Media Determined to Heroize Palestinian Poet Who Joked About Burning Israeli Babies
The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Rafaat Alareer was not a good person.
In fact, during his life, Alareer revealed himself to be a thoroughly despicable individual who celebrated the gruesome murder of Israeli babies by Hamas terrorists, and engaged in Holocaust revisionism.
And yet, for some unfathomable reason, international media outlets have chosen to venerate Palestinian academic Alareer as a kind of messiah-like figure: a wise martyr who supposedly died for his people.
It didn’t matter that, hours after Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, raping and massacring civilians, Alareer described these atrocities as “legitimate and moral” during a BBC interview, likening them to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Nor did the media care that he joked about burning Israeli babies with baking powder.
Instead, the media were determined to make a hero out of a thoroughly repugnant individual, and no grotesque comment about Jews being slaughtered was going to change their narrative.
Alareer, who taught at Gaza’s Islamic University and was also a writer, was killed in an airstrike last December. This occurred after he inexplicably refused to evacuate from northern Gaza, despite repeated warnings from the IDF that the area was targeted due to Hamas infrastructure.
Back in 2021, HonestReporting exposed Alareer’s disturbing online history, which included describing Israel as “Nazi Germany on steroids” and claiming that Zionism and Nazism are “two cheeks of the same dirty a**e.”
He also stated that “Hitler is as peaceful as any Israeli leader,” and accused the Jewish State of perpetrating a “second Holocaust.”
Bear in mind, Alareer made this claim during a year when Gaza’s population grew by roughly 100,000 people — a curious assertion given that the definition of a Holocaust is the “destruction or slaughter of people on a mass scale.”
Now, a year after his death, the media have decided to re-eulogize this academic antisemite with glowing tributes that ignore his hateful legacy.
Not to be outdone by the gushing tributes across social media, veteran journalist Chris Hedges published what he presumably thought was a heartrending “letter to Refaat,” while a popular literary site lauded Alareer as the “Poet, Teacher, Husband [and] Father.”
The Guardian took the lead with a feature titled, “How many dead Palestinians are enough? The unbearable prescience of the late poet Rafaat Alareer.”
The Guardian’s piece goes so far as to present Alareer as a prophetic figure, while engaging in its own brand of shameless historical revisionism.
For example, it refers to the Palestinian “Great March of Return” as a “peaceful demonstration.” Only in the minds of The Guardian could violent riots — featuring Molotov cocktails, grenades, and chants about ripping off Jews’ heads — be described as peaceful.
Trust @guardian to write a gushing review of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer’s work.
Here’s a reminder of his ugly past.
And some “highlights” from The Guardian’s story. https://t.co/wwkvUZaIy8 pic.twitter.com/nKv6dsZPrp
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) December 11, 2024
The byline on The Guardian’s piece belongs to Sarah Aziza, a Palestinian writer who, five days after the October 7 massacre, wrote: “I confess my imagination was so limited I had not considered such a coup could come from this battered, besieged place.”
When she finally acknowledged that Hamas had killed Israelis, she refused to “overwrite the suffering of those killed and captured by Hamas,” in a confession that she didn’t even want to acknowledge the true that horror the victims endured.
It’s why, in the closing lines of Aziza’s piece, she claims that Alareer was “singled out” for backlash after joking about burning Israeli babies alive.
In this narrative, being criticized for sadistic comments about butchering babies becomes evidence of victimhood. Who knows? The Guardian probably imagines those babies deserved it.
This is the sorry state of the international media today: elevating individuals like Rafaat Alareer while willfully ignoring their vile rhetoric and actions.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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