Conservative news group embraces hardcore antisemitism following Oct. 7 massacre

For many years, LifeSite News has provided thorough reporting on topics rarely covered by other news organizations. While the media group is Catholic, many evangelicals relied upon its reports on issues related to the sanctity and protection of life, which is its namesake. However, recent changes in the organization’s views should cause Christians to immediately strike it from their list of news sources.

Following the Oct. 7 massacre and commencement of the war, the group claims their eyes have been opened to the dark and disturbing “facts” about Israel. All of the supposed revelations echo those long cranked out of the propaganda arms of terrorist organizations and antisemitic conspiracists.

As explained by one of their co-founders, Steve Jalsevac, last week: “Prior to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, most of us knew little about the tiny, but militarily and politically powerful nation of Israel. We tended to marvel how it managed to keep winning its battles against seemingly overwhelming forces from neighbouring Muslim nations and ‘terrorists’ from within and outside its borders.  It was amazing how skillful the Israelis have been at fighting wars and developing the most advanced modern weaponry and intelligence gathering systems.”

“Many of us were almost totally unaware of the great suffering and violence that mostly innocent indigenous Muslims, and even some Christian and orthodox religious Jews, have endured since 1948 from the more extremist Zionists who came to Palestine,” he charged. “They stole and occupied Palestinian Muslim homes and lands and oppressed them in the ‘world’s largest open-air prison’ in Gaza and other similar regions in Israel.”

“We were exposed to frequent, high-profile reports on Islamic terrorist actions against civilians, which, of course, any humane person must condemn,” Jalsevac continued. “Still, we had no idea that Israeli Zionists also committed numerous terrorist acts, starting with the 1948 Nakba, that killed thousands of innocent Palestinians.”

Before we move to some of the recent outlandish reports against Israel by LifeSite, let’s break down those statements by their co-founder.

1) “Most of us knew little about the tiny, but militarily and politically powerful nation of Israel.”

Considering the fact that many within the Catholic church ascribe to “Replacement theology,” the belief that the church has replaced Israel in God’s plan and covenant, it is not surprising that LifeSite lacked a firm foundation regarding Israel and the Jewish people. This critical misrepresentation of God’s Word made them, like many others in the catholic church throughout the centuries, easy prey to antisemitism.

2) “The 1948 Nakba, that killed thousands of innocent Palestinians.”

The Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” refers to Israel’s re-establishment as a nation on May 14, 1948. The reference falsely accuses the Jewish people of “ethnically cleansing” the land of Palestinians—despite the fact that more Arabs live within Israel today than they did prior to 1948.

Author Hal Lindsey underscored that the “Nakba” is a lie told with the explicit goal of “generating hate.”

“Across the Middle East, children are taught to call the founding of Israel on May 14, 1948, ‘the Nakba,’ or catastrophe,” he explained. “Their teachers depict Jews as violent usurpers of the land.”

Lindsey stressed that this claim does not align with history.

“They don’t mention that Arab nations fooled masses of people into going to ‘Palestine’ just prior to 1948 by promising them land and prosperity,” he described. “Neither do they say that these people were declared ‘refugees’ even though they had not been in the land long enough to qualify for refugee status according to previous UN rules. Israel asked the Palestinians to stay and welcomed Jewish refugees. Muslim countries threw out the Jews and threw Palestinian refugees into massive camps, almost like prisons. They had to keep them there because to let them assimilate into their societies would be to lose the political leverage they represent.”

3) “The ‘world’s largest open-air prison’ in Gaza.”

Robert Gottselig, Executive Director of the Friends Of Israel Gospel Ministry, recently dispelled these inaccurate representations of Gaza.

“In 2005, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was leading the country, he gave the entire Gaza Strip to the Palestinians and removed some 8,800 Jewish people living there at the force of their own IDF soldiers,” he explained. “They said, ‘Here you go. We want to make peace. Here is the Gaza Strip. We won’t even have one Jew present.’ What was the response? Well, they elected Hamas to rule over them in 2006. Since then, over 40,000 rockets have reigned into Israel.”

“Instead of turning Gaza into something beautiful with the billions of dollars given to them by the International Community, they chose to build one of the largest terror networks in the world,” Gottselig highlighted. “They built this terror network with the express purpose of killing Jews.”

4) “Mostly innocent indigenous Muslims” and “Israeli Zionists committed numerous terrorist acts.”

This accusation is not only unfounded but also ignores the countless terrorist attacks Israel faces at the hands of Palestinians on a daily basis. Among the Palestinians, “Martyrdom” in the act of killing Jews is glorified, and the families of terrorists are richly compensated by the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Let’s not forget the phone conversation recorded during Hamas’ October 7th massacre in which a Palestinian man called his parents with glee from within Israel: “Dad, I’m calling you from the phone of a Jew! I just killed her and her husband. I killed ten with my own hands!”

Recent Anti-Israel Accusations

According to Jalsevac, the group began relying heavily on “Muslim news sources” in the Middle East, which he described as “objective and professional, contrary to what the Western public are propagandized to believe.”

