The Free Press: Selling the Israel Lobby's Agenda Under The Banner Of Fearless Journalism.
Bari Weiss's "The Free Press" Sells Itself As An Adversarial Independent Outlet, But Functions As A Propaganda Arm For The Israeli Government.
One of the biggest outlets on Substack is “The Free Press”, with 1.25 million overall subscribers and 155,000 paid subscribers, and is valued at over $100 million.
Founded by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, the outlet purports to be a fearless adversarial alternative to the mainstream media.
The outlet’s about page claims that it is “built on the ideals that once were the bedrock of great journalism: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence.”
The outlet purports to “publish investigative stories and provocative commentary about the world as it actually is—with the quality once expected from the legacy press, but the fearlessness of the new”.
This all sounds good, but a look at the outlet’s actual content looks more like a free press release for Benjamin Netanyahu than any kind of adversarial, independent outlet.
That is because that is the outlet’s intention. Founded by Bari Weiss, the daughter of an Israel lobbyist and lifelong zionist, the outlet’s intention is to inject zionist propaganda into the new media discourse.
In this outlet, I will reveal the real mission of the Free Press and its nefarious role in the new media ecosystem.
AIPAC Nepo-Baby
Bari Weiss and the Free Press’s advocacy for Zionism and the Israeli government begins to make a lot more sense when one takes a closer look at her father, Lou Weiss.
A self-described “ardent Zionist”, Bari Weiss’s father, Lou Weiss, has worked with AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) to further Israeli interests in American politics.
Weiss’s father, Lou, is such an “ardent Zionist” that he only votes in America for whatever candidate he believes will be more pro-Israel.
“I voted for Bill Clinton once because I thought he would be good for Israel,” Lou told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.
He told the paper, “I think Trump has done some real good, he’s been absolutely terrific on Israel”.
“Personally, I’m a conservative, but I’ve chosen to support those candidates that are good on the issue of Israel. That is my litmus test,” Lou told the paper.
Because of this, Lou Weiss has worked closely with the Israel lobby to push for America to fund and arm Israel.
In another article for the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle, Lou Weiss wrote “For a couple of decades I have been coming with my wife and whichever daughter was available to participate”, referring to the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington D.C.
“I tend to go to the breakout sessions featuring Christian Zionists, or African- American Zionists, or Hispanic Zionists”, Lou wrote.
He also bragged about lobbying Congress to support Israel, writing, “The highlight of the weekend is the trek to Capitol Hill to lobby on behalf of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Over the years, you get to know your congressmen, which can be fun after you get over the lobbying butterflies.”
Lou went on to write, “We once met the side of a freshman congressman in the fenced-in storage locker in the attic of a congressional office building. After some pleasantries, we discussed the issues with the member or a key aid. We made an informed request to support some piece of proposed legislation in a way that might make a professional Gucci wearer blush.”
He went on to write, “Helping to promote a love of Israel by petitioning our members of Congress is exhilarating, and fun, and Zionistic and patriotic all at the same time.”
Lou Weiss has also worked with AIAPC in an attempt to primary Israel critics in the House of Representatives and replace them with Zionists.
The outlet Jewish Insider reported, “In a key House primary on AIPAC’s radar, Jewish and pro-Israel activists in Pittsburgh are privately supporting a potential Democratic challenger to Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA)”.
The outlet wrote that “AIPAC has publicly sparred with Lee on social media over her support for conditioning U.S. aid to Israel and her decision to boycott Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to Congress in July”.
It reported that AIPAC wanted to replace Lee with her primary challenger, Bhavini Patel, due to Lee’s opposition to funding Israeli slaughter in Gaza.
The outlet went on to write:
On Sunday, ( Bhavini) Patel met with Jewish community members in Pittsburgh to discuss the race at the home of Lou Weiss, a pro-Israel activist affiliated with AIPAC, according to sources familiar with the matter. Weiss declined to comment but said in a text message to JI (Jewish Insider) last month that he believes Lee has ‘certainly earned a challenge,’ citing what he described as her ‘off-the-charts hostility’ toward Israel.
At the 2018 AIPAC conference, Lou Weiss was even shouted out for his lobbying on behalf of Israel by AIPAC’s then-director, Howard Kohr.
A Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle article quoted Lou’s wife and Bari’s mother, Amy Weiss, who also served as a co-chair of the Pittsburgh AIPAC delegation-celebrating “a shoutout her husband, Pittsburgh community leader Lou Weiss, received from Kohr”.
Amy Weiss said, “Kohr featured Lou…as a Kenyon College friend who makes the journey to policy conference every year in spite of mobility limitations from his MS” saying “He mentioned him as the guy you see schlepping around Capitol Hill with his trekking poles as he visits our congress people and makes the case for the U.S.-Israel relationship.”
