especially Palestinian ones. To be fair on these shills for anything Israel does no matter how craven, their creation story involves a NYT photo of a Jewish student from Chicago who was attacked by Palestinians in East Jerusalem, miscaptioned as a Palestinian getting beaten by an Israeli soldier on the Temple Mount. My best guess, given that even the location was wrong, is that the photo editor pulled a negative image of routine Israeli brutality during a protest at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and put one of the sole Jewish victim of the day—and then forgot to change the caption.

As I said, ‘Honest Reporting’ particularly hates photojournalists, especially Palestinian ones. They are constantly claiming photos that are easy to get with patience, an 8 frames a second SLR, and a long lens are “fake” or “staged”, that the photographer was working with the Palestinian “terrorists” pictured, you get the idea.

It’s impossible for me to write the ‘Honest Reporting’ organization name without using scare quotes because I’d feel dirty about propagating their branding lie. They are not interested in honest reporting, they are interested in promoting Israel’s lies. Having lived in the occupied Palestinian territories, reading some their interpretations of ‘what the photographer was really doing’ are often just laugh out loud funny—if the thoughts behind their comments weren’t so obviously racist.

On Christmas Eve, ‘Honest Reporting’ published a tweet, complaining about the very Israel-friendly New York Times choosing a photo taken by Gazan Reuters photojournalist Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa on October 7th as one of its 2023 Year in Photos:

The photo is captioned a little strangely in that sentence one and sentence two are describing two different occurrences but the New York Times is correct in the first by not identifying the people breaking the fence apart as HAMAS members. Or photojournalists, lol.

HAMAS fighters broke through the walls and fences around Gaza, used boats to enter Israel from Gaza, and paraglided from Gaza into Israel but this is clearly a photo of what happened after the assault was already in motion, when thousands of Gazans—realizing that the Israeli border machine gun posts had been taken out by HAMAS—decided to visit the other side of Israel’s border themselves. The photo does not show HAMAS members breaking through the fence. The people in the photo aren’t armed, they’re just civilians.

‘Honest Reporting’ isn’t good at seeing details like that, or pretends not to see them:

Despite ethical questions we raised about publishing photos by Gazan photojournalists who broke through the Israeli border on Oct. 7, @nytimes has no problem including this as one of its photos of the year – taken by Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa as the border fence is breached.

But the photo wasn’t taken by Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa but by a photojournalist from Turkey’s Anadolu agency, Ashraf Amra (captioned correctly below):

The photo that wasn’t taken by Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa but by a photojournalist from Turkey’s Anadolu agency, Ashraf Amra, is ironically found in the above screen capture published on the ‘Honest Reporting’ website in an article that also falsely claims Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa “described breaking into a room where Israelis were hiding before being taken by Hamas terrorists.”

The reality is that Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa, in his own words, in a video found on the same page on HonestReporting.com, is describing HAMAS members breaking into the room, not himself (starts at 0:43, pictured right).

They seem mostly angry that he accompanied HAMAS during their invasion, as if ABC, CNN, ITV, and the BBC’s embedded tours of Gaza with the IDF aren’t exactly the same thing. They are so incensed by him that they projected his name onto someone else’s photo that was miscaptioned by the New York Times.

No foreign press is allowed into Gaza without being embedded with the IDF. Only Al-Jazeera has reporting teams on the ground, and those preceded the current conflict. Some individual journalists and photojournalists provide sporadic content to other media. The majority of the information about Gaza is actually provided by citizen journalists during this first livestreamed genocide in history.

It is ‘Honest Reporting’s inattention to detail (or intentional overlooking of details), their overfocus on irrelevancies, and their spinning of material to suit a deeply and consistent anti-Palestinian narrative that makes their work insidious.

Their tone is much like Israel’s. Israel is a victim, surrounded by a hostile media, not the perpetrator of a three-quarter century-long system of oppression. Another reason why it’s important to go to check the sources yourself. Even ‘Honest Reporting’ can’t keep its own stories straight.

During the current conflict—the amount of disinformation, both intentional and as a byproduct of ignorance and racism—makes that doubly important. There are a lot of people who have never set foot in even Israel, never mind Palestine, with very strong opinions who appear very early in the Dunning-Kruger Curve.