Category Archives: New York Times

NY Times Considers Notion That Terrorism Against Israel is a Matter of Free Speech

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The January 22, 2021 article (24th in the print edition) in The New York Times “What Zoom Does to Campus Conflicts Over Israel and Free Speech” could have been an interesting discussion about the ongoing role of big media companies and censorship. Remarkably, the Times opted to tackle an easy and extreme case – the dissemination of terrorist propaganda and calls for violence – and decided the answer was sure, if the target is Israel.

The opening sentences of the article made it clear that the author understood the subject to be used as a foil in the discussion:

“Leila Khaled is a two-time hijacker, a member of a Palestinian group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. So it came as a shock to Javier Cohen, a senior at New York University, to find her speaking on an N.Y.U. webinar last semester.“

From such factual clarity, it is frightening that the Times would follow:

“In a conflict that has divided campuses in recent years, here was a new dimension: A commercial technology company [Zoom], under pressure from pro-Israel groups, was controlling content at a major American university.

“We’re usually not in the position of having campus speech being adjudicated by outside agents,” said [NYU Professor] Mr. Ross, arguing that criticism of Israel was being labeled anti-Semitism. “But Zoom is in the position of doing that right now. ”

This is preposterous and incendiary. Saying that pro-Israel groups are shutting down “content” through the guise of charges of “anti-Semitism” completely misses the mark that the university invited a terrorist who calls for violence onto the college square on the basis of free speech. In no civilized society does free speech cover such activity. To blame the target of the vitriol for shutting down discussion adds to the delusion and reeks of fanning more anti-Semitism.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had written about Leila Khaled a few months ago when she was due to speak at San Francisco State University (SFSU):

“In some anti-Israel circles, PFLP terrorists Leila Khaled and Rasmea Odeh have drawn particular admiration. Leila Khaled took part in the hijacking of two civilian aircraft in 1969 and 1970. In recent interviews, she has remained unrepentant for her role in the hijackings and continues to hold the view that the Palestinian national movement is justified in using all means of resistance, including armed struggle.”

At the same time in September 2020, Colorado Congressman Doug Lamborn wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr outlining the criminal charges that should be brought against SFSU which had invited Khaled and possibly the technology companies like Zoom for hosting such discussions which “appeared to be [for the purpose of] the promotion of the PFLP’s [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] terrorist agenda to a wider audience.“

While the Times did not quote the ADL or Lamborn’s letter, it seemed to acknowledge the issue of promoting terrorism but then it quickly shifted gears back to anti-Israel free speech:

“A spokeswoman for Zoom, Colleen Rodriguez, said Ms. Khaled’s association with a terrorist group violated the company’s terms of service. The company also banned three other colleges’ webinars featuring Ms. Khaled.

“As schools around the country have shifted to virtual learning, the battles over Israel and the Palestinian territories — with opponents accusing one another of anti-Semitism or suppressing free speech — have migrated with the technology, evolving from campus demonstrations and fliers to social media and Zoom.”

It is as though the article was written by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in acknowledging the problem of promoting terrorism but then excusing it as a matter of “suppressing free speech.” The article would go on for another 37 paragraphs – three pages including large color pictures – about whether criticism of Israel is a matter of free speech.

The 2,000-word article ended with an exchange that suggested the public square deserved to hear from Leila Khaled:

“The history is “messy,” he said, with “justice on both sides, and injustice on both sides.”

“Even without remote learning, students have little incentive to see the other view and strong support for hardening their own side’s.

“Mr. Stern said, mildly, “That makes conversations very difficult.””

One cannot imagine that the Times would go to such lengths to defend a university inviting a member of al-Qaeda onto campus to discuss the evils of the United States and its desire to continue an armed struggle against the western world. Maybe an alt-left university in California or New York would entertain a member of ISIS delivering a lecture under the banner of the university but hopefully law enforcement would shut it down.

The New York Times spent considerable ink over this past week saying that the new Biden Administration will help unify the country. That will only happen if he sends the attorney general and law enforcement after the alt-left universities and media companies like The New York Times which continue to promote terrorism and terrorists.

