A useful rule of thumb to live by: Social media isn’t real life. 

But one of the challenges in the brave new world of media is that extremist influencers can often create the perception of influence simply by dominating so much of the online discourse. 

Hasan Piker, a far-left streamer who has been the subject of favorable media profiles despite a laundry list of antisemitic and terror-justifying rhetoric, is a case study in how traditional journalists normalize extremists — and how politicians conclude there’s a marketplace for radical views in the electoral marketplace, even when it’s typically a mirage. 

In part because Democrats have been desperate to find anti-establishment voices that claim to speak for young men, Piker is seen as a popular, edgy podcaster by liberal leaders in both media and politics. (Nevermind the fact that Piker gets only about 36,000 viewers on a typical stream — about 1/25th of the typical nighttime audience of MS NOW, as The Atlantic’s David Frum pointed out.) 

The New Yorker invited Piker to speak at its annual festival, treating the antisemitic streamer as just another one of the many thought leaders in attendance. Leading progressives, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), joined him at rallies and on his show.

And a handful of leading Democratic presidential contenders — most notably California Gov. Gavin Newsom — expressed interest in going on his show. 

This, despite the fact Piker has justified Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attacks, forcefully denied some of the terror group’s atrocities, has called Orthodox Jews “inbred” and claimed America deserved 9/11. 

Any one of those comments on their own would have typically disqualified anyone from playing a part in our political discourse. Yet in the wave of glowing profiles, Piker’s antisemitism and anti-Americanism didn’t even merit a mention. 

It wasn’t until March 19, when Third Way President Jon Cowan and Lily Cohen, a press advisor from the center-left think tank, took the initiative to co-write a column for The Wall Street Journal calling out Piker’s antisemitism without any caveats. The decision to call out the crazy — when few in the press or politics had the courage to do so — was a moment that proved that one principled voice in defense of normalcy can break the mirage of those who believe there’s a political marketplace for this garbage. 

The op-ed, headlined “Democrats Are Too Cozy with Hasan Piker,” generated outsized attention, in a way that previous efforts to spotlight Piker’s antisemitism hadn’t. Reporters who once gave Piker a free pass were now asking Democrats whether they agreed with his extremist positions. 

Suddenly, when presented with his indefensible comments, some Democrats started building up enough courage to speak out against him. First, it was Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), head of the moderate New Democratic Coalition, who called Piker an “unapologetic antisemite.” Then, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, told JI that Piker is “somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks” — and called on one of her primary opponents, Abdul El-Sayed, to cancel a scheduled rally with him. 

Even left-wing lawmakers and candidates — such as Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and a progressive Democratic state legislator from Michigan — canceled scheduled appearances with Piker.

By the end of the month, only three of the 14 prospective Democratic presidential candidates that Politico interviewed said they would appear on a livestream with Piker if invited. That marks a sea change from just weeks earlier, when he was being treated as the trendy fad in progressive politics. 

The dynamic is a reminder that the delusions of a social media echo chamber will persist unless they get confronted by political reality. Sometimes that reality is as simple as speaking up against craziness when everyone else is afraid to speak the truth. 

It would be heartening to conclude that this episode is proof that antisemitism can be confronted when good people speak up. 

But this past week also featured Politico publishing a virulently antisemitic cartoon that could have been drawn from the Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer — one that they pulled from their website and apologized for. This is the same publication, owned by Axel Springer, that gave Piker a credulous interview last year making no mention of his extremism. (And last week, it also blatantly misrepresented leading Democrats’ comments on AIPAC to manufacture an anti-Israel narrative.)

It all goes to show that the antisemitic rot fueled by social media is entering into the mainstream. It will take more brave and principled voices like Cowan and Cohen to stem the tide.

A federal judge’s ruling this week that voided the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter Voice of America, restoring more than 1,000 journalists and other employees by Monday, is raising some hopes that the embattled international broadcaster funded by the federal government may now be able to ramp up its Persian-language coverage to reach Iranians at a crucial moment amid war with the U.S. and Israel. 

While VOA had resumed some of its Persian news broadcasting in recent months, it has been hobbled by a yearlong near shutdown ordered by the Trump administration that had reduced the organization to a skeletal staff — further battered by the tumultuous tenure of Kari Lake, who until recently served as the de facto leader of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the network.

