On July 24, 2025, Margery Eagan and Jim Braude hosted Omer Bartov on their Boston Public Radio broadcast as he maliciously maligned and lied about Israel for about twenty minutes. Rather than even expressing some skepticism, they fawned over him and reinforced his demonization of Israel. The following was sent to WGBH and NPR.
To: Boston Public Radio (WGBH) and NPR
From: Alan Stein
Subject: July 24 WGBH program hosted by Margery Eagan and Jim Braude
I am writing regarding the portion involving Omer Bartov of the July 24 WGBH program hosted by Margery Eagan and Jim Braude. I found this program to be perhaps the most egregious example of the anti-Israel bias irrationally exhibited by Ms. Eagan and Mr. Braude in their coverage of the war Hamas started with its barbaric October 7 slaughter and has made sure continues.
Bartov - an ironic name for someone as hateful as he is - may be a Holocaust "scholar" and may be able to get biased, hateful, error filled op-eds containing patently false accusations against Israel published in newspapers like The New York Times, but his accusations should be met with skepticism rather than fawning agreement.
His accusation of Israel perpetrating genocide in Gaza is an inversion of the truth, an accusation which is particularly perverted given that Israel has been defending itself against a terrorist group whose charter actually calls for genocide and whose October 7 attack was avowedly an attempt to further its genocidal goal.
Why did Eagan and Braude not question him with facts which irrefutably prove Bartov's accusation of Israel committing genocide is not only false but totally perverse.
These facts include:
• No army in history has taken the steps Israel has taken to minimize harm to the civilians in the population of its enemy. Indeed, military leaders from other democracies have studied what Israel has done and concluded they would never go that far because the steps Israel has taken has endangered its own soldiers and civilians to an extent they could not accept for their own soldiers and civilians.
• Israel has actually managed to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza to a small fraction of the norm for urban combat. The United Nations Security Council, in a session on May 22, 2022 recognized that in urban conflicts the norm was that roughly 90% of the casualties were civilian, putting the ratio of civilian to military casualties in the urban areas at approximately 9 to 1; in Gaza, the ratio has been approximately 1 to 1, or just about a ninth of the norm recognized by the UN Security Council. Even this is based on the assumption that the total casualty figures given by Hamas, which traditionally grossly inflates such figures, are relatively accurate. Israel's record is clearly astoundingly good, without even taking into account the way Hamas deliberately uses civilians as human shields.
• Israel has facilitated the transfer of food and other humanitarian supplies to Gaza; one would be hard pressed to find an example of any other country that has helped provide its enemy with humanitarian assistance during a war. Indeed, I believe this is unprecedented. That Israel has continued to do this even while much - probably the vast majority - of the aid has been stolen by Hamas, used to feed Hamas' terrorists with the food not needed by Hamas then sold at exorbitant prices to the very civilians it was meant to be given to for free.
• To try to keep Hamas from stealing the aid, Israel and the United States have set up a system for distributing aid separate from the demonstrably anti-Israel United Nations and other groups. Hamas rightly considers this a threat to its control over the people in Gaza and has orchestrated attacks on civilians approaching the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for that aid, along with workers for GHF, killing many and then spreading stories claiming those Hamas murdered were killed by Israel. The evidence has repeatedly proven Hamas was lying, but the media continues to spread Hamas' lies and generally refrains from ever correcting the record when they have been proven to be false.
• UN agencies and other so-called "humanitarian" (but really anti-Israel) groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been warning about impending famine and massive deaths from starvation since shortly after Hamas started the war. They were wrong each time, yet the media keeps repeating those warnings. Never is it mentioned that the amount of food transferred to Gaza has been significantly more than that needed - indeed far more than has been provided to countries where there actually has been famine and deaths from starvation. Of course, since those countries are not the world's only Jewish state, those terrible situations are generally ignored.
Besides the failure to even hint at those facts and, minimally, question Bartov about how he could accuse Israel of committing genocide when those facts so clearly disprove such an accusation, the plight of the people in Gaza who are truly suffering was ignored by Eagan and Braude and has generally been almost totally ignored since October 7. I refer to the hostages kidnapped by Hamas and brutalized and deliberately starved for more than 21 months, with many being murdered by Hamas during that period.
There is no mention by Eagan and Braude that Hamas has refused to give information about those it - along with allied terror groups, employees of UN groups like UNRWA and others generally referred to as innocent civilians - have been holding hostage. There is no mention that they haven't even let the International Red Cross visit any of those they've been holding hostage.
Why have Egan and Braude not balanced the anti-Israel fanatics they have hosted - and fawned over and praised each time - with knowledgeable people who would actually tell the truth?
Why have they not hosted any of the hostages that have been freed (each one in exchange for a large number of Palestinian terrorists, most of whom returned to terrorism after being released), who could testify to the barbaric treatment to which they and others were subjected?
Why have they not hosted people like John Spencer, America's most respected expert on urban warfare, or Richard Kemp, a retired British Army officer who served in Afghanistan and can compare Israel's steps to minimize civilian casualties with the methods used by Britain and the United States in Afghanistan? Why did they not host retired Israeli general Amir Avivi when he was in the Boston area in April? Or Mordechai Kedar, a former Mossad agent who was in the Boston area last November?
Why have they not hosted knowledgeable journalists like Jonathan Tobin, the editor of Jewish News Service who for years edited the Connecticut Jewish Ledger?
Why have they not taken advantage of the fact that one of our country's most prominent lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, who has written a number of books about the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the war Hamas started October 7, has a home in Massachusetts and I'm sure would be receptive to being hosted so that he could testify to the truth?
Most of Eagan and Braude's programs touching on Hamas' war could have been produced by Hamas' propaganda machine. They have done a disservice not just to the only democracy in the Middle East and not just to truth, but to America and the entire democratic world.
WGBH and NPR claim they perform a public service. Their coverage of Hamas' genocidal war against Israel certainly hasn't been a public service and hasn't been responsible journalism.
