By Benay Blend
Anyone familiar with Israel’s history of covering its deeds in this way should have known right away that this was a falsehood.
Now editor-in-chief at CBS, Weiss had accused the Palestinian scholar of joking about Israeli babies who were burned in an oven by Hamas.
“This Zionist attacked me knowing pretty well that the ovened baby is a fabricated story,” Alareer responded, “but still took it as a chance to demonize Palestinian natives.”
On December 6, 2023, an Israeli airstrike surgically hit the apartment where Alareer and his family were sheltering, thus illustrating Ramzy Baroud’s claim that “Words Kill,” whether through Zionist-driven language that justifies the bombing of hospitals serving the wounded in Gaza or social media posts that continue to repeat the lies about Hamas’s actions on October 7.
Zionist justifications for mass murder have continued since that date. For example, the first time that it bombed a hospital in Gaza on October 17, 2023, Israeli media claimed that it was a Palestinian rocket that murdered nearly 500 people seeking refuge in the building and wounded many more.
Anyone familiar with the entity’s history of covering its deeds in this way should have known right away that this was a falsehood, plus investigations proved that the occupation was to blame. Still, the media continued to repeat the lie, along with many more in the next few years, causing people who should have known better to waver in their support for Gaza.
In a similar vein, Baroud rebukes those who “water down” their language in order to gain credibility and so not “(risk) the loss of their privileges, careers or standing in society.”
A case in point, it took Senator Bernie Sanders two years to admit that a genocide was taking place in Gaza. “The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” reads an op-ed posted on Sanders’ website.
Nevertheless, as Ahmad Ibsais notes, Sanders’ declaration not only came too late, it arrived within a “highly problematic framework.”
Like many others, Sanders begins with the obligatory denunciation of Hamas. By labeling the group a “terrorist organization,” Sanders negates the legal right of occupied people to resist their occupation, and even more egregiously, blames Israel’s genocide on the victims.
Despite the Zionists’ own admission that, given the confusion of that day and the military’s desire to kill their own people rather than have them taken captive, Sanders repeats the falsehood that Hamas “killed 1,200 innocent people.”
Thus, he repeats falsehoods used to justify the entity’s “right to defend itself,” in other words, commit genocide, the very crime that Sanders seeks to oppose.
Providing Cover for State Repression
Not only is this a form of victim-blaming, but it also gives cause to repression of Palestinian organizing and free speech.
For example, Zionist organizations in Canada have been busy calling out groups that they charge are linked to “the terrorist group” Hamas.
On August 20, 2025, for instance, the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver reported that the leader of OneBC and MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena, Dallas Brodie, filed a private prosecution against Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator for Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
These charges are a consequence of labelling support for the resistance as antisemitism, along with Kate’s receiving a human rights award from the Iranian government, which, somehow, in the minds of the Federation, amounts to “hate and antisemitism,” a leap of logic that has no bearing in facts. However, it is encouraged that each time a public official and Western media refer to Hamas as a “terrorist group,” as Sanders and others did numerous times in public discourse.
By “watering down the language,” Baroud explains, “one supposedly gains greater credibility, thus space to be heard or published.”
Mamdani Falls in Line
On the other hand, Harold Meyerson proposes just the opposite: “The key to radical reform,” he writes, “New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani clearly understands, is to be pragmatic as all hell.”
Mamdani ran on a platform focused on making New York City affordable to New Yorkers who are struggling with high inflation prices. To deliver on that promise, he apparently had to compromise on issues that had been important to his pro-Palestinian, anti-imperialist, anti-police violence sponsors.
“Part of getting that means he must avoid making political enemies when doing so would imperil his agenda,” Meyerson explains.
This meant reappointing Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, despite what 121 groups, including the pro-Palestinian advocacy group, Within Our Lifetime, the Black Alliance for Peace and Jews Against White Supremacy (JAWS), said in a statement which called out the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) “legacy of racialized policing, surveillance, and repression, and a retreat from the values of justice and liberation that Mamdani’s campaign claimed to champion.”
“Mamdani’s reappointment of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch was a sign that he’d try to avoid inflaming the easily flammable police,” Meyerson claimed. “Creating an uncomfortable civic peace on that one front gives him the space to focus on childcare and housing.”
While Meyerson might believe that “the price for delivering on his core issues is compromise on other issues,” those who bore the brunt of police violence understand that fascism has never been defeated by concessions.
Moreover, as Within Our Lifetime makes clear, Tisch’s tenure has not only overseen “revived Broken Windows–style policing” that has long terrorized communities of color, her connections also place her “at the intersection of the billionaire class, the NYPD’s global footprint, and zionism, revealing how local repression and settler-colonial occupation are structurally linked.”
Venezuela: Words Kill
Mamdani’s back-stepping on global imperialism does not stop at Gaza. In a statement by the Bronx Anti-War Coalition, republished on Black Agenda Report, the group called out the mayor-elect for his recent claim that Venezuelan and Cuban heads of state “Nicolas Maduro and Miguel Diaz-Canel are dictators… suppressing free and fair press,” a charge, the coalition explains, is “imperialist disinformation straight from the CIA’s playbook.”
Echoing Baroud’s assertion that “Words Kill,” Mamdani’s repetition of erroneous claims is a lie that is used to justify Trump’s threatened military invasion and Marco Rubio’s calls for US-led regime change, thus paving the way to war.
The statement ends with the following appeal: “Electoralism will never dismantle empire—it is empire’s pressure valve.”
What is the answer to imperialism abroad and repression at home? According to the coalition, the route to solidarity is through direct action: shut down ports shipping arms to Israel, occupy offices enabling sanctions, and build dual power in local communities rooted in revolution, not ballots.”
In ‘The Struggle is One: Palestinians in Venezuela Oppose US Aggression’, Louis Brehony recalls Venezuela’s long history of support for Palestinian liberation. This show of solidarity continues today in the Global South, partly because those who are experiencing US imperialism understand that unity in the face of continued oppression is the only path towards communal liberation.
Fighting ‘Terrorism’ Charges
On December 5, 2025, the Black Alliance for Peace published a statement in support of an ongoing collective hunger strike in British prisons by members of Prisoners for Palestine. All are being held without bail under the “Terrorism” act for their direct actions against the Zionist genocide in Palestine. Among the 33 prisoners, six are on hunger strike, and more are expected to join.
In honor of the late Iman Jamil Al-Amin, Black Alliance for Peace pledges to uphold the “centrality of solidarity with our political prisoners, deepening our commitment to their support and freedom, by any means necessary.”
From Turtle Island to Venezuela, to Britain, and elsewhere around the world, solidarity through collective action remains one of the most effective remedies for dishonest reporting as well as public figures who repeat the lies. Actions that can bring about a world where words no longer kill.
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
