RUTHFULLY YOURS

ABC News recently hired a new reporter to write about politics, including U.S. policy toward Israel–a Harvard student journalist who has accused Israel of “atrocities” and who has praised the pro-Hamas protesters on his campus.

Tommy Barone, a junior at Harvard, was the lead author this week on a coauthored news feature for ABC News.com about what Kamala Harris’s policy agenda will look like. It included a section on what her policy will be towards Israel and Gaza.

But can Barone claim to be a neutral, objective reporter when writing about Israel?

On May 8, Barone authored a lengthy op-ed in the Harvard Crimson—where he is an “Editorial Chair”—attacking Israel and giving the pro-Hamas protesters helpful advice on how to improve their image.

“A significant proportion of faculty and students—myself included— believe Israel is committing atrocities in Gaza,” Barone wrote. He denounced what he called “the indiscriminate violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian people.”

Barone also wrote: “You would be hard-pressed to find an injustice more unambiguous, more immediately persuasive, than the live-time, live-streamed mass death of over 13,000 children [in Gaza].”

Of course, there hasn’t been any “mass death of over 13,00o children,” live-streamed or otherwise. Incredibly, Barone made that outrageous accusation two days after the United Nations publicly admitted that Hamas’s claims about fatalities among children were wild exaggerations.

The UN said the correct number was 7,797. Even that number is inflated, because Hamas terrorists who are between the ages of 15 and 18 are counted as innocent “children.” But Tommy Barone prefers to believe Hamas.

Barone thinks that almost all the pro-Hamas protesters at Harvard are very fine people. “The overwhelming majority of the protesters are decent and well-intentioned,” he wrote. (How could he possibly know that?) What makes him “want to scream” is not their support for Hamas gang-rapists, but rather the fact that they’re not effective enough.

They speak in “abstractions and excuses,” he complained. That “has given critics fodder to smear it.” The protesters’ language “does not convince or mobilize a single person who wasn’t already convinced and mobilized.” He obviously wishes they were able to convince more people to support their pro-Hamas positions.

So Barone offered them some helpful advice. They should “just tell people simply and directly that something disgusting is happening in Gaza,” instead of using rhetoric about destroying Israel and murdering Jews. If they followed his advice, “they would enjoy this campus’s widespread support and begin to earn the nation’s.” The protesters “could chant about the sheer scale of the violence, print fliers with pictures of it, project videos of it onto buildings, [and] take interviews dismantling the flimsy, bad-faith arguments made by many of their opponents.”

Barone concluded: “As the semester comes to a close and Harvard’s pro-Palestine encampment dwindles in size, I would urge its protesters to find a politics that truly aids their cause.” Because he wants their cause to succeed. He really does.

For anyone who has forgotten, it was at Harvard that the pro-Hamas campus movement got started. It didn’t start in response to “atrocities” committed by Israel or Israel “inflicting indiscriminate violence,” as Barone claimed. Thirty-three student groups at Harvard issued their pro-Hamas declaration on the very day of the murderous October 7 attack.

That was three weeks before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza. It was before Israeli jets had even started bombing Hamas targets there.

The student groups’ statement claimed that “the Israeli regime [is] entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” They justified the mass-murder by Hamas as a response to (non-existent) “Israeli apartheid” and “Israeli violence.” They accused Israel of committing “massacres.” They claimed that “Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death,” whatever that means. The groups that signed the statement then held rallies on campus openly cheering and defending the Hamas pogrom.

President Joe Biden recently described public support for the Hamas attacks as antisemitic. President Biden was right. Tommy Barone and his pro-Hamas friends are wrong.

And ABC News is wrong to disguise Barone as an impartial reporter and give him a platform from which to write about Israel. He’s a deeply biased partisan who should not be writing for ABC News about issues that he can’t possibly look at objectively.