In Search of Integrity

During this season of the year, the Jewish community looks inward, and does something called “Heshbon Nefesh”, an accounting into our souls. We do this both individually and collectively. We try to rectify any wrongs that we might have committed. We are asked to delve deep down to our moral wiring, and to apologize to our fellow human beings or to the Creator, himself, and to endeavor to mend our ways.

It is at times like these that we are forced to confront the fact that humanity is capable of soaring to the greatest heights of goodness or descending to the appalling depths of moral evil.

This week was marked by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a great young man taken from this earth. We simultaneously witnessed a young man who threw away his remarkable potential and eliminated a great and important soul from our universe.

I met Charlie at an AIPAC Policy Conference during lunch, and we rode the bus to the Capitol together.

Charlie loved Israel and the Jewish people, but, moreover, he loved the United States with a passion, and stood up for our basic freedoms. He was young, sincere, earnest, and every pore of his being radiated with the word “integrity.”

That is a word that is missing too often in our current political rhetoric. Young people are getting their news from social media, from Instagram, Facebook Tic Toc, and YouTube.

According to FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, one in three US college students in 2025, feel the use of violence is acceptable. That is an 80 per cent rise from 2020.

What might possibly rival that threat to our civilization is the fact that much of what is being seen and heard on the news has been manipulated by broadcasters with a very specific agenda.

As Avi Mayer, founder of the Jerusalem Journal, and former editor of the Jerusalem Post, has written, “Throughout this war numerous individuals in Gaza have not only failed to intervene when harm was imminent, they have actively participated in inciting, perpetrating, amplifying and celebrating that harm.”

He continues, “On the morning of October 7, 2023, as thousands of Hamas terrorists poured into Israeli communities, carrying out unspeakable atrocities, many broadcast their actions to the world via GoPro cameras and mobile devices. Their efforts were supplemented by those of a number of Gaza-based Palestinian photographers — including several employed by mainstream media outlets — who somehow found their way into southern Israel in the first waves of the attack and documented much of the carnage.”

Avi quotes from a paper by Honest Reporting, asking whether or not it was conceivable that these “journalists” just happened to cross the border to be in Israel proper, together with the terrorists, well before he Israeli army was alerted to the plan.

He describes how a professional photographer, Hassan Eslaiah,  who worked for Reuters and  The Associated Press, uploaded a video which was apparently taken from the back of a motorcycle, heading into Israel from Gaza. In one hand, is a hand grenade, although it is unclear whether it was his or someone else’s. But, he tweeted later on that day,  referring to the Hamas attack as “beautiful,” calling the perpetrators “warriors,” and mocked Israelis — whom he called “settlers” — for hiding in a dumpster.

CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy for Reporting in America, has done their own research and has verified that Hassan Eslaiah has written for the radical, Electronic Intifada, and has been employed by the Hamas-affiliated al Quds television network. CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal tweeted out a photo of the now-deceased Hamas leader kissing Hassan Eslaiah.

Avi continues, two other photojournalists, Ashraf Amra and Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa — whose photographs have been published by AP, Reuters, and other outlets — held an Instagram Live broadcast after returning to Gaza, displaying gruesome footage of the atrocities in southern Israel as they grinned and laughed. “We were there two hours ago, since the beginning,” Abu Mostafa says in the video, contradicting a Reuters spokesperson’s claim that the agency’s photographers were only active “two hours after Hamas fired rockets across southern Israel and more than 45 minutes after Israel said gunmen had crossed the border.” As Hamas celebrated the carnage,  they were almost giddy with delight. Amra chimed in with, “Whoever can go-go. It’s a one time event that will not happen again-Really.”

And these were far from the only ones.  The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 192 journalists have been killed throughout the conflict, as of September 4, 2025, yet Honest reporting sites the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center that of the 192 Palestinian journalists identified by the CPJ as 77 (roughly 40%) were either members or affiliates of an anti-Israel terrorist group.

The rape of both males and females, the mutilation of their body parts. Their murder.  The burning of babies in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. None of this should be forgotten.

And these atrocities were participated in, recorded and celebrated by pseudo journalists.

Not one of us should excuse or apologize for the card-carrying terrorists who masquerade themselves as professional journalists.

Free speech and integrity are central to the democratic way of life.

As Charlie Kirk once said, “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens. Because you start to think the other side is so evil, they lose their humanity.

Sarah N. Stern is Founder and President of EMET.

.