Michael Epstein

[Hillel Fuld @HilzFuld]

Yea, I don’t think they’ll be bringing me back to the show. 🤣

[Three Year Letterman @3YearLetterman]

I think the Atlanta Hawks are going to give Ohio State a tougher time this Saturday than the point spread would suggest

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Suggestion: if you don't want your buildings destroyed, don't build your key war-making facilities under them, then make war on your neighbors by committing ghastly atrocities against them.

[Rawan Osman روان عثمان @RawaneOsmane]

George Galloway posted this photo today with the caption "What if this was your Dad? #Gaza."

This man is not in Gaza and he is not Palestinian. He is Syrian, like me.

His name is Mohammed Mohiedin Anis, known as Abu Omar. AFP photographer Joseph Eid took this photo in March 2017, in the ruins of Abu Omar's bedroom in al-Shaar, eastern Aleppo, the neighborhood devastated in the regime's 2016 offensive to retake the city. Abu Omar was a collector of antiques and vintage cars. The war took his home and most of his collection. He came back anyway, sat on his bed in the rubble, lit his pipe and played a record. The whole world knew this picture as the face of Aleppo's destruction.

And Galloway knows exactly who destroyed Aleppo, because he was on their payroll.

In 2012, Galloway began hosting a show on Al Mayadeen, the Beirut channel that has never disclosed its backers and is widely seen as the voice of Iran's "Axis of Resistance." He was reportedly paid around £3,000 an episode. He also presented on Iran's state channel Press TV, and spent nearly a decade on Putin's RT.

The Axis: the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, the Iraqi militias, the Houthis and, until December 2024, the Assad regime. For over 13 years after the 2011 uprising, Assad survived only because the IRGC, Hezbollah and Russia fought his war for him. When the regime finally collapsed, he fled to Moscow and was granted "humanitarian" asylum. The same humanity he denied every Syrian he bombed.

Who doesn't remember the barrel bombs on bakeries and markets? The sarin in Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun? The chlorine in Douma?

Galloway remembers. On his show he called Assad "the last bastion of Arab dignity." When Assad gassed Douma in 2018, Galloway pushed the "staged attack" conspiracy, even though the OPCW confirmed chlorine was used.

None of this is new. This is the man who stood before Saddam Hussein in 1994 and saluted his "courage" and "indefatigability." He was suspended from the House of Commons after an inquiry found strong circumstantial evidence that Saddam's regime, with his connivance, used the Oil-for-Food program, meant to feed starving Iraqi children, to fund his Mariam Appeal campaign.

In 2014 he declared Bradford an "Israel-free zone": no Israeli goods, no Israeli academics, not even Israeli tourists. Police logged it as a hate incident.

Last year he flew to Tehran to accept an award named after Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, called him a "martyr," and boasted that his most treasured possession is Haniyeh's personal passport. Then he flew straight to Moscow to applaud Putin's Victory Day parade.

Today, the self-proclaimed anti-imperialist lives in what he calls "exile," broadcasting from Russia and China, lecturing the West about freedom.

This is not an honest mistake. It is the method of Galloway and his camp, and it is what they mean by "by any means necessary." When the truth doesn't serve the cause, you invent a new one. A Syrian father, ruined by Assad and his Iranian and Russian patrons, becomes a Gazan victim of Israel. The real killers get erased, and the propagandist who defended them on their payroll gets applause from a Western audience that never bothers to check.

Syrians remember who bombed Aleppo. They remember who went on TV to defend it.

Abu Omar is not your propaganda, shameless George.

@georgegalloway

[Sean Dillon 🎙 Hosts Beyond the Mic @SeanADillon]

Sat down with a guy who's been on one story for twenty years. Near the end of our conversation I asked if he kept the promise he made himself when it started. Find out what he said when you hear @ViewfinderNYC talk about "Fault Line: Haditha".

https://t.co/Ubvk15E5kV

[Michael Epstein @ViewfinderNYC]

@SeanADillon Thanks, @SeanADillon. Had a great time! If you can believe it, the story gets even crazier.