In a separate ruling earlier this month, the judge ordered that Lake’s appointment as acting chief had been unlawful and nullified her aggressive moves to gut VOA. President Donald Trump last week nominated Sarah Rogers, a senior State Department official, to take over USAGM — a position that requires Senate confirmation which Lake never received. The Department of Justice has not confirmed if it will seek to appeal the latest ruling.

One USAGM source expressed optimism that the judge’s decisions would result in “more resources,” but cautioned that “there are still leadership issues” in the Persian service — once one of VOA’s largest divisions — stifling its ability to report exhaustively on news developments and offer coverage without the appearance of bias.

The Persian division — whose content had seen a growing audience among Iranian news consumers before the shutdown, according to a VOA fact sheet — is now led by Ali Javanmardi, an Iranian Kurdish journalist who has drawn scrutiny for censoring the outlet’s reporting on Iranian opposition figures such as Reza Pahlavi, the exiled crown prince who gained renewed prominence amid mass protests that swept the country prior to the war. One journalist with the Persian service said this month he was fired because of disagreements with leadership over the network’s direction.

The editorial constraints and massive cuts to VOA’s stable of full-time reporters not only “decimated the Iran division” but also “politicized it at a time when it is more important than ever for the United States to be speaking directly to the Iranians,” the USAGM source told Jewish Insider before the recent rulings, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. “It’s a shame what has happened.”

Now, as the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign in Iran continues amid a near-total internet blackout imposed by the country’s regime, the need to reach information-starved Iranians has only grown more urgent, several experts familiar with the matter told JI.

But there are ongoing concerns that VOA as well as a federally funded but independent network, Radio Free Europe/Free Liberty, which operates a Persian service called Radio Farda, will continue to struggle due to government roadblocks that have obstructed their ability to produce meaningful stories and even to transmit broadcasts that Iranians have viewed as trusted sources during previous domestic conflicts.

“By adhering to the truth, U.S. international broadcasting can be a powerful tool in America’s arsenal, particularly in Iran where RFE/RL and VOA have strong brands and audiences,” Jamie Fly, who led RFE/RL from 2019-2020 and now serves as chief executive of Freedom House, a think tank promoting global democracy, told JI on Thursday.

Under current management, however, USAGM “seems to be doing everything possible to ensure that President Trump’s messages to the Iranian people are not heard, and in some cases, directly contradicted,” Fly added.

RFE/RL, which Lake tried but failed to shut down, has faced a litany of obstacles that have particularly diminished Radio Farda’s broadcasting presence in Iran. In addition to withholding funding that forced its Persian service to furlough half of its staff, Lake’s efforts to target the network included cutting access to a key U.S. transmitter in Kuwait that allowed it to disseminate its broadcasts in Iran and inhibiting the use of virtual private networks that help circumvent internet shutdowns, among other hostile moves.

According to an RFE/RL source, USAGM “is still asking that” the network “use its own grant” resources to broadcast via short and medium wave radio from the Kuwait transmitter — which is federally funded. USAGM “resumed transmissions of Radio Farda” on shortwave in early February and medium wave in early March, the source told JI. The network has additionally paid for satellite as well as short and medium wave transmissions using its “own grant funds already through private vendors.”

“As the internet remains unstable” in Iran, the source said, “our journalists have been able to conduct interviews with and receive updates from Iranians on the ground only periodically.” 

Despite such issues, Farda “continues to garner a significant audience online,” the source told JI. From Feb. 28 to March 17, for instance, “Farda published 738 posts on Instagram, recording 105.5 million impressions and 28.6 million video views.”

Even as the organization has managed to bypass some impediments to its operations, another RFE/RL source described intense frustration with USAGM, calling its oversight “dysfunctional” as the agency has sought to exert its control over a network that — unlike VOA — is not a government entity.

“They have no plan,” the source said on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. “There’s no strategy.” 

USAGM “could and should be more cooperative when Iran blocks” internet access, the source told JI this week. “We should all be surging into Iran now,” where RFE/RL has learned that university students in the country have been “sharing shortwave radios to hear” its broadcasts amid the war.

