Robin Andersen’s The Complicit Lens is a tour de force: not only does she focus on US legacy/mainstream/capitalist media coverage of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, but she examines their coverage in light of what was then-happening in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and late 2025, which she documents carefully with 942 footnotes, most linked by URLs. Andersen, a Professor Emerita of Media Studies at Fordham University, builds a very solid case through making claims and supporting them with strong evidence.

Near the end of the book, she quoted a statement made by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a volunteer physician in Gaza, to the UN Security Council. He broke down while presenting it.

“I did not see a single combatant during my five weeks in Gaza. My patients were six-year-olds with shrapnel through their hearts and bullets in their brains, pregnant women with their pelvises obliterated and their fetuses cut in two while still in the womb.” He operated without sterility, electricity, or anesthetics on “crowded and filthy floors.” He said as a physician he bore “witness to the deliberate destruction of health care, the targeting of my colleagues, and the erasure of a people.” He cited numbers; eighty-three of American medics in Gaza reported seeing children shot in the head or chest. The destruction of health care was not a system failure, rather, he pointed out, it had been “systematically dismantled through violations of international law.”

Then, importantly, Andersen wrote, “No establishment media covered Dr. Sidhwa’s compassionate testimony or printed his words disputing Hamas was embedded in hospitals. This reporting was left to Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera, UN Media, and human rights organizations.”

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