Tunisian President Kais Saied addressing members of his country’s armed forces. Photo: Reuters/Tunisian Presidency Handout

What’s the connection between a centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory, a deadly storm across the Mediterranean, and the world’s top two news agencies?

Unfortunately, it’s more about Judaism than journalism. Here’s why:

Tunisian President Kais Saied apparently found who to blame for Storm Daniel, which killed thousands of people in Libyan floods this month: Zionism.

In an hour-long diatribe in front of his cabinet this week, reminiscent of the worst antisemitic conspiracy theories against Jews, Saied actually said that naming the storm after a Hebrew prophet proved that, “The Zionist movement has penetrated to attack the mind and thinking; we’ve fallen into a cognitive coma.”

His absurd claims drew immediate criticism, and various media outlets reported them for what they really were: outrageous antisemitic remarks.

But not the Associated Press. The news agency’s headline saying the Tunisian president’s remarks were merely “denounced as antisemitic” created a false dichotomy between fact and interpretation:

If it’s antisemitic, why not just say so?

We fixed it for you, @AP.https://t.co/pyZ9ZnfaxB pic.twitter.com/eu59jn6NZe

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) September 20, 2023

While it’s understandable that a news agency would try to keep its distance from over-interpreting reality, in this case, the AP actually ended up questioning the very label of antisemitism. It’s doubly shocking, because they added the following paragraph:

Names of storms are chosen by meteorological authorities through an alphabetical list alternating female and male easy-to-remember names. Daniel is a very common name across the world.

It’s really as if they avoided the conclusion of calling a spade a spade. And it’s not the first time that the AP has let antisemites off the hook, like it recently did with none other than the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who made outrageous antisemitic remarks that were also widely condemned.

But what happens when there’s not only bad reporting, but a full-on, tear-inducing feature premised on an antisemitic axiom: if Israel didn’t exist, Palestinian refugees in Libya would not have been killed in floods there.

Well, looked what happened at Reuters News Agency. One wonders how the agency’s reporters and editors thought it was a worthy news story.

Surely, many storm victims would not have been there if it weren’t for a myriad of occurrences throughout their lives. Is Reuters trying to decipher and judge the butterfly effect of a chaotic reality just in order to point at the wanted culprit — Israel?

They did not blame the climate or an act of God. Only Israel.

Here is how the distorted linkage was done:

The Abu Amra family are descendents of Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee their homes in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation and ended up in Gaza as refugees. Some older relatives then quit Gaza during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, becoming refugees for a second time in Libya.

Again, readers are left to draw the ugly conclusion themselves: The Palestinians who fled to Libya may not have died if it wasn’t for Israel.

Unfortunately, tblaming the Jews for the world’s woes and natural disasters has been a very successful antisemitic strategy for millennia.

From the lethal Bubonic plague  in Medieval Europe, to the COVID-19  pandemic, the Beirut explosion, and even a snowfall in Washington, D.C, fingers have been dangerously pointed at Jews.

In the past, it resulted in massacres and pogroms. Today, to avoid such outcomes, media outlets have a duty to expose these distortions with knowledge and understanding.

Oddly enough, knowledge and understanding are the traits that according to the Bible, characterized the prophet Daniel (Daniel 1:17).

Indeed, they provide the only way to release his name from being misused in the antisemitic Lions’ Den.