Related First One Through articles:

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims

Flip-Flopping on the Felling of Terrorist Groups’ Founders

New York Times Recharacterizes Hamas as a Right-Wing Terrorist Group

For The New York Times, “From the River to the Sea” Is The Chant of Jewish and Christian Zealots

Even The New York Times Needs to Fire David Halbfinger

CNN Sanitizes Palestinian Car Ramming Terrorism

NY Times Will Not Write About Arab Pogroms

Every Picture Tells a Story: Have Israel and the US Advanced Peace?

The New York Times wants the military to defeat terrorists (but not Hamas)

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NY Times Alternative Facts on Palestinian Elections

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The New York Times once again wrote an article about Palestinians considering holding elections that could only be called #AlternativeFacts if one wanted to be charitable.

Page A10 of The New York Times of January 16, 2021

The article wrote that “Mr. Abbas was now seeking to renew his legitimacy in the eyes of the international community, especially with the imminent arrival of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the White House, which they said Mr. Abbas hoped would herald a return to negotiations with Israel.”

Nowhere in the article did it state that Abbas has no legitimacy with Palestinian Arabs.

The Palestinians poll themselves every quarter and the last results were released on December 15, 2020. There are important results to share with the public which were omitted by the Times:

  • 86.3% of Palestinians think the Palestinian Authority is corrupt
  • That 86.3% compares to 63.4% who think Hamas-led institutions are corrupt
  • 64.4% of Palestinians are not satisfied with the job of Abbas as president
  • 66.0% of Palestinians want Abbas to resign
  • If Abbas was in an election against the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, he would lose 42.8% to 50.2%
  • If it were a three-way race including jailed terrorist Marwan Barghouti, Abbas would place third, with Barghouti at 41.2%, Haniyeh at 32.3% and Abbas at 24.5%
  • 75.9% of people polled do not expect Abbas’s Fatah party to accept the results if Hamas wins
  • 37.7% and 21.0% of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank, respectively, seek to emigrate
  • The number one concern for Palestinians is unemployment and poverty. The “occupation and settlements” was number two

Marwan Barghouti, a convicted terrorist, is the leading contender to win Palestinian presidential elections, yet his name did not make it into the Times article at all. How not surprising – on both fronts.

If the authors had read the poll results, they would have known that the Palestinians are more concerned with their economy than negotiations with Israel.

The Times called Abbas’s Fatah as “the mainstream Palestinian party,” even though it is highly unpopular and likely to lose the elections.

The Times continued that “The United States and much of the west refused to work with the unity government [of Fatah and Hamas] because Hamas, which they consider a terrorist organization, would not accept international demands such as renouncing violence and recognizing Israel’s right to exist.” There was no commentary on how Biden would work with a PA president who was either a convicted killer (Barghouti) or leader of a terrorist group (HAMAS).

Making sure Israel could be cast in a negative light, the article added that “Israel may also decide to bar Palestinians from voting in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.” The December poll states that 56% of Palestinians favor such people being able to vote in West Bank polling stations, if Israel does not allow a foreign election to take place on its soil.

The Times coverage of the Palestinians is an alternative universe of peaceful Democracy-loving people being unfairly cast in a negative light by right-wing Israeli and American governments. It will be interesting to see how the paper’s language evolves during a year in which the U.S., Israel and Palestinian Authority might all change administrations.

Related First One Through articles:

The New York Times Refuses to Label Hamas a Terrorist Group

New York Times Recharacterizes Hamas as a Right-Wing Terrorist Group

New York Times Grants Nobel Prize-in Waiting to Palestinian Arab Terrorist

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims

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Featured Idiot: NYT’s Friedman on Harris as Rural Broadband Czar

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On December 16, 2020, The New York Times editorial board elected to give its entire opinion page to long-time journalist Thomas Friedman to discuss a topic he knows nothing about: rural America.