[Michael Epstein @ViewfinderNYC]

@johnawahba @c14english Still one of the best sketches of all time

[Rachel Moiselle @RachelMoiselle]

Brenda Power is a rare voice of moral clarity amongst the Irish commentariat on this issue. In under a minute she eviscerates Ireland’s hypocrisy.

‘There wasn’t a single peep of protest to the Irish cricket team voluntarily playing Afghanistan last month, where women are treated worse than battery chickens. It is the most extreme humanitarian crisis in the world right now, as far as I can see, the gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Not a word of protest.’

‘Where was your indignation when we played [Afghanistan]? England wouldn’t play them, South Africa wouldn’t play them, New Zealand wouldn’t play them. The great humanitarians in Ireland had absolutely no difficulty. We’re hypocrites.’

[Mike Beauvais @MikeBeauvais]

"The plan? Create a lore so complicated and bewildering that the Western Massachusetts lesbian bar currently hemorrhaging money recoups its losses by becoming an attraction for disbelieving tourists."

[Michael Epstein @ViewfinderNYC]

@robbystarbuck Very seriously surprised someone didn’t accuse the bar owner of genocide.

[Michael Epstein @ViewfinderNYC]

@Tyler_A_Harper Here’s the original Instagram post.

https://t.co/rzdjW6zM9D

[Ami Dar @AmiDar]

On October 7th, Awad Darusha, an Arab/Palestinian citizen of Israel, worked as a paramedic at the Nova Festival. When the killing started, he helped other paramedics escape, but refused to escape himself. He stayed to help the wounded, until he was shot by Hamas. Barring the Arab parties from Israel’s election desecrates his memory, and that of many others.

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

Last week I wrote that the New York Times's Israel coverage since October 7 had cost it my trust. I have written fifteen pieces for the paper over 35 years — eleven in Opinion, four in the Sunday Magazine. I still read it, but with a jaundiced eye. That article drew a quarter-million interactions.

This morning two Times shareholders sued in New York County Supreme Court for the internal records the company has refused to produce for four months. The petitioners are the State Board of Administration of Florida, which manages the state’s public pension assets, and the National Center for Public Policy Research. Most of what they want concerns Israel-Hamas coverage and whether the board oversees the paper’s own editorial standards.

The suit relies in part on a Jewish former video-desk employee who, according to the complaint, flagged antisemitism and anti-Israel bias internally at least 15 times between 2019 and when she left the paper in March 2026.

I treated this as a journalism standards issue. The lawsuit notes that since the Times eliminated its public editor in 2017 — and never replaced the job — there has not been an independent in-house watchdog over what ends up under a Times byline. The Israel-Gaza coverage is the worst example of what has resulted.

@SulkinMaya's Free Press exclusive: https://t.co/v5ROUnyfnL

[Gabriel Epstein @GabrielEpsteinX]

The 14th public iteration of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s (MOH) death toll list, dated to May 7, 2026 and containing 72,835 entries, was released quietly on July 5 by Iraq Body Count. Long analysis of data quality, demographics, unknowns, and post-ceasefire trends. 🧵

[Hayes @HayesThund]

I broke this down in detail for people unfamiliar with this figure:

This is a fatality pyramid (red + blue) superimposed over a Gaza population pyramid (grey) based on age and sex between 2023-2026.

Left side is male. Right side is female.

Notably, fatalities skew *dramatically* toward men aged 15-40, especially 30-34 y/o, far beyond what their demographic prevalence would predict.

Reported fatalities for women and children come nowhere close to men of fighting age and are substantially underrepresented given their respective population distributions.

It should also be noted that Gaza has historically always had a high birth rate and young population as the grey pyramid shows.

Since a “genocide” doesn’t necessarily discriminate based on age and sex, and neither age nor sex predict probability of death if we believe civilians are being indiscriminately murdered, the fatality pyramid should more closely resemble the Gaza population pyramid.

It clearly doesn’t.

In fact, the fatalities of children should be much higher too, given their share of Gaza’s population - especially between 0-14 y/o.