USAGM did not respond to a request for comment. On social media, Lake has otherwise touted VOA’s efforts to reach Iranians, despite criticism that she has hampered its resources and diluted its Persian coverage — which she wrote in one recent post that she had tried to “realign” with “U.S. foreign policy.”

Experts raised doubts about the possibility of an imminent news surge into Iran even if the judge’s recent ruling is expected to soon restore VOA to its pre-shutdown capacity. As USAGM maintained an adversarial posture toward VOA, RFE/FL and other federally funded nonprofit groups, it still remains to be seen if Rogers, the nominee to succeed Lake, will change direction. Lake, meanwhile, has pledged she will appeal the ruling invalidating her role and said that she will continue at USAGM as its deputy CEO.

Amid the changes, Ilan Berman, an Iran expert at the American Foreign Policy Council who serves on the board of RFE/FL, told JI in an interview that he was “cautiously optimistic there is going to be more coherence to administration” inside USAGM, after a year in which he questioned its “strategic mission.”

During Lake’s tenure, “there was no coherence to the informational enterprise” except for a “focus on disruption,” Berman noted. “The people who suffer are the people of Iran.”

Long before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks, parents — especially Jewish parents — wondered and at times struggled with how to speak to their children about antisemitism.

In the midst of the antisemitism that exploded in the wake of the attack on southern Israel and continued to rise through the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas, journalists Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi found themselves navigating that challenge — and found no help to guide them.

“The fact that our kids are talking about it, [it’s] something I’m dealing and grappling with in New York City in 2023 at the time,” Golodryga, a CNN news anchor, told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “I never thought that we’d be having to address [it] so directly. But there were no resources on this issue. I asked my kid’s school about it, [saying], ‘What are you doing to address antisemitism?’ And in a longly worded statement, it was clear that there were no resources. They weren’t really doing anything.” 

In Israel, Levi, an anchor on Israel’s Channel 12, was asked about antisemitism by her pre-teen son. “And I was sort of floored by it,” she told JI. “I didn’t even know how to begin answering because I wasn’t planning to answer that question, explaining and answering a lot of other questions that Oct. 7 brought to the table.”

As a result, Golodryga said, “Yonit and I decided to try to write the book we couldn’t find.” The result was their debut book, Don’t Feed the Lion, released on Tuesday.

After the Oct. 7 attacks, Golodryga and Levi spent much of their professional bandwidth reporting on the war. The weekly writing and brainstorming sessions for the book, Golodryga explained, were “cathartic” and provided an opportunity to “step aside and away from all of the breaking news and the heartache of the day.” For Levi, having that support system and the experience of writing the book amid so much turmoil at home was “like a ray of light inside this darkness of the last two years.”

Don’t Feed the Lion is a novel targeted to middle school students, but with lessons, scenarios and parables that anyone who has experienced or witnessed discrimination — in any of its forms — will recognize.

The book’s main plot point revolves around a pair of Jewish siblings in Chicago. The older of the two, Theo Kaplan, a soccer enthusiast and co-captain of his school’s team, is shaken when prominent soccer player Wes Mitchell goes on an antisemitic rant. Days later, the eighth grader’s teammates vandalize his gym locker with a swastika. Theo, who is weeks away from his bar mitzvah, faces inner turmoil as he grapples with the fallout of Mitchell’s comments and the responses to the incident by his friends, teammates and school administrators. (Spoiler alert: the school is more than happy to sweep the incident under the rug.)

Meanwhile, Theo’s younger sister, Annie, sneakily creates an account on a social media platform in an effort to get concert tickets, but ends up falling into a Reddit-esque black hole of antisemitic drivel, which she attempts to fight despite being far outnumbered by anonymous online trolls.

Theo finds himself an ally in Gabe, a new student who moved to Chicago after his mother’s death from COVID-19. Gabe, although an outside observer, becomes the readers’ eyes and ears into the Kaplan family when he is paired with Theo for a family heritage project that sees the two spotlight Theo’s grandparents, Ezra and Talia.

“It’s obviously a fictional book, but there are several real-life experiences that we’ve encountered, that I’ve encountered with some family members, going back several years ago, where antisemitism not only wasn’t really addressed, but when it was facing students and faculty members at schools, it wasn’t treated or given the prioritization that that other forms of hate were given,” Golodryga said.