The outlet Mondoweiss reported that Lou Weiss “was active in lobbying local congressmen against the Iran deal” and “once described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as ‘the leading advocate for the Western world…. He definitely speaks for me’”.
Pictured Above: Bari Weiss’s AIPAC-connected father, Lou Weiss.
Like Father, Like Daughter
Zionist activism connected journalism
Weiss, just like her father, got into politics and journalism out of a desire to support Israel and smear and silence its critics.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald did an investigation into Weiss’s Past in 2017 and wrote that “her relatively short career as a writer and activist has been overwhelmingly devoted to one issue: a defense of the Israeli government and a corresponding smear campaign against its critics”.
Greenwald uncovered a talk Bari gave at the 2012 Conference of the American Zionist Movement, where she boasted about “how my Zionist activism is connected to my journalism” and “the connection I see between Zionism and storytelling”.
Weiss, in the talk, said she “went to college (at Columbia) really wanting to avoid politics completely”, but that “changed when I heard about this movie called Columbia Unbecoming”.
As Greenwald noted, the film “Colombia Unbecoming” was a propaganda piece attempting to shut down academics critical of Israel at Columbia.
Greenwald noted that one of the targets of the film, the Professor Joseph Massad called the film “the latest salvo in a campaign of intimidation of Jewish and non-Jewish professors who criticize Israel”.
At the time, the New York Civil Liberties Union said that the film and the campaign that went along with it were designed to stifle “scholarship and political expression”.
The Union noted that the campaign was promoted by “donors, politicians, newspaper editorial boards, and others” to be used as “a vehicle for intrusion into principles of academic freedom and upon political speech”.
“This David Project film ( Columbia Unbecoming) would not have provoked controversy had it not arisen out of the divisive political controversy involving Israel and Palestine,” the civil liberties union wrote.
As Greenwald went on to write:
Weiss’s activism against these professors was preceded by a one-year stint in Israel. After she crusaded against these Middle East studies professors at Columbia, penning columns denouncing them, she was quickly hired by the standard organs for neoconservative opinion: the New York Sun, Tablet, then the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. She gushed that the Wall Street Journal op-ed age was perfect for her politics — it ‘can often be an island of sanity for those of us who care about Zionism and Israel’ — and explained that she went to Tablet ‘because I wanted the chance to focus on Jewish issues.’
As Greenwald reported, Weiss continued her campaign to silence critics of Israel after getting into journalism.
As he reported, she took part in a coordinated zionist campaign to get the academic Abu El-Haj-whose father is Palestinian-denied tenure at Barnard College.
Greenwald noted that despite the fact that “No one in her department doubted she would get” tenure, and despite the fact that her “tenure application had passed the review of three separate academic committees”, “an online petition emerged — written by an Israeli settler — demanding that she be denied tenure, accusing her of defaming Israel based on ignorance and shoddy scholarship”.
Greenwald wrote that “One of the media leaders stoking the flames against this accomplished young American-Palestinian academic was Bari Weiss, living in Jerusalem at the time”, noting that Weiss wrote articles from Israel bolstering the Zionist campaign to deny Abu El-Haj tenure.
Pictured above: Bari Weiss taking part in pro-Zionist activism at Columbia University.
In the aforementioned 2012 speech, Weiss boasted about the “connection between advocacy journalism and Zionism”.
Over the course of her journalism career, Weiss continued to act as a de facto cut-out of the Israel lobby, generating smear campaigns against any member of the House or Senate or presidential candidate that opposed official Israeli policy.
When Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was first elected in Minnesota in 2018, Weiss dug up an old tweet of hers from 2012 where she said “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel” and used it to try to paint her as an anti-semite.
She has also attempted to smear Michigan representative Rashida Tlaib- the only Palestinian American representative in Congress- as an antisemite.
In a widely mocked video clip, Weiss smeared then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as an “Assad Toady (meaning sycophant) - because Gabbard at the time opposed the Israeli-supported regime change war in Syria.
Weiss could not even define the word Toady when Rogan pushed back on her, saying, “I that I used that word correctly,” and could not cite an example of Gabbard being an “Assad Toady”.
The Intellectual Zionist Web
Despite the fact that Weiss’s entire career had consisted of attempting to cancel anyone critical of Israel or sympathetic towards Palestinians, she eventually rebranded herself as a crusader against cancel culture and in support of free speech.
One of Weiss’s early forays into the cancel culture and identity politics debate was a 2018 article she wrote in the New York Times titled “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web”.
The article purported to profile a long list of academics, journalists, and pundits who Weiss claimed were “a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now.”
The overwhelming majority of people listed in the article were diehard zionists and many with close connections to Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Likud party.
