The New York Times’s July 5 edition included a long news analysis article by Michael D. Shear, “The Cost of Victory: Israel Overpowered Its Foes, but Deepened Its Isolation,” which refers to “the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack that killed 1,200 people and took 250 people hostage.” The use of “people” may seem innocuous. But in context, it’s telling – and disturbing.
Roughly 70 percent of the Israelis who were slaughtered by some 6,000 Hamas-led invaders were civilians. The rest were soldiers and police officers, including off-duty personnel, who tried to repel the onslaught. The civilians included infants, children, elderly kibbutz residents, young music festival attendees and entire families – burned alive, raped and gunned down. They were deliberately targeted in an unprovoked massacre of such barbarity that comparisons to the worst pogroms and Nazi atrocities are not hyperbole; they are necessary for historical accuracy and moral clarity.
More than 3,400 Israelis – civilians and soldiers – were wounded.
The 250 hostages taken into Gaza were overwhelmingly civilians, including women and children, the elderly and foreign workers.
This deliberate targeting of civilians – the very definition of terrorism – is why Israeli officials, human rights experts and many international observers have categorized the October 7 attack as a mass atrocity constituting crimes against humanity.
And yet, the euphemism-laden language of much of the liberal media persists, subtly recasting calculated terror as mere tragedy. In place of massacre, we often get “raid.” Instead of terrorists, we read about “militants.” Hostage-takers are “fighters.” The rhetoric of indiscriminate slaughter is couched in passive constructions that blur the line between victim and aggressor.
Shear’s article is more than 2,000 words long. But the reader is never told that Hamas is a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. He refers to “West Bank militancy,” never to Palestinian terrorism or terrorist groups. The only time the word terrorism appears is in reference to the May assassination of two young Israeli diplomats in Washington, D.C. – described only as “an attack officials called a hate crime and terrorism.” The avoidance is glaring.
This is not new. The same editorial contortions have been used for decades to sanitize terrorism when the perpetrators are Palestinian Arabs and their allies, and the victims are Israeli or Jewish.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian terrorists hijacked commercial airliners, threatened passengers at gunpoint and in some cases blew up planes on live television – or in mid-air, as in the case of the practically forgotten Palestinian terrorist bombing of TWA Flight 841 on September 8, 1974, which claimed 88 lives. The explosion occurred over the Ionian Sea, about 30 minutes after the jetliner, which was flying from Tel Aviv to New York with scheduled stops in Athens and Rome, took off from the Greek capital with a checked suitcase loaded with explosives.
Time and again, media outlets described the terrorists as “guerrillas” or “commandos.”
When 11 Israeli athletes were murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by members of the Black September Organization, a covert arm of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) – after being beaten, tortured and held at gunpoint in the Olympic Village – the perpetrators were rarely referred to in the press as terrorists. To this day, some outlets speak of “the Munich hostage crisis” rather than “the Munich massacre.”
In 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group, operating on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a PLO-member group, murdered 26 people at Israel’s Lod Airport, including Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico. The terrorists were described in press accounts as “guerrillas.”
In 1974, three members of another PLO-member organization, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, took 115 civilians hostage, including 105 children, in Ma’alot, a northern Israeli town, after killing two Israeli Arab women and an Israeli Jewish couple and their four-year-old son. The terrorists, who had infiltrated from Lebanon, murdered 25 of the hostages – 22 of them children – with grenades and automatic rifles. The international media labeled the killers “commandos.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, amid waves of Palestinian bus bombings and café explosions during the intifadas, the media’s go-to term for terrorist became “militant,” a word that conveys little about motive and even less about morality. And now, even after Hamas’s documented atrocities – including torture, rape and the kidnapping of children and Holocaust survivors – much of the press still can’t bring itself to say the obvious: terrorism.
Why does this happen? Part of the answer lies in the liberal media’s romanticization of revolutionary struggle. There is a longstanding narrative framework, rooted in Cold War-era Third Worldism and anti-colonialism, that casts Palestinian terrorism as a form of justified “resistance.” That narrative has been adopted wholesale by activists like New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who has consistently refused to condemn Hamas, even when pressed to do so by survivors and the families of hostages.
This worldview regards the victims of terrorism not as human beings, but as symbols of an oppressive system. And so, to maintain ideological consistency, the violence they suffer must be euphemized. We see the effects of this bias in the language choices editors and reporters make. One rarely finds a mainstream article that calls Palestinian terrorism what it is – systematic, sadistic and explicitly aimed at civilians.
This failure of language matters. It shapes how the public perceives the conflict. It lends legitimacy to terror. And it distorts our historical memory. By softening the terminology, the media shields perpetrators from moral accountability while denying victims the dignity of truth.
When the media refuses to call out deliberate anti-civilian violence as terrorism, it does more than obfuscate; it enables. It encourages a climate in which barbarism is rationalized, grief is politicized, and clarity is sacrificed for ideological convenience.
It’s time to end the word games. A movement that rapes, tortures and murders civilians is not a “resistance.” It is a terrorist movement. The term resistance conjures noble images of the French Resistance or World War II partisans; but these fighters targeted Nazi combatants and collaborators, not children, not civilians at music festivals. To equate Hamas and related terrorist groups with that legacy in any way is a grotesque distortion.
The distortion is rooted in part in the lingering influence of Third Worldist ideology – particularly the writings of Frantz Fanon, who romanticized anti-colonial violence, including terrorism, as purifying and redemptive. His justifications for political violence have seeped into Western academia, where generations of students have been taught to view terrorism not as evil, but as resistance cloaked in revolutionary legitimacy.
But professional journalists and editors are not ideologues or political operatives. They are not bound by campus dogma or activist manifestos. They are entitled to their opinions – and even to advocacy – so long as they uphold the standards of fairness and accuracy that journalism demands.
Put simply, the media has a responsibility to speak plainly – not just for the sake of truth, but in defense of the moral boundaries that distinguish civilization from barbarism.