But whereas many stories and fiction novels about Jewish families settle into tired tropes, Don’t Feed the Lion takes a more realistic approach to the American Jewish experience: Ezra and Talia are a mixed Ashkenazi-Mizrahi couple — a rarity in the world of Jewish literature. The family dynamic is challenging, with estrangement between Theo and Annie’s grandparents and their aunt’s family. And Theo faces the relatable social pressures that many young assimilated Jews encounter as they feel torn between spending Friday nights socializing with friends during a time traditionally set aside for Shabbat meals with family.

Beyond capturing the zeitgeist of the modern American Jewish family, Theo is a relatable protagonist — owing in part to Golodryga and Levi’s own children, who inspired elements of Theo’s personality, backstory and experiences. Golodryga recalled her son’s reaction to the response, in 2022, to antisemitic social media posts made by then-Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving. 

“It seemed like everyone was apologizing for him but him, and he was allowed to play,” she explained. Irving was ultimately suspended for eight games, more than a week after the initial social media post, after repeated opportunities in which he had refused to distance himself from the content of the post. NBA heavyweights, including LeBron James and Jaylen Brown, a vice president in the NBA’s players’ union, defended Irving at the time.

Golodryga said her son didn’t know how to approach the situation. “As a New Yorker, he even said, ‘So can I not go to games? Or can that mean that I shouldn’t be a fan, or I can’t watch him anymore? He doesn’t want me to.’ So that’s always sat in the back of my mind.” 

Where art perhaps most imitates life is in how administrators in the story respond to the swastika incident — not by addressing it head-on, but by hoping to sweep it under the rug, thereby avoiding the need for disciplinary action that could keep Theo’s soccer team from advancing to the state-level competition. 

At the heart of the book, Levi said, is “that the kids really get what’s wrong and what’s right” — even when the adults in the room do not. “At the end of the day, it’s like the grown ups [in the book] and in reality too, sort of obfuscate … and say, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t stand up because it’s not good for my workplace, or it’s too much bureaucracy,’ or all the other things that are said in this book, and the kids at the end of the day, they know, they get what is wrong and what is right.”

An Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital that reportedly killed 20 people, including four journalists, was a “tragic mishap,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday, not long after President Donald Trump criticized the attack. 

“Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser Hospital in Gaza. Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff and all civilians,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement. “The military authorities are conducting a thorough investigation. Our war is with Hamas terrorists. Our just goals are defeating Hamas and bringing our hostages home.”

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he is “not happy” about Israel’s strike on the Nasser Hospital, in the southern Gaza Strip.

“I’m not happy about it. I don’t want to see it,” Trump said, while noting that he did not know the details of the strike.

The president added that he is also committed to getting the remaining hostages out of Gaza, though he expressed doubt that a deal would come through.

“At the same time,” he said, “we have to end that whole nightmare. I’m the one that got the hostages out. I got them out, all of them. [Middle East envoy] Steve Witkoff has been amazing.”

Israel has said that 20 living hostages are still being held in Gaza, but Trump on Monday repeated a claim that the true number is “probably a little bit less than 20, because I think one or two are gone.” Israeli officials have not said that any of the 20 hostages believed to be alive have died recently. 

Hamas, Trump said, is unlikely to release the hostages. 

“I said a long time ago I’m going to get them out, but when we get down to that final 10 or 20, these people aren’t going to release them, because [Hamas is] dead after they release them,” Trump said. “It’s a nasty situation, very nasty. Horrible thing.” 

The Israeli Defense Forces announced that it would conduct an inquiry into the attack. “The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and does not target journalists as such. The IDF acts to mitigate harm to uninvolved individuals as much as possible while maintaining the safety of IDF troops,” IDF international spokesperson Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani said.

The rise of antisemitism has dominated breaking news headlines, films and books in recent years. But two leading journalists noticed a void — a lack of resources in how to address the subject matter with young readers. 

Concerned about what they observed, CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga and Yonit Levi, an anchor on Israel’s Channel 12, joined forces to write Don’t Feed the Lion, a new novel geared towards middle schoolers. 