Some of the most die-hard zionist figures listed by Weiss in the article were:
Ben Shapiro, who in 2010 tweeted, “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage #settlements rock". Shapiro is a die-hard zionist and is so close to Benjamin Netanyahu that he posted a video of himself eating dinner with him in 2022.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who said in 2014 that “Benjamin Netanyahu deserves a Nobel Peace Prize” for his bombing of Gaza that killed 1,462 civilians, including 551 children and 299 women.
Sam Harris who in 2014 wrote an article titled “Why don't I criticize Israel” where he admitted that Israel has “caused massive losses of innocent life” and killed “woman and children and other noncombatants” but went on to say he will never criticize Israel because there is a “moral difference between Israel and her enemies”.
Dave Rubin, who recently met with Benjamin Netanyahu to help him “push back against anti-Israel trends in the right-wing media”.
Maajid Nawaz, who the Times of Israel describes as a “staunch Israel ally”.
Jordan Peterson, who tweeted “Give 'em hell [Netanyahu]... Enough is enough” at the start of the Gaza genocide in 2023, and ate dinner with him on video along with Ben Shapiro.
Douglas Murray, who did IDF-guided propaganda of Gaza since the genocide began and was given an award by the Israeli government for “offering an eloquent, informed and compelling voice in defense of Israel”.
It was around this time that Weiss became a figurehead opposed to cancel culture and identity politics.
To be fair, much of Weiss’s grievances against the mainstream media’s embrace of identity politics nonsense were legitimate.
One particularly ridiculous example she has cited in a Vanity Fair profile on her was when her New York Times colleagues created a Slack channel to accuse her of “microaggression” based on an extremely innocuous tweet (something I find especially ironic given the New York Times has advocated for actual aggressions by pushing for every American war).
But think back to Weiss’s words about how “my Zionist activism connected to my journalism”.
Was Bari Weiss using people’s legitimate annoyances with identity politics to build an audience she could sell her Zionist propaganda to, and to support a list of Likud-friendly Zionists as the antidote to cancel culture?
I would argue that a look at her future work shows this is the case.
Weaponizing tragedy to further Zionism.
Weiss later weaponized a tragedy that occurred at her hometown Synagogue to create more smears of anti-zionists.
After a neo-nazi mass shooting took place at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, which Weiss attended when she was younger, she used the opportunity to get a book deal, publishing the book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” in 2019.
The book, which was supposed to be a look at the history of anti-Semitism in the context of the shooting, spent much of its time smearing critics of Israel.
In the book, Weiss put forth an anti-Semitic smear of anti-zionist Jews, implying that they are disloyal and motivated by social reasons over a genuine concern for human rights.
In the book, Weiss conflates anti-Semitism with anti-zionism, writing, “Anti-Zionism is not just anti-Semitism because of current reality. Anti-Zionism is also anti-Semitism because of history”.
Weiss then goes to smear anti-zionist Jews as disloyal to Jewish interests, writing “a very small but very vocal group of (anti-zionist) Jews seems as deeply opposed to Jewish interests as many of our community’s enemies”.
Weiss then goes even farther with this smear, claiming that anti-zionist Jews only oppose Zionism for social clout, writing, “What these (anti-zionist) Jews dread is something more intimate and more likely: moral condemnation, social ostracism, and reputational vilification meted out by peers, professors, friends, and political allies. To be a good progressive increasingly requires distorting Jewish history and disavowing the Jewish state. Telling the truth is not worth the risk to reputations, careers, or social standing”.
In reality many anti-zionist Jews have families that were killed in the Nazi Holocaust and are motivated from a place of preventing genocide from happening to anyone again, including Palestinians.
Explaining his motivation to speak out against Zionism, the Jewish anti zionist journalist Aaron Mate said, “I’m the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, my father Gabor barely survived life under Nazi occupation and so since a very young age I’ve been told about my own family’s history and the importance of never again. Never again means never again for everyone. And when all these horrific abuses are being done towards the Palestinian people in my name as a Jewish person, it’s so important for me to speak out”.
The Jewish Anti-Zionist academic Norman Finkelstein has said, “My father was in Auschwitz, my mother was in Majdanek concentration camp, every single member of my family on both sides was exterminated, both of my parents were in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and it’s exactly and precisely because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when Israel commits it’s crimes against the Palestinians”.
Weiss goes on in her book to offer more smears of anti-zionists.
She writes, “If you want to see the stakes, just look across the pond, where Jeremy Corbyn, an anti-Semite, has successfully transformed one of the country’s great parties into a hub of Jew hatred”.
The claim that the former British Labor Party candidate Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-semite was a hoax cooked up by the British Israel lobby, and Zionist elements inside the Labour Party because Corbyn was sympathetic to Palestinians.
In an even more bizarre portion of the book, Weiss claims that critics of Zionism are taking part in a “Soviet Conspiracy”, writing “Progressives have, knowingly or unknowingly, embraced the Soviet lie that Israel is a colonialist outpost that should be opposed, in the most elite spaces across the country, people declare, unthinkingly, that Israel is a racist state and that Zionism is racism, without realizing that they are participating in a Soviet conspiracy”.
