PNW Consul General of Israel calls out ‘tone deaf’ media over ‘two sides’ coverage

The Consul General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest, Ambassador Marco Sermoneta, is not mincing words. He’s alarmed by the level of anti-Semitism since the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel. And the media is making it worse.

“The two ends of the horseshoe are the extreme left and extreme right,” Ambassador Sermoneta told The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH in an exclusive interview. “They are very much aligned when it comes to hating Jews and being violent against Jews. I think that this is a wake-up call to American society, starting from not even [college] campuses, but even K-12. And I think that it’s evidence that something needs to be done to respond to that. The rise in anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world … it’s not like it started on October 8. This is something that’s been ongoing for a while. The vilification of Israel is automatically translated into social pressure and harassment and intimidation of Jews.”

Sermoneta took particular issue with local media outlets’ coverage of the pro-Hamas protests. He said there are no “two sides” and the hate on display shouldn’t be sanitized.

“I think that most of the media that we are interacting with has been pretty tone-deaf to the magnitude of this massacre,” he said. “Has been tone-deaf to the fact that there are no two sides here. There’s only one side because it’s Hamas that we’re facing. And there were no two sides with ISIS and Hamas is the same as ISIS.”

More from Rantz: Seattle media ignores pro-Israel rally, sanitizes pro-Hamas blockade

Astonishing denialism

The Jason Rantz Show has previously criticized other Seattle media outlets for being particularly sloppy in coverage, leaning into anti-Semitism and revisionist history to placate far-left viewers.

Joel Moreno of KOMO was caught fabricating coverage of one local pro-Hamas march. Cornelius Hocker of KING 5, meanwhile, platformed an anti-Semitic business owner blaming Jews for the terrorist attacks because “Hamas wouldn’t exist if they were not being occupied, being subjugated to the things that they’re dealing with.” Real Change News extremist Guy Oron blamed Israel, too, posting on October 7, “Today is a natural consequence of continued oppression — people will always fight back.”

Sermoneta argued that due to the poor media coverage, October 7 denialism has taken hold.

“It astonishes me because, you know, I remember that Holocaust denial didn’t start the day after the last concentration camp was liberated,” Semoneta explained. “And here, we see a lot of suspicion, incredulity when it comes to what Israel is saying and proving and showing. The fact that there’s a necessity for us to screen a 40-something minute video compiling all the different kinds of brutality and barbarism and genocidal frenzy that the Hamas terrorists have documented in order to you know, show their parents back home, but also to terrorize other Israelis, just proves that for some reason, some people refuse to understand the magnitude they refuse to believe the data.”

Listen to The Jason Rantz Show on weekday afternoons from 3-7 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Check back frequently for more news and analysis.

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