The one-time foreign affairs correspondent presented his bold idea that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris should become the czar of rural America and bring broadband to bridge the “connectivity gap.” He wanted this accomplished not so much for the benefit of rural America but to put on a show that Democrats care about these lagging Americans, so those red states might loose a touch of their rosy glow and prevent Democrats from getting trounced in the next election cycle.

What Friedman failed to understand and convey in the editorial was that the Trump administration committed billions of dollars to bring broadband to rural America.

It was just TEN DAYS AGO that the FCC announced the results of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Auction 904 which awarded $9.2 billion of federal grants to telecom companies to subsidize the buildout of broadband networks in remote parts of the country. This came two years after the Connect America Fund II Auction 903 which granted $1.5 billion to operators to construct broadband networks for rural America.

But don’t let facts get in the way.

Friedman further noted that Harris “is a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive America.” Maybe Freidman is not aware that non-partisan GovTracks observed that Harris was the least bi-partisan U.S. senator. She also scored as the most extreme leftist in her voting record, even more than proud Democratic-Socialist Bernie Sanders and closeted Democratic-Socialist Elizabeth Warren.

But don’t let history get in the way.

The Times will have its urban readers believe that rural Americans are waiting for Democrats to save them, but all Friedman’s editorial really showed was his ignorance and contemptible view that non-urban Americans are just pawns for progressive politics.

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Follow the Money: Democrats and the Education Industry

Hispanics for Trump

Progressives Judge Past American Actions and Ignore Today’s Foreign Culture

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NY Times Will Not Write About Arab Pogroms

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It is a sad state of affairs when the media ignores the slaughter of innocents and brands such events in the nomenclature of the killers.

Consider the “Second Intifada” which Palestinian Arabs started in September 2000 when they refused to accept 98% of their desires in a peace deal with Israel. Palestinians went on multi-year rampages blowing up buses and pizza parlors full of kids and women. Over 1,000 Israelis were killed until Israel constructed a security barrier to stem the tide of murderers. Rather than call the event a “war” or a “pogrom,” the media calls it by the term Palestinians chose, “Intifada,” which means “uprising.” It’s shameful. It should be called the “2 Percent War.”

On December 11, 2020, The New York Times didn’t just adopt an Arab name to mask Arab sensibilities, it adopted an entire Arab narrative in rewriting history.

In an article about Morocco normalizing relations with Israel, the paper wrote the following:

“Today, Morocco has a Jewish population of about 4,000, said to Samuel L. Kaplan, the U.S. Ambassador to Rabat from 2009 to 2013. That is down from more than 200,000 Jews who lived in Morocco when Israel was established in 1948 but who then began responding to calls to immigrate to Israel.”

There were certainly some Jews who felt the Zionist urge to move to Israel but the vast majority fled their homes due to rampant anti-Semitism that overcame the Muslim world when Jews took control of what they deemed to be Muslim land.

After Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, two pogroms broke out in Morocco, in the towns of Oujda and Djerrada. The attacks killed 47 people, wounded hundreds and lefts hundreds homeless. Not surprisingly, 10% of the country’s Jews quickly fled the country.

After Morocco declared independence in 1956, an Arabization of the country commenced, cutting Jews off from parts of society. At the same time, the government prohibited emigration to Israel, which lasted until 1963. In 1961, roughly 90,000 Moroccan Jews had to be ransomed in Operation Yakhnin, bringing Jews to Israel. In the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, another 40,000 Jews fled to Israel.

Headline in NY Times in 1956, seemingly forgotten by the paper today

The number of Jews that fled persecution from homes they lived in for centuries in Muslim-majority countries was between 850,000 and 1 million people.

  • Algeria 140,000
  • Egypt 75,000
  • Iraq 135,000
  • Lebanon 5,000
  • Libya 38,000
  • Morocco 265,000
  • Syria 30,000
  • Tunisia 105,000
  • Yemen 55,000

This total of 850,000 Jews does not include the Jews who fled Iran and Afghanistan. It far surpasses the Palestinian Arabs who left Israel in 1948 when they waited for their Arab neighbors to destroy the nascent Jewish State.