She again conflated opposition to Zionism with anti-Semitism, writing “When anti-Zionism becomes a normative political position, active anti-Semitism becomes the norm”.
Enter The Free Press.
In 2020, Bari Weiss officially resigned as a columnist from the New York Times, making a public spectacle of it in an official resignation letter where she wrote, “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”.
Weiss wrote in her letter, “the lessons that ought to have followed the (2016) election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else”.
After leaving the Times, Weiss launched a Substack outlet at the time called “Common Sense”.
By 2022, “Common Sense” rebranded as “The Free Press”. Weiss raked in cash from “venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen and David Sacks” for this new media startup.
A sample of the type of reporting The Free Press did is showcased in a 2022 mashup “of the most thoughtful writers we know” on the biggest stories of 2022 presented at the end of the year.
Some things written in the Mashup go against the mainstream consensus, including a write-up from the current NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, where he criticized the official narrative on Covid-19, exposing the harsh effects of lockdowns and school closures, the censorship of dissident views of covid and the shutting down of the Canadian trucker protest.
The mashup, however, also includes a write-up from the pro-regime change Iranian activist Masih Alinejad, who calls for “the thugs of Tehran” to be “finally toppled”, a top goal of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Here lies the ultimate trick of Bari Weiss’s “The Free Press”. She has used the mass disillusionment with the mainstream media on issues such as cancel culture or Covid to draw in a large audience she and other writers at the outlet can now sell Zionist propaganda to.
The entire outlet is basically a trap, have readers coming in looking for an alternative view on identity politics, COVID, or censorship, and have them come out believing Israel’s genocide in Gaza needs to be funded and armed and that America needs to bomb Iran and all of Israel’s enemies in the region.
In this section, I will review some of the deeply insidious narratives pushed on the Free Press, along with the banal limited hangouts that diverge from mainstream narratives.
The Anti-Free Press.
While calling itself the “Free Press” and claiming to represent “fearless” journalism, the outlet repeats Israeli propaganda used to murder journalists and academics in Gaza who are actively documenting a genocide on the ground while bombs are raining down on them.
One of the most ridiculous claims of Israeli atrocity propaganda put out in the aftermath of October 7th, was the false claim that Hamas baked a baby in an oven.
The ridiculously cartoonish piece of atrocity propaganda was quickly debunked as a “false claim” by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Along with everyone else with any semblance of a functioning brain, many Palestinians mocked this ridiculous claim used to justify mass murdering them.
One was Reefat Alareer, who jokingly said “with or without baking powder”, in response to this hoax on October 29th of 2023, a clear attempt to mock Israeli propaganda used to justify the bombs that were raining down on Gaza.
Alareer, a Palestinian professor and poet in Gaza, was widely seen as one of the most effective peaceful advocates of the Palestinian struggle to the outside world, regularly communicating the plight of Palestinians through poetry and writing.
While Bari loves to smear all Palestinians as anti-semites, Alareer actively spoke out against anti-semitism.
As journalist Max Blumenthal wrote in his 2015 book, The 51 Day War: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, Alareer “emphasized to his class that not all Jews were Zionists, and challenged them not to implicate an entire group for the cruelty of a state that claimed to be acting in their name”, and hosted the Jewish anti-zionist journalist Dan Cohen in his class in 2014 to emphasize this point.
Despite this, Weiss took Alareer’s joke tweet out of context and went to slander him on Twitter, saying he was “joking about whether or not an Israeli baby, burned alive in an oven, was cooked ‘with or without baking powder’”.
Weiss was taking what was actually a Palestinian undergoing a genocide, mocking the dehumanizing propaganda used to justify said genocide, and attempting to make it look like Alareer supported a baby being baked in an oven.
Soon after Weiss’s slander, Alareer began receiving threats from Israelis saying things like “send me your address, we are going to wipe you out in Gaza,” and “When we get to Gaza, I personally will rape rawdog your old mother”.
Alareer posted these threats on Twitter and said:
If I get killed by Israeli bombs or my family is harmed, I blame Bari Weiss and her likes.
Many maniacal Israeli soldiers already bombing Gaza take these lies and smears seriously and they act upon them.
Shortly after this, Alareer was targeted and killed by an Israeli air strike.
Pictured Above: Tweet from Reefat Alareer before he was targeted and killed in an Israeli air strike.
This is not the only time the “Free Press” has pushed lies used by Israel to justify killing journalists in Gaza.
In a recent joke of an investigation published by the Free Press, written by Frannie Block and Jay Solomon titled “How Qatar bought America”, a crude attempt to distract from the Israel lobby’s influence in American politics, the reporters write “According to documents shared by the Israeli military last fall, at least six Al Jazeera journalists were active members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
To back this up, the reporters link to already debunked fake documents fabricated by the IDF, which falsely accuse six journalists working in Gaza of being members of Hamas.
