"Today, Explained" anti-Semitic and anti-Israel bias

To whom it may concern,

I am a (former) listener of Today, Explained Vox Media Podcast. I am not your typical Vox listener - I lean more "conservative" than most of your listener base, but I have found that getting a broad perspective on issues from people with different viewpoints than my own allows me to inform my own understanding of the world. Broader perspective allows me to distill what is happening in the world and inform my own decision making. I know that I will not always agree with what is said in everything that I listen to, but being able to hear and understand things from the other side will make me more informed and a better citizen of the world.

However, "Today, Explained"'s coverage of the conflict in Israel has gone way over the line of reasonable alternative perspective and veered into the category of blatant anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. Below is a timeline of the "Today, Explained" coverage of the events in Israel since October 7.

The first coverage is October 10th which was somewhat balanced but already lays the groundwork for blaming Israel for the entire conflict and the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israelis on October 7th - saying that the Netanyahu government is somewhat responsible for stoking flames in the West Bank which caused and allowed Hamas to attack.

It all goes downhill from here.

October 16th "how Palestinians view Hamas" which in the intro mentions "We're going to do some facts" and then continues to do anything but that. The episode starts with mentioning that Israel, the U.S. and many of their allies designate Hamas as a terrorist organization, but many disagree - as if this is a valid viewpoint in light of the fact that they just perpetrated the largest terror attack since 9/11. Imagine if after 9/11 a podcast was released giving context to Al Qaeda and laying claim to the fact that it wasn't a terrorist organization. The episode then continues with the creation of Hamas and mentions how in the Hamas charter it calls for the destruction of Israel, but then it brushes that off with a single quote from an unnamed person saying that Hamas isn't anti-Jewish. They fail to mention that the charter has never been changed and Hamas regularly calls for the complete destruction of Israel and expulsion or murder of all Israelis. The guest than proceeds to take issue with referring to any Hamas activity as terrorist - that any act is justifiable in the name or resistance. They then proceed to mention Hamas suicide bombings starting in 1994 and attribute all to a terror attack (notice how I'm not afraid to call terrorism what it is, no matter which side it comes from) by Baruch Goldstein in February of 1994 (this attribution is likely completely inaccurate - the subsequent attacks were an attempt to undermine the Oslo accords). They play a single news clip which intimates that they were only targeting military targets and fail to mention that the bombings continued for 10 years and included over 100 bombings of innocent Israeli civilians and hundreds of deaths and thousands more injured. The guest then claims that Hamas denounced violence (this never happened) until Israeli aggression goaded them back into it (failing to mention that there was definitely blame on both sides for the aggression and acute actions taken by Hamas often preceded Israeli action (2006 kidnap of Gilad Shalit, 2008 rocket launches, 2011 terror attack, 2014 rocket launches, etc.). He then goes on to blame Israel for the lack of elections in Gaza because Israel blocks elections in East Jerusalem (it is unclear what the connection there is between elections in Gaza and East Jerusalem).

October 23rd "Hearts, minds, and likes" - accusing Israel of mass misinformation campaign - with the prime example being the Israeli response to the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, despite the fact that the episode was published many days AFTER the US affirmed that the most likely cause of the explosion was a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. The episode then went on to claim that Hamas was a small organization incapable of misinformation campaigns (even though ironically - the example of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion showed that it was more than capable and that western media was just waiting to publish it's propaganda).

But all that pales in comparison to what was published on October 25th "Why does the US always side with Israel?"?

To answer that question - there was no mention of shared values (democracy, human rights, women's rights, inclusion, etc.) or the fact that Israel is the US's buffer against extremism in the region and protects US interests from attack. Rather, the unabashed answer was one you might expect from Joseph Goebbels - that the Democratic party is in Israel's pocket because the Jews pay them off. This sort of Nazi level propaganda from a respected news source is frightening. We say "Never again" but statements like that pave the way for discrimination and violence against Jews. The episode then goes to blame US's forever wars in the wake of 9/11 on Ariel Sharon's guidance to a gullible President Bush.

Vox Media should be embarrassed to have content like this published in it's name. It should immediately disavow anti-Semitic content and commit to being an impartial news outlet.

Eliot Gelernter