The New York Times rewriting history that Arab Muslims are never anti-Semites coincides with its depiction that White Americans are always racist. It is no wonder that White Jews are dropping the paper.

Related First One Through articles:

The New York Times Thinks that the Jews from Arab Countries Simply “Immigrated”

Jim Wolfensohn’s Invisible Generosity

New York Times Recharacterizes Hamas as a Right-Wing Terrorist Group

For The New York Times, “From the River to the Sea” Is The Chant of Jewish and Christian Zealots

The New York Times All Out Assault on Jewish Jerusalem

The New York Times Excuses Palestinian “Localized Expressions of Impatience.” I Mean Rockets.

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Jim Wolfensohn’s Invisible Generosity

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Jim Wolfensohn, former head of the World Bank, died this week. The New York Times wrote about his life’s work in a long obituary. As is commonplace for the legacy paper, it retold his final acts of generosity to conceal the behavior of its Victims of Preference, Palestinian Arabs.

In the concluding sentences of a 2000-word article, the Times wrote the following:

“His last major undertaking was in the mid-2000s as a special envoy for a diplomatic group known as the Quartet — made up of the United Nations, the United States, the Russian Federation and the European Union — which was seeking an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in which Israel would disengage from the Gaza Strip. If the deal were struck, he was to help coordinate revitalization efforts once the Palestinian authorities had taken over the area, the U.N. said at the time.

However, the negotiations failed.

“The Middle East,” Mr. Wolfensohn grimly observed, ”turned out to be my mission impossible.”

A casual reader would assume that Wolfensohn was simply one more person who tried to help the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The peace deal described above would have had Israel “disengage from the Gaza Strip” and then his work of coordinating “revitalization efforts” would commence. As “negotiations failed,” Wolfensohn did not actually coordinate any efforts to help the Palestinians.

Not so.

Israel did “disengage from the Gaza Strip” and Wolfensohn coordinated an effort which had Jewish donors around the world buy the Israeli greenhouses and equipment left in Gaza to hand to the Palestinians to jump start their economy. Wolfensohn donated $500,000 of his own money to the purchases.

But the effort proved fruitless. Palestinians looted the greenhouses shortly after the Israelis pulled out of Gaza.

A Palestinian carries a plastic roll he took Tuesday from a greenhouse, background, at the evacuated Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim in the Gaza Strip.Emilio Morenatti / AP

Amid al-Masri, head of the Palestine Economic Development Company’s (PEDC) greenhouse project said the looting “will undermine our efforts to privatise the project as we hoped and also it could frighten investors aiming at other projects.” Indeed, the project designed to restart the Gaza economy once again proved the failure to launch at the start.

James Wolfensohn’s generosity towards the Arabs of Gaza went unmentioned by The New York Times, as to have done so would have required showing the theft and ineptitude of the local population and Palestinian Authority. For the pro-Palestinian legacy media, better to whitewash Arabs shooting themselves in the foot with some generic language about the intractable conflict.

Related First One Through articles:

New York Times Recharacterizes Hamas as a Right-Wing Terrorist Group

For The New York Times, “From the River to the Sea” Is The Chant of Jewish and Christian Zealots

The New York Times All Out Assault on Jewish Jerusalem

The New York Times Excuses Palestinian “Localized Expressions of Impatience.” I Mean Rockets.

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NY Times 2000-word obituary for James Wolfensohn

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims

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The New York Times has continued to use pictures which accompany its articles (read editorials) to frame narratives that are vehemently anti-Zionist.

On November 20, 2020, the paper had a two-page spread on pages A12 and A13 which touched upon the victims of terrorism but handled the stories very differently.

Pages A12 and A13 from The New York Times on November 20, 2020

Page A13 had a large color photograph of a victim of a terrorist attack in Toronto. The article’s title “Professed ‘Incel’ Who Killed 10 With Van Stands Trial in Toronto” had a caption under the page’s dominant picture which read “Cathy Riddell, 70, who sustained over 20 injuries, including brain trauma, in a 2018 van attack that killed 10 people and wounded 16.” The large picture gave a personal story of the tragedy that struck so many and left the reader feeling emotionally attached to her and the many victims of this ‘incel’.

