For two years, much of the Western media and political class has engaged in the systematic dissemination of anti-Israel disinformation. This has not been a matter of criticism or scrutiny — both legitimate in any democracy — but of narrative construction: selective facts, inverted causality, and the routine laundering of terrorist propaganda into mainstream discourse. The result has been predictable and deadly. A target has been drawn on the backs of Jews worldwide.
Every media outlet that allowed itself to become a conduit for this propaganda bears responsibility for what follows. When terrorism is euphemised as “resistance,” when rape and massacre are contextualised rather than condemned, when Jewish suffering is minimised or erased, and when Israel is portrayed not as a nation defending itself but as a uniquely illegitimate evil, the consequences are not theoretical. Hatred is normalised. Violence is licensed.
The anti-Jewish terrorist attack we witnessed in Australia this week did not occur in a vacuum. It is the inevitable downstream effect of a political and media ecosystem that has spent two years mainstreaming the rhetoric of “globalising the intifada” while pretending that words have no consequences. History tells us otherwise. Dehumanisation precedes violence — always.
Political rhetoric matters. When elected officials march alongside crowds chanting slogans that have historically meant the elimination of Jews; when they refuse to distinguish between Israel’s right to exist and a terrorist organisation’s campaign to destroy it; when they speak endlessly of Palestinian suffering while remaining conspicuously silent about Jewish victims — they are not neutral. They are taking sides. And the side they are taking legitimises hostility toward Jewish communities far beyond the Middle East.
This moral failure is compounded by cowardice. Too many political leaders are willing to condemn “all hate” in the abstract, yet refuse to name antisemitism when it appears cloaked in the language of antizionism. Too many are willing to invoke “Never Again” on commemorative days, while tolerating or excusing the very incitement that makes its repetition possible the rest of the year.
The media’s role in this cannot be ignored. Journalistic ethics demand scepticism, verification, and proportionality. Instead, we have seen uncritical repetition of casualty figures supplied by terrorist-controlled authorities, the suppression of evidence of Hamas war crimes, and the routine framing of Jewish self-defence as aggression. This is not journalism; it is activism masquerading as reporting. And activism of this kind has real-world victims.
Words shape reality. Narratives create permission structures. When Israel is cast as a global villain and Jews as collective agents of evil, violence against Jews becomes not only imaginable but, in the minds of extremists, justified. That is how pogroms begin. That is how synagogues become targets. That is how “Never Again” becomes “Again.”
The Israel Institute of New Zealand calls on political leaders, media organisations, and civil society to confront this truth honestly. Denounce antisemitism without qualifiers. Reject the rhetoric of elimination, no matter how fashionable it has become. Hold media institutions accountable for propagating falsehoods that endanger Jewish lives. And understand that silence, evasion, and moral relativism are not neutral acts — they are forms of complicity.
The line between rhetoric and violence has now been crossed, repeatedly and visibly. The question is no longer whether words matter. The question is whether our leaders have the courage to accept responsibility for the consequences of the words they have tolerated — and too often, encouraged.