The fake documents actually function as an IDF kill list used to justify killing six of the only journalists documenting the Israeli genocide in the Northern area of Gaza.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had already exposed multiple instances of Israel putting out fake documents to accuse journalists of being Hamas-aligned in order to justify their killings before this set of fake documents was released in October of 2024.
The CPJ documents that after Israel killed journalist Ismail Al Ghoul in Gaza, they put out fake documents accusing him of being a Hamas member. CPJ pointed out that the fake document shows “Al Ghoul, born in 1997, received a Hamas military ranking in 2007—when he would have been 10 years old”.
The CPJ also noted that Israel “released Al Ghoul after detaining him during the army’s March 18, 2024, raid on Al-Shifa hospital,” something they certainly would not have done had he actually been a Hamas member.
Furthermore, the CPJ noted that Israel accused journalists Hamza Al Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya of being “terrorists” after killing them, but the Washington Post, after reviewing the drone footage of their murder, found “no indications that either man was operating as anything other than a journalist that day”.
One of the six journalists listed on the fabricated IDF documents/kill list, Hossam Shabat, has already been targeted and killed by the IDF.
After his murder, his family revealed that :
On the morning of March 24, 2025, Hossam left his tent alongside fellow journalists to begin their day of reporting. After driving for about one kilometer, they pulled over. Hossam stepped out to speak with a group of men nearby. Moments later, an Israeli surveillance drone launched a targeted strike.
The drone killed Hossam, the men he was speaking with, and his friend . As a surveillance drone, its use confirms that Hossam was deliberately tracked and targeted. The strike was intense and direct—Hossam was killed instantly, and the force of the blast tore both of his legs off in opposite directions.
He was assassinated by AI-powered, U.S.-funded weaponry—targeted simply for being a journalist in Gaza
His murder also proved that the documents that alleged he was secretly a Hamas sniper were false.
Journalist Jeremy Scahill confirmed that Hamas-which publicizes the deaths of all its members as “martyrs” after being killed-conducted a review and found that Shabat was not only not a sniper but wasn’t a member of Hamas in any capacity
By presenting this fake document as authentic, the Free Press is risking the lives of the five other journalists targeted in it who are still alive.
The Free Press’s Neo-Con Foreign Policy Man.
The Free Press’s go-to writer for many foreign policy issues is the life-long neocon Eli Lake.
As Harper’s Magazine writer Ken Silverstein noted in 2013, Lake in the past continued to spread the Iraq WMD deception-using wacky, discredited sources-even after it was long debunked.
Silverstein wrote
Yet for years, (Eli) Lake continued to doggedly pursue his belief that Iraq had WMDs, writing pieces (again using questionable sources) claiming that Saddam had in fact possessed large quantities of these weapons, but that Russia had snuck them across the border into Syria on his behalf shortly before the U.S. invasion. In a 2006 piece for the New York Sun, he reported that David Gaubatz, a former special investigator for the Pentagon, said he’d found four sealed underground bunkers in Iraq ‘that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons.’ But, Lake reported, when Gaubatz asked American weapons inspectors to look into them, he was ‘rebuffed.’
Military authorities may have rebuffed Gaubatz because he showed signs of being unhinged. Two years after Lake’s story appeared, Gaubatz wrote a now-scrubbed post about Obama at jihadishere.blogspot.com that read, ‘We are now on the verge of allowing a self admitted ‘crack-head’ to have his finger on every nuclear weapon in America.’ In 2009, he published a book entitled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.
Eli Lake also played a role in the Israel lobby-led campaign to prevent the anti-war veteran diplomat Charles (Chas) Freeman from becoming the chair of the National Intelligence Council in 2009.
When Freeman withdrew his nomination for the role in 2009, he wrote that it was because of a slander campaign from the Israel lobby, writing:
The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East. The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.
Eli Lake played a huge role in this smear campaign.
At the time, National Review wrote that Eli Lake played a large role in “Chas Freeman withdrawing from consideration for the post of chairman of the National Intelligence Council” writing “The Washington Times — was very much on the case, with Eli Lake providing the most substantive reporting on Freeman, his history, and his connections to the Chinese and Saudi regimes.”
Freeman’s supposed “connections” to the “Chinese and Saudi regimes” were the two main smears leveled by the Israel lobby to prevent his nomination.
Had Freeman- a proponent of diplomacy and opponent of militarism- been allowed to go through as the chair of the National Intelligence Council, he could have prevented some of the blood soaked foreign policy disasters of the Obama era, such as the regime change in Libya, dirty war in Syria and Maidan coup in Ukraine.