Jalsevac’s anti-Israel accusations, self-described as “courageous,” are only the tip of the iceberg. In recent months, LifeSite has referred to the current conflict as “Israel’s genocidal war” and accused Israel of “atrocity propaganda,” “crimes against humanity,” deliberately “killing journalists” on a scale far surpassing Nazi Germany, placing Palestinians in “concentration camps,” and making the “sodomizing” and killing of prisoners “a popular practice.”

Israel has, according to LifeSite, held a “policy of elimination and expulsion of the non-Jewish population” and is waging a “ruthless war of extermination against the Palestinians.”

LifeSite also asserted that Donald Trump in 2015 became a “puppet” of a “wealthy zionist banker” who allegedly bought his support of Israel—a claim that echoes countless antisemitic conspiracies and centuries-long tropes against the Jews.

A Zionist Partnership With Evangelicals?

LifeSite, of course, is not above using select Jews who are willing to malign the promised land. A report published only last Saturday from LifeSite praised the comments of Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, who rejects the legitimacy and Jewishness of Israel and specifically decries those who call Jerusalem Israel’s “eternal capital.”

“The Jewish people don’t have a capital. We never had a capital.” he insisted. “Netanyahu has no right to claim that his state is mine. We have nothing to do with Israel… Israel is not my nation-state in the slightest. This is a unilateral claim of the Israelis, of the Zionists, and it’s an assault on my religion.”

In remarks Jalsevac called “enormously helpful,” the anti-Israel Rabbi insisted that the creation of Israel was brought about by a deceptive partnership between “extreme zionists” and a “Christian evangelical interpretation of the Bible.”

Modern Israel’s Fulfillment of Biblical Prophecy

One of the claims that this Rabbi most despises is that “prophecy is fulfilled with the state of Israel.”

“A number of years ago, Netanyahu spoke in a site of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and he mentioned a prophecy in the Book of Yeheshkel [Ezekiel] about how the prophets saw dried bones rising from the ground and growing flesh and becoming live again. And Netanyahu said that that prophecy is fulfilled with the state of Israel because the Jews were dried bones and now they grew flesh, and they are real people again,” LifeSite reported Shapiro as stating. “For over a century, this has been a Christian evangelical interpretation. The Zionists, when they talk about the Bible, they’re not talking about the Judaic version of Judaism and Jewishness. They’re talking really about the Christian evangelical version.”

A plain reading of Ezekiel 37 flatly contradicts Shapiro’s statements.

Ezekiel 37:11-14 reads, “Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken it, and performed it, saith the Lord.”

Furthermore, in the previous chapter, God describes re-gathering the Jewish people from among the nations of the earth in which they were scattered and bringing them back into the Land of Israel and its capital, Jerusalem. God states that the land will have been long desolate, only to become lush, militarily mighty, and again inhabited by the Jewish People.

In Ezekiel 36, God says, “For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by… And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are inhabited… Thus saith the Lord God; I will yet for this be enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will increase them with men like a flock. As the holy flock, as the flock of Jerusalem in her solemn feasts; so shall the waste cities be filled with flocks of men: and they shall know that I am the Lord” (Ez. 36:24, 34-35, 37-38)

While we are on the topic of Biblical prophecy, I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight that the so-called day of “catastrophe,” more accurately known as the day Israel was founded as a nation, was also precisely foretold in Scripture and carried out by God’s hand. Isaiah 66:8 states that Israel would be re-established in a “single day.” Miraculously, that is exactly what occurred when the British mandate on the land ended, Israel declared its independence, and US President Harry Truman minutes later acknowledged their sovereignty—all within the timespan of 24 hours.

In Bad Company

While LifeSite’s co-founder insists that their “courageous” reporting on Israel is against the curve of mainstream media reports in the West, the reality is that they are in plentiful company.

Inaccurate anti-Israel reporting is precisely what is found on the pages of most major newsgroups. It was only a few short weeks ago that CBS News ordered its journalists not to acknowledge Jerusalem as being within Israel, calling the ownership of the city “disputed.”

According to Amir Tsarfati, Founder and President of Behold Israel, “the BBC was found to have breached journalistic rules 1500 times in past months, pushing their agenda of anti-Israel propaganda.”

Additionally, many news organizations have shared grossly inflated death tolls by the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza and have been quick to publish the terrorist organization’s spin on events. For example, the New York Times reported that an Israeli airstrike struck a hospital, killing hundreds of civilians, in October of 2023. That story turned out to be less than accurate. Not only did very few die in the explosion, which actually occurred in the parking lot of the hospital, but it was also found to have been caused by a misfired Hamas rocket. The New York Times did very little to correct its blunder, simply publishing a follow-up article weeks later calling the evidence of their report “murky” and reluctantly admitting “a Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli airstrike, as the more likely cause”—though their original report remains published online.

Devaluing Life

Unfortunately, LifeSite News has fallen for one of Satan’s most beloved propaganda campaigns—turning people against the Jews. A news organization which once held a wonderful value of life now devalues the lives of the children of Israel and their nation. While I’m sure they will vehemently disagree with that statement, “devaluing life” is the only way to accurately describe those who plant their flag with individuals who would like nothing more than the eradication of Israel and its Jewish population.

As a group that claims to revere Scripture, LifeSite would do well to recognize who in the Bible was named “the apple of [God’s] eye.” That loving title was bestowed to Israel, along with a warning: “He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of His eye” (Zechariah 2:8).