The story on page A12 portrayed a very different picture for readers. The story called “Seeking Restart with Biden, Palestinians to Pare Prisoner Payments” also had a picture – but of a very different kind of “victim.”

The picture was of two people walking around rubble. The caption read “The parents of a Palestinian prisoner inspecting her house in the West Bank after it was demolished by the Israeli Defense Forces.” In this rendition of history, the Palestinian terrorist is the victim, by being in jail and having her house demolished. The dead and injured Israelis are nowhere to be found as they are not victims for the Times, as their very presence makes Arabs “resort to violence.”

While the paper could have shown pictures of Israeli victims as it did in the article on the following page, including the Henkins who were shot to death in their car in front of their children, or Tamar Fogel who was 12 years old when she entered her home to see her parents and three siblings stabbed to death by two Arab men, or hundreds of other Israelis, it opted to make the Palestinian Arabs serving in jail the victims.

Perhaps a dose-of-reality bubble could have been placed over this woman’s head as she inspected the demolished home, like Widad Barghouti who had her house demolished after her son Qassam Shibli killed a 17-year old Israeli girl on a hike. The text would read her statement just after her house was demolished: “I say to [my son Qassam], to all of them [the prisoners], that we are proud of you. If we want to talk about our achievements as mothers, then the most important achievement that we have made in our lives is that we gave birth to heroes such as these.” Nah, that would break the Times narrative crafted for its anti-Zionist readership.

The anti-Israel media will tell you explicitly, subtly, directly and indirectly until you’re brain-washed to believe that Palestinian Arabs are always the victims, even – or perhaps especially – those that murder.

Related First One Through articles:

Every Picture Tells a Story: Have Israel and the US Advanced Peace?

Every Picture Tells a Story: Goodbye Peres

Every Picture Tells a Story: Anti-Semitism

Every Picture Tells a Story: No Need for #MeToo for Palestinians

Every Picture Tells a Story: Fire

Every Picture Tells a Story: The Invisible Killed Terrorists

Every Picture Tells a Story: Arab Injuries over Jewish Deaths

New York Times’ Lost Pictures and Morality for the Year 2015

Every Picture Tells a Story: Versions of Reality

Every Picture Tells A Story: Only Palestinians are Victims

Every Picture Tells a Story: The Invisible Murdered Israelis

Every Picture Tells a Story- Whitewashing the World (except Israel)

The New York Times’ Buried Pictures

Every Picture Tells a Story, the Bibi Monster

Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It?

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The NY Times ‘More Confrontational Approach’

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The year of ‘protests’ has many themes and at least as many defenders.

The New York Times wrote about the Black Lives Matter protests in September 2020 that “Some Protests Against Police Brutality Take a More Confrontational Approach.” The Times did not say that they were violent, just that the protest were more assertive, “moving into white neighborhoods where activists demand that people choose a side.” It seems that the paper believes that a protest is simply ‘more confrontational’ when it directly challenges any-and-all to pick a side.

The Times used the same language in a piece on November 18, 2020 about Palestinians dealing with Israel. In describing Hamas, the article wrote that Hamas is a “militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, and which favors a more confrontational approach toward Israel in the West Bank.“

Calling Hamas a “militant group” instead of a designated terrorist group is an established priority for this left-wing paper. Using the new choice phrase of a “more confrontational approach” seems to reorient the reader that Hamas is an activist group moving beyond its base in Gaza into the West Bank. It’s a red herring to mislead readers about Hamas’ desire to destroy Israel.

The Times also used its platform to obfuscate U.S. laws such as the Taylor Force Act which was passed to pressure the Palestinian Authority to stop paying people to kill Israelis. The paper wrote about Democrats trying to get Palestinians to make changes including “reforming the way that Palestinians who serve time in Israeli prisons, including for violent acts, are financially compensated, an arrangement that critics call ‘pay-to-slay.’” That’s quite a bit of verbosity to get around stating that U.S. law prohibits rewarding violence, a gross human rights violation. Instead, the Times portrayed the objection as stemming from “critics,” likely those who oppose ‘protests.’