Continuing on this neocon trend, Lake writes regular columns in the Free Press espousing conventional neo-conservative dogma, such as support for the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, calls to ramp up the already murderous sanctions on Venezuela, support for the Ukraine proxy war and smears of anti-war activists as “sympathetic to America’s enemies”.
Most importantly, and likely why Lake was hired in the first place at the Free Press, he is a strong supporter of backing Israel's genocide and Gaza, and often engages in genocide denial to cover up their war crimes, and is a strong proponent of war with Iran.
Lake has published two genocide denial columns, denying the basis for the International Criminal Court arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for “war crime of starvation as a method of warfare”.
In one Free Press article, Lake wrote, “We have heard many accusations of starvation over the course of this war, but there has been scant evidence.”
In another article, Lake quoted a bogus study from the Israeli Hebrew University (which Lake admits is “has not yet been peer-reviewed”) which claimed “the food supply (in Gaza) contains sufficient energy and protein for the population’s needs”.
Aside from the obvious embarrassment of writing an article which amounts to saying “Study from a University in the country committing a genocide says country isn’t committing a genocide”, the fact that Israel has a starvation blockade on Gaza is undeniable.
The Israeli government itself has never been shy about admitting to the use of hunger as a weapon of war.
When placing the first blockade on Gaza in 2006, the Israeli advisor Dov Weisglass admitted that “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”.
In 2012, the United Nations concluded that by 2020, if the blockade continues, “The already high number of poor, marginalized and food-insecure people (in Gaza) depending on assistance will not have changed, and in all likelihood will have increased.”
Early on in the Gaza genocide, former defense minister Yoav Gallant bragged about placing a complete food blockade on the “human animals” in Gaza saying, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed, We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”.
There is ample evidence that this policy caused Palestinians to starve. As TIME magazine wrote :
International agencies have repeatedly sounded the alarm that Gaza is starving. The U.N. has said that one in four people are starving and nine out of ten families in some areas spend a day and night without food. A December report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification predicted that by February, all 2 million people in Gaza would face crisis levels of acute food insecurity, with at least one in four households facing famine-like conditions.
The latest blockade, the harshest one yet, has caused “3,500 children below the age of five years to ‘face imminent death by starvation’ while some 70,000 children have been hospitalised in the enclave due to severe malnutrition”, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.
This time, even the IDF admitted the blockade was starving Palestinians with the New York Times reporting “Israeli military officers who monitor humanitarian conditions in Gaza have warned their commanders in recent days that unless the blockade is lifted quickly, many areas of the enclave will likely run out of enough food to meet minimum daily nutritional needs”.
In a particularly outrageous article, Lake lambasted Joe Biden for not being supportive of Israel enough. He wrote:
And the handcuffs often come with stern admonitions. So Biden arms the Jewish state and professes his support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but there is always a “but.” Israel has a right to self-defense, but it must do more to protect the Palestinian civilians Hamas uses as human shields. Israel has a right to self-defense, but it should not escalate its war against Hezbollah—even as the terror group fires rockets and missiles over Lebanon’s southern border. Israel has a right to self-defense, but it must participate in ceasefire talks that Hamas has boycotted. Israel has a right to self-defense, but there is no way it can enter its enemy’s last stronghold in Gaza without unacceptable casualties. Put another way, Israel has a right to fight its enemies to a tie.
Every single word of this paragraph is a lie. While claiming the Biden administration demanded Israel “ must do more to protect the Palestinian civilians,” in reality, Biden armed Israel while it bombed civilians’ housing, shot children in the head and chest, targeted hospitals, and fertility clinics and committed mass rape and sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees.
While Lake claimed that the Biden administration told Israel, “ it should not escalate its war against Hezbollah”, the Biden administration secretly greenlit an Israeli invasion of Lebanon despite promising the Lebanese government it would secure an Israeli ceasefire.
Lake claims the Biden administration told Israel it “must participate in ceasefire talks that Hamas has boycotted”. In reality, Hamas has always been supportive of a ceasefire deal, even offering to release all the hostages shortly after October 7th in exchange for Israel not invading Gaza -an offer Israel rejected.
Multiple Biden administration officials have now admitted that Netanyahu intentionally sabotaged a ceasefire agreement by refusing to withdraw forces from the Philadelphi Corridor, and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that Netanyahu had “repeatedly rejected” the ceasefire deal.
Lake claimed that the Biden administration told Israel, “there is no way it can enter its enemy’s last stronghold in Gaza”, referring to the Rafah invasion, despite the fact that Biden continued to back Israel after it crossed its “red line” and invaded Rafah.
As the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Herzog said, “God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted.”
Along with his genocidal denial columns and columns calling for the United States to be somehow even more supportive of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Lake has been an ardent pusher for war with Iran and an opponent of American diplomacy with the country.
