The State Department on Tuesday defended a claim by Washington’s envoy to Israel that misinformation disseminated by American media outlets is contributing to the dangerous antisemitic climate in the United States.
“Inevitably, as we have all watched, the kind of Jew-hatred and antisemitism that has been promulgated through media has been nonstop,” said Tammy Bruce, State Department spokesperson, at a press briefing, answering an inquiry about a statement published by U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee earlier in the week.
“I would argue that it would be naïve to suggest that the Jew-hatred that —whether it’s through social media, through fake news, through the rhetoric regarding Israel through the years—has not developed or perpetuated antisemitism,” Bruce said. “It’s naïve or—or mistaken.”
Bruce also pushed back on criticism of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private entity that has been distributing aid in the Strip. It has seen leaders and a key consulting group quit, although its efforts seem to have largely been successful thus far.
“Every time I’m up here, it is this critique of —I say 7 million meals have been distributed, but it would have been—but not for you, it should have been those guys over there or these people over here,” Bruce said, alluding to complaints that the United Nations should be the organization responsible for aid delivery.
“In that region and in general with everything that happens, someone is not going to be happy. Someone is going to think it could have been done a better way and yet it wasn’t being done,” Bruce said of other organizations’ failures to distribute aid.
“I thought after three months of being harangued in this room by many of you about ‘Don’t you care about the starving Gazans?’—seven million meals—and now we’re being harangued about ‘It’s not by the right people.’ We have to move on from that.”
Bruce said the State Department is awaiting the results of an Israel Defense Forces investigation regarding an incident near a GHF aid site in which the IDF said it fired warning shots toward purported aid seekers who took an unapproved route and approached IDF positions.
Some media outlets published Hamas’s claims of mass casualties from the incident, even after a separate incident, which Huckabee referred to in his statement, in which multiple outlets were forced to retract reports of mass casualties at another aid site after key video evidence was discredited.
The need for the IDF to protect aid sites wouldn’t exist, Bruce said, “if Hamas would lay down their weapons and release all the hostages and the bodies that they’re also holding.”