Readers of Mosaic are likely familiar with the combination of distortion, credulousness, and confusion that characterizes so much of the coverage of the Gaza war in the mainstream press. But far worse is what can be found in what the British journalist John Ware dubs the alternative media—hard-left, obsessively anti-Israel, and usually anti-Semitic outlets that have persistently denied that Hamas slaughtered civilians, raped women, and engaged in other acts of unspeakable barbarity. They take their cues from Hamas itself, which both distributed video of the atrocities and sent its representatives to claim they never happened on the BBC.

Backing up this campaign of lies are such Islamist outlets as Al-Hiwar TV, which Ware describes as a “Muslim Brotherhood-aligned TV station broadcasting daily to the Arab diaspora from its London studios.” And then there are Hamas sympathizers with academic pedigrees, which the alternative and mainstream media cite as respected authorities:

Khalid El-Awaisi, a lecturer in early Muslim history/Islamic Jerusalem studies at University of Aberdeen, told Muslims at the Masjid-e-Umar [mosque] in Bradford on October 21: “What you heard about attacks on concerts, and all this nonsense, it turns out to be lies.”

One wonders most of all why one of Scotland’s leading universities has a professorship in “Islamic Jerusalem studies” and what precisely that means.

The last part of the equation are such U.S.-based outlets as Max Blumenthal’s Grayzone (famous for denying atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin), Mondoweiss, and Electronic Intifada. Ware presents a careful forensic dissection of their arguments, which makes for difficult reading. He concludes:

The alternative media are likely to play an increasingly influential role in how the conflict now plays out in Britain and elsewhere. For it is their journalism which the growing number of Hamas sympathizers and apologists here hope will resonate most closely with British Muslims, a large and growing constituency. The fact that six months into the war, a poll showed 76 percent of British Muslims had yet to accept that Hamas had committed murder and rape on October 7 should ring alarm bells. Muslim university graduates were slightly more in denial than non-graduates.

Here at Mosaic, we’ve published quite a lot about many Arab states, but one that’s barely received mention is Oman, located at the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The sultanate has stayed out of the recent conflicts of the Midde East, and is known to have sub-rosa relations with Israel; high-ranking Israeli officials have visited the country clandestinely, or at least with little fanfare. For precisely this reason, Oman has held itself out as an intermediary and host for negotiations. The then-secret talks that proceeded the Obama administration’s fateful nuclear negotiations with Iran took place in Oman. Ari Heistein explains the similar, and troubling, role Muscat is playing with regard to the Houthis in neighboring Yemen:

For more than three decades, Oman has served in the role of mediator for the resolution of disputes in Yemen. . . . Oman allows for a Houthi office in the capital, Muscat, reportedly numbering around 100 personnel, to operate from its territory for the purported function of diplomatic engagement. It is worth asking why the Houthis require such a large delegation for such limited engagement and whether there is any real value to engaging with the Houthis.

Thus far, efforts to negotiate with the Houthis have yielded very limited outcomes, primarily resulting in concessions from the Saudi-led coalition and partial de-escalation when it has served the terror group’s interests. Rarely, if ever, have the Houthis fully abided by their commitments after signing off on international agreements. Presumably, such meager results could have been achieved through other constellations that are less beneficial to the recently redesignated foreign terrorist organization.

In contrast, the malign and destabilizing Houthi activities in Oman are significant. They include: shipment of Iranian and Chinese weapons components [and] military-grade communications equipment via Oman to the Houthis; the smuggling of senior officials in and out of Houthi-controlled areas via Oman; and financial activities conducted by Houthi shell corporations to consolidate the regime’s control over Yemen’s economy and subsidize the regime.

With this in mind, there is good reason to suspect that the Houthi presence in Oman does more harm than good.