Genocide-Complicit Western Media Lend Credence to Outrageous Israeli Justifications
(Washington, D.C., 8/11/2025) – The US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), America’s umbrella group of Muslim associations, along with American Muslims, categorically condemns the Israeli government-ordered killing of seven Palestinian journalists in Gaza late Sunday night, including internationally known Aljazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, 28, and four of his colleagues, fellow correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, 33, and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, 25, Mohammed Noufal, 29, and Moamen Aliwa, 23.
The Council also denounces the many Western media outlets that have prominently published appalling Israeli justifications for their admitted premeditated targeted killing of al-Sharif, a father of two little children (Sham, 5, and Salah, 2) in their headlines and story leads about the Israeli army’s targeted killings of the seven journalists.
The Israeli government shamelessly admitted ordering the assassination of al-Sharif, the most popular and prominent voice reporting daily from Gaza just minutes after al-Sharif decried the international community’s mute complicity and refusal to halt the savagery of the Israeli genocide atrocities in Gaza.
“If this madness does not end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased — and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop,” he wrote.
Notably, al-Sharif and his crew were among the few journalists who remained in the north of Gaza since the Israelis launched their war of ethnic cleansing 22 months ago. He became one of the most crucial and heroic press voices in the world, conveying the horrific Holocaust of our time in real time to humanity.
Tellingly, the Israeli government specifically ordered al-Sharif’s murder after announcing its intent to forcibly occupy Gaza City and clear out about 1 million Palestinians who remain there.
Having barred a docile global media from Gaza for their entire atrocity-filled war, they did not want al-Sharif – a singular voice and witness to truth – reporting what is sure to be the most horrific and barbarous phase of the wholesale Israeli Palestinian slaughter.
“The order to assassinate Anas al-Sharif, one of Gaza’s bravest journalists, and his colleagues, is a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza,” said an Aljazeera network statement.
Media observers have implicated the U.S. in the rampant, targeted Israeli killings of this shockingly unprecedented number of journalists, emphasizing that “immunity for perpetrators and the lack of accountability embolden Israel’s actions and encourage further oppression against witnesses to the truth,” the network said.
Hani Mahmoud, a colleague of the slain reporters, who was nearby just before their midnight Sunday murder by an Israeli army drone airstrike, said the Israelis assassinated al-Sharif and his crewmembers “because of their relentless reporting on the starvation and the famine and the malnutrition” of suffering Palestinians in Gaza, “because they’re bringing the truth of this crime to everyone” in the world.
After al-Sharif’s murder, the Israel army claimed it deliberately killed him and his colleagues in their press tent near Al-Shifa hospital because he was an armed commander for Hamas only posing as a journalist, “advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and troops,” claiming it had documents providing “unequivocal proof.”
They have “zero evidence,” said European Council on Foreign Relations analyst Muhammad Shehada. “His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening.”
The assassinations raise the catastrophic number of deliberate Israeli killings of Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023 to a staggering 269 press murders, dwarfing the number of journalists killed in every major war since the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s, including the two World Wars, and the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Ukraine wars combined.
USCMO Secretary General Oussama Jammal said today in a statement:
“This goes beyond war crimes. The Israeli slaughter of journalists now reads like a phone book. These are reporters who have had to write their last will and testament because they know they are going to be killed.
Anas’s read: ‘I entrust you with Palestine…I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had time to dream in safety and peace.’
Anas was a husband and father, who was also starving. Days ago, he collapsed during a live broadcast from hunger.
Look at his final message, pleading for his family:
‘Care for my daughter, the light of my eyes… my son, whom I wished to see grow strong.’ Bayan Khalid, his wife, he called as ‘steadfast as an olive tree.’ She now faces the Israeli-U.S.- made Gaza famine and caring for her children alone.
“The U.S. and Europe must cut off all arms now to this Israeli ethno-supremacist genocide machine.
“President Trump must halt the Israeli ethnic cleansing, genocide, and occupation before it goes further, force the Israelis out of Gaza, and ensure the full, free flow of surged food, water, power, sanitation repair, and medical aid into Gaza now – without Israeli influence or control.
“The U.S. must end the Israeli blockade completely and immediately and give Palestinians their sovereign rights as a people, in accordance with UN resolutions and international law.
“And the world must bring all the perpetrators and aiders and abettors of this Israeli genocide of the Palestinians to justice by way of an international tribunal in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, as with the Nuremburg trials after World War II.”
Our prayers of condolences go out to the family and loved ones of these slain heroes of our time.
May God accept them in the Hereafter among the noble bearers of truthful witness and unite them with their countless family members and loved ones who have been martyred before them.
God bless them, have mercy on them, accept them and their sacrifice, and admit them into His High Garden of Paradise.
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