“Trump’s Iran Nuclear Deal Looks a Lot Like Obama’s,” Lake wrote recently, in an attempt to undermine any prospects of another Iran deal, functioning as a de facto outpost of Netanyahu, given that he gave a speech to the American congress and made cartoonish propaganda statements such as “Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam” in an attempt to stop the first Iran deal in 2015.
Eli Lake wrote an article in 2024 stating, “American Troops Know: Iran Is Already at War with Us”, pushing the Netanyahu-driven idea that Iran is a threat to America, designed to provoke an American war with Iran.
Netanyahu has attempted to drive this idea home on multiple occasions, claiming in his 2015 speech to Congress that “This regime (Iran) will always be an enemy of America” and saying in his 2024 speech to Congress “For Iran, Israel is first, America is next” and “Iran is the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States of America”.
Pictured Above: Eli Lake.
Bari Weiss’s Hoax Heavy Podcast.
Along with Lake’s columns, Weiss hosts a podcast where she regularly hosts every media figure willing to sell the Israeli propaganda line.
She hosted the former Facebook executive, Sheryl Sandberg, to discuss her hoax film “Screams Before Silence” which used everything from con-artists pretending to be witnesses to supposed testimonies coerced through torture to launder the Israeli fabricated claim that Hamas committed “mass rape” on October 7th.
The film was a follow-up to a hoax article published in the New York Times titled “Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
The article falsley claimed that two young girls at the Kibbutz Be’eri were raped on October 7th, causing a spokesmen for the Kibbutz to come out and say “It’s not true, They Were Not Sexually Abused”.
The article also claimed that Gal Abdush who was killed on Ocotber 7th was raped, a claim that several of her family members, including some who spoke to her shortly before her death, came out and said was false.
Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary, which Weiss was interviewing her about-used even more deceptive tactics to launder the hoax.
The film’s main “witness,” Rami Davidian, was exposed by the Israeli Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker for telling “stories made up from beginning to end. Hair-raising stories that never, ever occurred.”
Drucker said these fabricated stories “were quoted in a reputable film,” referring to “Screams Before Silence”.
Even more disturbing, the film used forced confessions obtained from torture to back up the hoax.
The recent UN human rights council report on Israeli sexual abuse of Palestinians wrote :
The Commission reviewed several videos where detainees were interrogated by members of the ISF, while placed in an extremely vulnerable position, completely subjugated, when confessing to witnessing or committing rape and other serious crimes. The names and faces of the detainees were also exposed. The Commission considers the distribution of such videos, purely for propaganda purposes, to be a violation of due process and fair trial guarantees. In view of the apparent coercive circumstances of the confessions appearing in the videos, the Commission does not accept such confessions as proof of the crimes confessed.
referring to the forced confessions that were featured in the film.
The report wrote that the mass rape hoax was used “to mobilize support for the ISF military operations in the Gaza Strip and continue the war”.
The report also found that the false claims of mass rape were used to justify real rape of Palestinians writing “The Commission’s investigation shows that members of the ISF have been impacted by such messages (of mass rape)” causing a “sharp increase in sexual violence against Palestinian women and men fueled by similar desire to retaliate”.
More recently, Bari Weiss interviewed the British propagandist for the IDF, Douglas Murray, about his recent book “On Democracies and Death Cults.”
I previously caught Murray spreading an endless slew of lies in his debate with the anti-war, Libertarian comedian Dave Smith on the Joe Rogan experience.
Murray performed so poorly in the debate that even the debate’s moderator, Rogan, mocked Murray’s pompous claim of expertise on the following episode of his show.
The book that Bari was interviewing him about is no different. The writer and journalist Nathan J. Robinson put out a lengthy review of the book, where he caught Murray repeating multiple falsehoods.
Some of the most egregious examples cited by Robinson are:
Murray apparently begins the story on October 7th, without even mentioning the “the Nakba, the occupation, the blockade, or the settlements” that preceded it.
Murray denied that Israel is an apartheid state without “engaging with the extensive documentation of an oppressive two-tiered system that has been provided by human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem”.
Murray paraphrases a passage from David Remnick’s New Yorker article “Notes from the Underground” in the book without providing a citation.
He claimed that “one of [Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s bodyguards] worked as a teacher and was employed by UNRWA [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency].” A claim based on the allegation that “stems from the fact that a U.N. teacher’s passport was found near Sinwar after his death” which was disproved by the Associated Press which found “the passport did not belong to Sinwar's bodyguard but to another man who is still alive” and that the man left Gaza for Egypt months before Sinwars death.
Murray claimed that Sinwar's wife “was even clutching a $32,000 luxury Birkin handbag” based on a claim the IDF made that his wife had a Hermès bag while in hideout, later debunked by “Israeli businesswoman Nicole Reidman, who has been a brand ambassador for Hermès, saying the bag was ‘trash’ and clearly not a Birkin.”