The New York Times itself is actively participating in a “more confrontational approach” to causes it opposes, a list which grows by the day, as enumerated by its alt-left readership.

Related First One Through articles:

The New York Times Refuses to Label Hamas a Terrorist Group

New York Times Recharacterizes Hamas as a Right-Wing Terrorist Group

The Proud Fathers of Palestinian Terrorists

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Beheadings are Not Terrorism for Al Jazeera

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The beautiful city of Nice, France was the scene of horrible violence on October 29, 2020 as three people were stabbed to death in a church. The attacker was said to have shouted “Allahu Akbhar” as he stabbed church-goers and hacked the head off of a woman.

The media took very different approaches to reporting the incident:

CNN: “Multiple casualties in Nice ‘terrorist attack,’ local mayor says

New York Times: “Deadly Knife Attack in France Appears to Be Terrorism, Officials Say”

BBC News: “Nice attack: Mayor says deadly stabbing points to terrorism”

CNBC: “Three dead and several wounded after a terror attack in Nice, France”

But Qatari-owned Al Jazeera, would not use the word ‘terrorism’ in its headline. In the article, it would not report that the mayor of Nice said that the assailant “repeated endlessly ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is greatest) when he was being treated at the scene.”

French forensics officers arrive at the site of a knife attack in Nice. Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty

The attack comes less than two weeks after a French teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded after showing his class caricatures of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in a discussion on free speech. After that event, Al Jazeera pulished a piece titled “After teacher’s killing, French Muslims fear rising Islamophobia,” an interesting inversion of victims. The article stated “Muslims fear Paty’s tragic death is already being weaponised to advance a government policy they worry conflates Islam with ‘terrorism’.“

Al Jazeera is doing its part in fighting ‘Islamophobia’ by making sure that beheadings are not called ‘terrorism’ and the phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’ is not used in its reporting.

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Bad Education: Al Jazeera

An Easy Boycott: Al Jazeera (Qatar)

Al Jazeera’s Lies Call for Jihad Against the Jewish State

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The Media’s COVID Bias

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The pandemic of our time has killed over a million people worldwide. One would imagine that such a global scourge might bring people together, or at least allow the media to rise above partisan politics.

But that is wishful thinking. There are other pandemics today including the polarization of politics and the death of unbiased media.

Consider the graphic shown on The Wall Street Journal’s cover page on October 15, 2020. It showed that despite the summer flattening of the positive cases of COVID-19 in Europe, the continent has spiked alarmingly and now surpasses the U.S. in terms of cases per million people.

Cover page of the WSJ with graphic showing steep increase in COVID cases in Europe, now surpassing the United States

This graphic, together with the article on page A9 exposed a narrative quite different than the Democratic Party is actively imparting to voters just a few weeks before elections – that the Trump Administration has been a grotesque failure at handling the pandemic, particularly relative to the rest of the world.

So The New York Times came to put the anti-Trump narrative back on track the following day.

New York Times cover page of October 16, 2020 with three large US maps and a chart dominating the entirety of the page

The entire middle of the front page from the very top to the very bottom was covered with graphics in red. The title of the charts read “U.S. Virus Cases Climb Towards Third Peak.” This was the message that the Times wanted readers to focus on, that things are getting real bad once again in the United States. The cases in Europe went unmentioned.

Reuters covered both stories over the past several days, in particular highlighting the troubling trend in Europe in several articles. One of the articles included this remarkable comment, that “Europe is reporting more daily cases than India, Brazil and the United States combined.” As of this writing, the NY Times has ignored the devastating trend in Europe.

The pandemic is destroying lives all around the world while the liberal and conservative media outlets post alternative facts to make us love or hate politicians. It’s a sad state of affairs and one likely to just make us all sicker.