The book tells the story of three children in Chicago who experience antisemitism firsthand at school when a soccer star makes an antisemitic remark and a swastika appears on a locker. Theo, his sister Annie and their new friend Gabe each struggle with how to speak up and confront hate. 

The book comes as antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment has increasingly impacted K-12 classrooms nationwide in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks on Israel and ensuing war in Gaza. 

“We approached this project wearing three hats: as journalists who seek clarity, as Jews who feel the weight of history, and as mothers who want our children to live in a world that is kinder and more just,” Golodryga and Levi, both first time authors, told Jewish Insider in a joint statement. 

“Empathy doesn’t happen in silence. We wrote this to help open dialogue between kids, parents, teachers, and communities, especially in times like these,” the veteran reporters said.

Don’t Feed the Lion, published by Arcadia Children’s Books, goes on sale Nov. 11. 

On Thursday, NBC News reported a claim from Iran’s Ministry of Health that “over 2,500 injured people were treated in public and university hospitals, with 1,600 discharged and about 500 still hospitalized.” Earlier this week, CBS News reported 224 Iranians were dead from Israeli airstrikes, also attributed to Iran’s Ministry of Health.

There is no free press in Iran, and journalists have been arrested and imprisoned simply for practicing journalism in the Islamic Republic. There is no real way to verify the Iranian Health Ministry’s numbers, and so many journalists report them, unscrupulously.

In a fast-paced, constantly evolving news environment, accuracy is paramount. The ability to try to authenticate a statistic by attributing it to an official government source, while knowing that the source is unreliable, can serve as the basis for an inaccurate narrative with wide-ranging effects.

Take, for example, the Al-Alhi Hospital incident in October 2023, when the most widely read Western media outlets reported on an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital, later confirmed to have been a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. In the aftermath of the hospital incident — which many outlets, including The New York Times, had to walk back — Jordanian King Abdullah II canceled an in-person summit with President Joe Biden in Amman, potentially altering the course of the conflict.

“Israel strikes Iranian state TV, warns people to evacuate Tehran after accusing Iran of targeting civilians,” was a CBS News headline on Monday evening. Hours prior, an Iranian ballistic missile salvo targeted dozens of locations across the country — with one missile landing in the heart of a residential area of Tel Aviv. 

Further missing in reports of fatalities in the region is the identity of those killed. Take, for example, an Israeli attack in December on the port of Hodeidah and Sana’a airport in Yemen, both utilized by the Houthis. “At least four people were killed and 21 others injured in the attack,” according to the New York Times report on the strike, filed by journalists in Israel and the United Arab Emirates who cited Yemeni state-run media and the country’s Ministry of Health. 

Why were those people at a Houthi port known for serving as a point of transfer for Iranian weapons? Were those who were killed Houthi officials? Were they engaged in activity that posed an active and immediate threat to Israelis? The reader will never know anything beyond that the numbers provided by the Houthi-run Health Ministry in Yemen “could not be independently verified.”

It’s a regular occurrence in Israel-related reporting, where reports on West Bank clashes fail to mention when those killed are members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or one of the many armed militant groups operating in the territory. 

More than 20 months after Hamas terrorists tore through southern Israel, raping, burning and killing people and destroying obstacles in their way, foreign reporters in the region continue to use casualty figures from the terror group’s Gaza Ministry of Health, noting only that the group doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Concerns over the reliance on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry were so severe that American legislators passed — on a bipartisan basis — an amendment to last year’s State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations bill barring the State Department from using the health ministry’s statistics. Read our report here.

An ABC News report from earlier this week on violence near humanitarian aid distribution sites in Gaza leads with the headline “More than 30 killed at controversial foundation’s aid distribution sites in Gaza: Health officials,” giving an air of legitimacy to the claim — even though a reader would have to move down to the story before learning that those health officials came from the “Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.” And nowhere in the story does ABC News note that the Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

The inclination to publish talking points and statistics from terror groups and regimes incentivizes a playbook for malign actors — from Iran to the Houthis and Hamas — to provide misleading casualty figures for the media to carry that lack the intricacies and nuances necessary in such reporting.

And in this new media reality, misinformation and malign actors — already benefiting from  sympathetic media organizations — thrive.