Instead the fatality pyramid reflects exactly what we’d predict in a hot war: men of fighting age - namely, combatants - experiencing disproportionately elevated mortality in armed conflict with the IDF.

And not a “genocide”.

Rwanda was a genocide, even though more men were killed than women and children. So yes, a genocide can “skew” by accident, even though, in 1994, the Tutsis were all being indiscriminately targeted for total destruction.

However, unlike Gaza - which was a war - there was not a Tutsi combatant terror force analogous to Hamas embedding themselves amongst civilians and holding “enemy” civilians hostage. Tutsis were simply being murdered for existing.

And unlike Rwanda - which was a genocide - fatalities in Gaza skew toward men of fighting age because combatants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) were being targeted by the IDF in a hot conflict that Israel didn’t want and didn’t start.

Never mind the profound difference in the overall death toll between either region and the quickness with which the killings in Rwanda took place…

The world should be on its hands and knees - every NGO, every activist, every “academic”, “journalist”, influencer, politician, state leader, mayor and asshole on social media - begging the Jewish state for forgiveness for their role in the spread of the genocide lie.

(Source: This figure is the 14th iteration of a figure, Proportional Distribution of Gaza Fatalities by Age and Gender vs Total Population, by Gabriel Epstein, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, https://t.co/ncb5f7fi17… PolicyNote158Epsteinv3.pdf; https://t.co/LSv99foN0Z…; data from Gaza Ministry of Health, US Census Bureau, and the Iraq Body Count).

[Michael Epstein @ViewfinderNYC]

@guy_value @ManhattanInst Exactly. It’s not about money or incentives. It’s about having a parent or guardian who actively cares about their child’s education. That can happen anywhere and within any family. (That said, funding does matter. We should invest in education universally.)

[Isaiah Berg @isaiahberg]

@nhannahjones @thomaschattwill Besides the factual deficiencies (e.g., school spending inequality), your essay reads like a survivor’s account of a Maoist struggle session or a collectivist famine in Soviet Ukraine, recounting infinite horrors while insisting that clearly, true communism has never been tried.

[Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger]

So it turns out that Hamas runs a WhatsApp group with all of Gaza’s journalists, where Hamas “managed the discourse and the narrative.”

These outlets have "journalists" in Gaza:

Reuters, AP, NYT, CNN, Wapo, PBS, NPR, BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Drop Site News

[Matti Friedman @MattiFriedman]

Every sentient journalist here knows these are the sources of "news" in Gaza, and have been since the Hamas takeover 19 years ago. This is obviously a major story, but Western editors can't cover it honestly because they've all played ball and are thus implicated themselves.

[Gerald Posner @geraldposner]

I have written eleven opinion pieces for The New York Times across 35 years. I still read it. I write what follows with no joy: while I have watched it become increasingly partisan in its news coverage over the decades, no topic has made its loss of balance clearer to me than its handling of Israel since October 7.

This week the Times published a sentence suggesting that Israeli victimhood over the 2023 Hamas terror attack was not a fact, but a "matter of perception." It only added an Editors' Note after furious backlash, much of it here on X. I have written corrections myself. A sentence like that doesn't slip past a reporter, an editor, and a copy desk by accident. The underlying problem is that it did not set off an alarm until readers outside the building made noise.

And that was simply the latest example. In May, the paper's Opinion section ran a column alleging Israeli forces used dogs to rape Palestinian detainees, built on sourcing no other serious outlet had corroborated. The Times's own executive editor later said the newsroom "wouldn't have done that exact piece."

Now there's data behind the pattern. A peer-reviewed Yale study of 1,559 Times articles on the war found the word "Israel" appeared more than three times as often as "Hamas," and that 1,423 of those articles mentioned neither Israeli casualties after Oct. 7 nor Hamas combatants killed in the war.

"Paper of record" was never a hereditary title. It was a claim about earned trust. I am not sure anyone still believes it.

My full article at Just the Facts: https://t.co/pG7mfcYpCj