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The CoronavirUS is Not Us Versus Them

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The U.N. Doesn’t Care About Middle-Aged White Male Victims of Covid-19

Genes Versus Leadership in the Pandemic

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NY Times Tries Hard to Paint Obama/Biden as Pacifists and Trump as Mercenary

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It must be especially galling to the left-wing media that an outlandish person like Donald Trump could forge peace deals in the Middle East while its patron saints in the Obama administration could not.

Consider the deliberate twisting of facts in The New York Times on September 24, 2020 about U.S. arm sales to Saudi Arabia. In a “News Analysis” section called “A Fraying Rationale for U.S. Aid to the Saudis in Yemen,” the Times wrote that

“Mr. Trump decided in early 2017 to restart arms sales to the Gulf Arab nations that President Barack Obama had halted in late 2016.”

The sheer audacity of this line in the Times is outrageous.

Obama’s term ENDED in “late 2016.” From 2009 to 2015, the Obama administration sold more weapons to foreign countries than any administration in U.S. history – particularly to Saudi Arabia. Obama’s penchant for arms sales was so egregious that even liberal media firms like Vice were appalled, writing an article as Obama left office in January 2017, “Obama’s Administration Sold More Weapons Than Any Other Since World War II.” The sub-header to the article was “Many were sold to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia.” The article noted that “Under Obama the overall sales, pending delivery of equipment and specialised training for troops, to Saudi Arabia alone has ballooned to $115 billion.” At the time of the article, the war Saudis were participating in in Yemen was well under way with “over 10,000 killed, 2.2 million displaced and nearly half a million children on the brink of famine from the ensuing crisis.”

While the Times was factually accurate that in Obama’s final month of his presidency he halted the sale of precision-guided munitions, it was only of that particular weaponry and only after eight years of selling the Saudis over $100 billion in arms!

New York Times article written to paint Obama and Biden as pacifists and Trump as a mercenary on September 24, 2020, coupling a picture of destruction in Yemen with one of Trump with the Saudis sitting comfortably in the White House striking deals.

The Times article stated that “current and former administration officials, as well as former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, say American involvement [in selling Saudi’s weapons] must end.” That’s quite a bit of “malarkey” as Biden would say, having been second in command in an administration that sold $115 billion in arms to the Saudis.

The Times added that “the State Department, starting in the Obama administration, sent a senior level official, Larry Lewis, on frequent trips to Saudi Arabia to advise on civilian harm,” making the Democrats appear worried about the death to civilians, but “the next year Trump administration officials pushed him [Lewis] out of the agency,” making Team Trump appear callous.

The attack on Trump continued to cast him as a simple arms merchant and uncaring of the damage done by the weapons: “Mr. Trump has offered a more transactional rationale [for selling arms to the Saudis]: that the United States should continue to sell weapons for the money. “They have nothing but money. Nothing but cash, and they pay us now.“”

The foreign policy failures of the Obama administration in the Middle East were plentiful, ranging from giving Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, a legal pathway to nuclear weapons; selling more weapons to Arab countries that any administration in history as a counter-balance the blessing of a nuclear-emboldened Iran; watching the arms sales be used to pound Yemen, the poorest country in the world, into sand; watching the plane-loads of cash sent to Iran get funneled into terrorist groups; failing miserably in negotiating between Israel and the Palestinians leading to Gaza wars in 2012 and 2014 and the stabbing intifada of 2015, to name but a few.

While U.S. voters don’t rank foreign affairs high on their priority list, The Times doesn’t want to take a chance.

During this particularly contentious election, The Times is actively recasting Obama and Biden as pacifists and Trump as a cold mercenary when in fact it was the Obama administration which enabled death and destruction in the Middle East and Trump who forged peace agreements in the region.

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Half Standards: Gun Control and the Iranian Nuclear Weapons Deal

Some Global Supporters of the P5+1 Iran Deal

The Gap between Fairness and Safety: WMDs in Iraq and Iran

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The United States Should NOT be a Neutral Mediator in the Arab-Israel Conflict

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