Murray claimed that Mahmoud Khalil was “not actually a student” at Columbia University when in reality he “was a student; due to graduate in May of this year” who had “finished his coursework in December, but was still in his housing because the university lets students stay in their housing through graduation.”
Murray claimed that former Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “Children are tools to be used against Israel. We will sacrifice them for the political support of the world”, a quote attributed to Haniyeh by an anonymous Twitter account with no citation. Robinson could “find no evidence that Haniyeh said it”.
Murray claimed that Iran “spent its decades in power taking over not just Iran but the wider Middle East,” writing “In the 1980s it fought a bloody war against Saddam Hussin’s Iraq, which killed half a million people” without mentioning the fact that “the Iran-Iraq war was waged by Saddam Hussein, who illegally invaded Iran”.
Pictured Above: Bari Weiss speaking to Sheryl Sandberg about her propaganda hoax film “Screams Before Silence”
Furthering The Israel Lobby’s Agenda.
The Free Press’s foreign policy line consists of three main agendas: Securing American support for Israel and the genocide in Gaza, denying the Genocide in Gaza and increasing American hostilities, and preventing diplomacy with Iran.
These all happen to be the exact agendas of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel lobby pushing for his interests.
On October 27th of 2023, the outlet published an article by Jay Mens and Niall Ferguson titled “Israel—and America—Have No Choice but to Act”.
The article wrote that “a ground operation in Gaza is necessary” despite acknowledging that “it will have an enormous human cost and an uncertain duration.”
The article calls for “a regime change in Gaza, the possible destruction of Hezbollah, and retaliation against attacks from Syria, Iraq, and Yemen,” with “complete American support”.
The article ends with a compilation of Israel lobby-approved neo-con tropes, writing, “Israel and America have to act. And they have to act together. The alternative is victory not only for Hamas, not only for Iran, but also for the new Axis the Western world confronts.”
The entire purpose of the article was basically a propaganda piece intended to shore up American support for backing Israel's genocide in Gaza and fighting Israel’s enemies in the region.
The outlet also often engages in atrocity denial, writing an article earlier this month by Michael Ames titled “The Gaza famine myth”.
As stated earlier, even the IDF has admitted they are causing famine in Gaza, with the New York Times writing, “In Private, Some Israeli Officers Admit That Gaza Is on the Brink of Starvation”.
UNICEF has confirmed over 9000 cases of children in Gaza being “admitted or treated for acute malnutrition” since March.
The Free Press, just like Benjamin Netanyahu, is adamant about provoking an American war with Iran and preventing another Iran deal.
When Trump was first elected president, the outlet published an article by Jay Solomon where he implied Trump should “cripple the Axis of Resistance and end Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb.”
“Netanyahu and his advisers have signaled their willingness to take advantage of Iran’s instability to further degrade Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. And they're seeking Trump’s help”, Solomon wrote, signaling support for an American/Israeli military operation in Iran, which Trump administration officials determined would “spark a wider conflict with Iran and the United States” and need “substantial American assistance”.
Not even hiding the fact that the outlet is a de facto cutout of the Israel lobby, the Free Press published an article by the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, where he writes, “Years of U.S. appeasement (of Iran) have failed. It’s time for a dramatic change of course”.
In the article, Oren called for “crushing sanctions and a credible military threat” on Iran.
As former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted, the point of “crushing sanctions” on Iran is to keep regular Iranians suffering in hopes it will lead to regime change. Pompeo admitted that the American sanctions on Iran make it “much worse for the Iranian people” in hopes that they will “rise up and change the behavior of the regime”.
Human Rights Watch found that the sanctions impacted “food security and the availability and distribution of medicines, pharmaceutical equipment, and supplies”.
As I previously wrote about, the Free Press published an article by Mike Pompeo where he argued against a deal with Iran and pushed for war.
Credit Where Credit Is Due.
In 2012, Bari Weiss set out to “connect her Zionist activism to her journalism,” and I will give her credit, she did a good job of doing that.
She was able to successfully jump on the growing dissatisfaction with the mainstream media and use it to create an outlet that purported to be a fearless, adversarial one by differing from the mainstream media on some limited issues.
This was a success for her; through this, she created an outlet with over a million subscribers, giving her a large audience to push her Israel lobbyist father’s agenda.
Along with articles about Cancel Culture, Covid, or Joe Biden’s obvious dementia, the Free Press publishes genocidal denial covering up Israel’s atrocities, calls for American arming of Israel, and a push for an American war with Iran for Israel.
As sick as it is, Weiss did actually do a good job of pushing the Israel lobby’s craven and genocidal agenda under the guise of fearless journalism and free thinking.
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This is a fact that anyone paying attention hasn't already worked out. Great job breaking it down. Upgraded to paid today. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the article and the run down of the Free Press’s Pro Israel stance.