Just as they have in Gaza, U.S. journalists failed their murdered colleagues in Yemen

An unwritten rule in the world of journalism is that reporters are supposed to stand up for each other, quite aside from our personal opinions. If one of us is threatened or murdered, the rest of us should show up and speak out, just like firefighters or police officers do when one of them is killed in the line of duty. 

But that informal rule didn’t apply to the 35 people who Israel killed in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, on September 10.

Let’s first look at the September 15 Human Rights Watch report on what actually happened. Here’s the headline: “Israeli Forces’ Attack on Saana Kills Journalists.” The HRW report confirmed that Israel killed “at least 35 people, including journalists, and injured dozens more.” The journalists worked for a newspaper named “26 September” which is associated with the Yemeni ruling group Ansar Allah (who are also referred to as “the Houthis”). HRW suggested that the attack may have been timed, quoting one source: “Since it is a weekly publication, not a daily one, staff were gathered at the publishing house to prepare for distribution, significantly increasing the number of people present in the compound.”

The HRW report went on, “The neighborhood is a densely populated residential area just next to Sanaa’s Old City, a UNESCO heritage site. The [Israeli] strikes took place when many residents and others were walking and driving through the streets, according to interviews and video footage taken after the attack and shared that evening on X by Al-Masirah, a Houthi-run news channel, and verified by Human Rights Watch. The video, a compilation of video clips edited together, shows streets packed with people and vehicles, damaged buildings, and rescue workers pulling injured people, including at least one child, from the rubble.” 

It’s now a full week after the attack, and the mainstream U.S. media almost completely failed their murdered colleagues — and the innocent civilians —  in Yemen. Let’s start with the New York Times. The paper clearly trusts Human Rights Watch, because it quotes HRW reports on other parts of the world all the time. So far in September alone, the Times has cited the organization seven times. But the paper’s report the day of the Israeli attack made no mention that journalists had died, even though the Times has a stringer in Saana, Shuaib Almosawa. Nor did the Times run any follow-up days later.

Other prominent U.S. outlets were just as bad. Not a word on National Public Radio. Apparently nothing on the MSNBC cable network. The Washington Post did eventually include a sentence, taken from the Associated Press, which did report that “hundreds [in Saana] attended funeral services for 31 Yemeni journalists who were reported killed in Israeli airstrikes last week.” But that was it.

The mainstream whitewash of the killing of Yemeni journalists is part of a much larger disgraceful coverup. In the past two years, Israel has now attacked seven nations in the Middle East; the assault on Qatar followed strikes and invasions against: Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and Yemen. 

You would have to search the past over many decades to find another country which has launched armed attacks on so many of its neighbors. But mainstream U.S. coverage remains minimal and perfunctory. (By contrast, just imagine the mainstream outcry if a commando group somehow bombed an Israeli newspaper or TV station, and killed 35 people.)

Even Israel’s September 9th attack on Qatar, a major U.S. ally, prompted a subdued reaction. (Although the conservative Economist, to its credit, did point out that “the raid on it [Qatar] was not preemptively aimed at an imminent threat. . . It was an act of revenge on the territory of a sovereign state.”)

Israel is not attacking little insignificant nations. Yemen, for instance, has a population of 40.5 million (larger than Saudi Arabia). Add the tens of millions in the other six Middle Eastern nations and you can see that Israel, and its patron, the United States, are creating enemies who will stretch into future decades.