What could have been an inspiring story about young Palestinians using social media to share their culture with a global audience was, unfortunately, used by Vice World News as yet another cover for attacking Israel. A recent article by James Greig was ostensibly meant to highlight the manner in which Palestinians have taken to the TikTok video-sharing platform to promote their collective national identity, but instead of empowering these individuals, the piece perpetuates misleading claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and omits the fact that terrorist groups are using social media to incite violence.
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Myth of the Multiplying Palestinian Refugees
The falsehoods start in the second paragraph of the article: “For Palestinians, most of whom are barred from returning to their homeland, social media platforms like TikTok can be a way of sustaining a shared cultural life and national identity,” Greig claims. This assertion about Palestinian refugees links to an Amnesty International page that claims there are “currently more than 5.2 million registered Palestinian refugees.”
What goes unmentioned is that the United Nations treats Palestinians differently from all other of the world’s refugees. For one thing, Palestinians are under the auspices of UNRWA, an entity created uniquely for them that has transformed the concept of refugee into an inherited characteristic. As a result, UNRWA today counts four generations of Palestinian as “refugees” — more than 5 million people.
Related Reading: Following HonestReporting Petition, US Gov’t Reveals True Number of Palestinian Refugees
In every other conflict around the world, refugee populations decrease over time. Only here do the numbers continue to rise – a phenomenon that has been weaponized against Israel. According to US government estimates, less than 200,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1948 War of Independence are still alive, and most others are not refugees by “any rational criteria.”
Amnesty and Vice nevertheless argue that millions of Palestinians have a ‘Right of Return’ to what is now the State of Israel – a demand not supported by international law. Such a skewed logic leads to the perception, pushed by Vice, that Palestinians are barred from “returning” to their “homeland,” despite the fact that many were born and raised abroad.
Quds News: Not Just a “Palestinian News Network”
The Vice story goes on to describe different reasons why it is purportedly a “risky endeavor” to share Palestinian content on TikTok. In this context, the piece blasts TikTok for the temporary suspension of QNN, which is deceivingly, simply described as “a Palestinian news network”:
Ahmad Jarrar, the editor of QNN, a Palestinian news network which was deleted from TikTok earlier this year, says that the platform’s moderation policies remain frustratingly opaque. […] According to Jarrar, this incident represents a broader trend: “Many Palestinian journalists complain about their content constantly being removed by TikTok.”
Conveniently, Vice omits that QNN stands for Quds News Network, a Hamas-affiliated news agency. QNN was not just suspended from TikTok; other social media networks also took action because of its ties to the Gazan terror group. In 2019, after a bipartisan request from US lawmakers, Twitter terminated QNN’s account as part of a campaign against users affiliated with Hamas and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
Related Reading: What Starts Online, Doesn’t Stay There
Not only is QNN associated with an internationally designated terrorist organization, but it also promotes hate and violence against Jews, as the blog Israellycool has pointed out on several occasions. The propaganda outlet has shared content from Holocaust deniers, peddles in vicious blood libels, and regularly incites Palestinians to attack Israelis.
As the Vice article correctly states, many Palestinians successfully use platforms like TikTok to document their lives and culture. However, when terrorist groups and their supporters harness social media to instigate hate and violence, platforms must take action, as online hate speech has sometimes led to real-life atrocities. Vice blatantly ignores this threat. In fact, the author of the piece actively downplays the problem:
For instance, certain keywords related to Palestine are more likely to be censored by Facebook’s AI-powered algorithms, including muqawama — the Arabic word for “resistance.”
Vice fails to explain that “resistance” in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict often means violence against innocent Israelis. A simple search using the hashtag muqawama on TikTok reveals several videos glorifying rocket barrages launched at Israeli civilians, as well as stone-throwing and Molotov cocktail attacks on IDF soldiers. Is describing this context really too much work for a professional journalist?
Blaming Israel For Hamas’ Crackdown On Women’s Rights
The TikTok story was not the only time the outlet took a jab at the Jewish state in the last couple of days. In another article published last week, Vice drew a connection between Hamas’ decision to curtail women’s rights in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the enclave.
On March 1, Vice published the article titled, These Women Would Like to Go Outside Without Needing a Man’s Permission, which basically rehashed a story previously covered by the Associated Press (AP):
A recent ruling by Gaza’s Sharia Supreme Judicial Council declared that unmarried woman would require the permission of a male guardian to travel. The announcement sparked uproar in the twenty–five-mile-long strip, where around two million Palestinians live under a 14-year economic blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.”
The opening paragraph almost reads like an exact copy of the February 15 AP story, which HonestReporting has covered here. As we pointed out, the internal policy enacted by Gaza’s Islamist rulers has nothing to do with the blockade – a security measure imposed in response to incessant attacks against the Jewish state, as well as the smuggling of weaponry through the Sinai Peninsula and Hamas’ support for terrorists therein.
Related Reading: AP, WaPo, LA Times Blame Israel For Hamas Decision to Restrict Women’s Rights
Moreover, the article falsely claims that the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip is “considered illegal under international law.” Israel and Egypt have every right under international law to inspect imports and ensure that weapons, such Iranian-produced rockets, do not fall into the hands of Hamas. This was confirmed by the UN’s Palmer Report.
This is far from the first time HonestReporting has called out Vice for biased reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 2019, a Vice News Tonight segment falsely claimed that 250 minors were killed during the Gaza border demonstrations. In reality, around 50 minors were killed, and many of them were involved in clashes with the IDF. After our criticism, the video was taken offline. And in November 2020, Vice erred again, publishing a video that glorified Palestinian terrorists and misportrayed Israel as cold-hearted and all-powerful, thus fueling the narrative that Palestinian terrorism is a legitimate form of ‘resistance’ to Israel.
