On Christmas Eve, The New York Times chose to publish an opinion letter by the mayor of Gaza City, Yahya Sarraj. Sarraj was appointed to his role by the ruling authority of Gaza, Hamas.
Hamas was launched in 1987 as the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its 1988 charter is the most antisemitic foundational charter ever written, calling for the killing of Jews as a religious obligation by the world’s Muslims. Palestinians elected Hamas to 58% of the parliament in 2006 with this genocidal charter. On October 2023, it made good on its promise to Palestinians with the invasion and brutal slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel.
The Times figured that it would give its Sunday platform to a member of this U.S.-designated terrorist organization, as a form of support that people assume only comes from TikTok. Sarraj got to plead his case that Israel is attacking a peace-loving enclave. The dozens of squares, schools, buildings and tournaments named after terrorists in and around Gaza City were not listed. The polls which show that the vast majority of Gazans have consistently embraced killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel since 2000, was also omitted.
Leaders of the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS were not given a prominent platform at The New York Times. But they hadn’t just killed over a thousand Jews.
ACTION ITEM
Write to letters@nytimes.com “Giving a platform to a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization is unlawful and immoral. You have put the lives of millions of Jews in danger by airing Hamas propaganda.”
Palestinians conducted a poll about reactions to Gaza’s October 7 massacre that killed 1,200 people in Israel, injured thousands and took 240 hostages. The results showed West Bank Arabs (83.1%) much more in favor of the butchering of Jews than Gazans (63.6%). The popularity of Hamas was much higher in the West Bank (87.7%) than in Gaza (59.6%).
It also showed that West Bank Arabs being more committed to destroying Israel and retaking all of “historical Palestine.”
This poll was conducted specifically about the massacre, and before a single Arab prisoner had been released from Israeli jails.
The New York Times decided to sanitize the Palestinian Arabs’ celebration of the raping of women and deliberate mutilation and killing of children and the elderly. It ran a headline that West Bank Arabs prefer Hamas over Fatah which runs the Palestinian Authority because the political-terrorist groups was able to free prisoners. #AlternativeFacts with a sick #AlternativeNarrative.
New York Times article with headline that lies about motivation of West Bank Arabs joy about the murder of Jews (November 29, 2023)
Since late 2021, several new West Bank terrorist groups emerged which have killed dozens in Israel and Area C of the West Bank, the Lions’ Den and Jenin Brigades being the two most popular. Many have members affiliated with Hamas who may have been planning a similar October 7 attack in the densely populated areas in Israel which could have killed 10,000 people. Israel’s raids to capture and kill these cells over the past 18 months likely averted an even worse massacre.
Over the past two years, West Bank Arab attacks have been more numerous and more lethal than attacks from Jews, even according to United Nations reports. In the recent reporting period before October 7, West Bank Arabs killed five times as many Jews (10) than West Bank Arabs killed by Jews (2).
But that narrative of fact was dead-and-buried in the Times. In their article whitewashing Arab violence in the West Bank, it wrote about two young Arabs who threw stones at Israeli soldiers who were freed from prison.
The New York Times is trying to paint West Bank Arabs as peaceful people “resisting” the Israeli army, “resorting” to violent groups like Hamas because they successfully free Arabs unjustly incarcerated. It is the language of socialists and anti-colonialists, meant to inflame hatred for the Jewish State as a falsely-labeled “European colonial state,” as preached in universities. It is a script and rallying cry of the alt-left, which wants to “normalize and globalize Hamas” to “globalize the intifada” in order to destroy other countries like the United States and Australia.
Over the past two years, West Bank Arabs launched several new terrorist groups, attacked and murdered Jews at a pace which dwarves attacks by Israeli “settlers”, and just now celebrated the heinous slaughter of civilians in Israel on October 7. The West Bankers have come to have “a greater confidence in the efficacy of armed struggle,” as described in a December 2022 poll, and believe that Israel will soon cease to exist.
Those plain truths are at odds with the socialist Times which prefers to paint West Bank Arabs as a small biblical David to Israel’s Goliath, scrapping by throwing stones at soldiers, rather than reveal the sickening bloodlust.
On June 27, 2023, months before the October 7 massacre, James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute spoke to the United Nations Security Council and said “that a recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favoring armed struggle. That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” That sentiment came from a staunchly pro-Palestinian pollster BEFORE October 7 to the jaundiced United Nations, where rarely a criticism of Palestinians can be heard.
There is a deep “tragic deformity” in Palestinian society that celebrates the mutilation and slaughter of Jews, and a vile deformity in socialist media which sanitizes Palestinian Arabs’ violence to prop them as ready for a state. It may be a symptom of a post-factual world which prefers narratives about underdogs or simply outright antisemitism. Perhaps both.
Either way, it is definitely coming for the Jewish State and diaspora Jews.
The New York Times has a long disgraceful history minimizing antisemitism both during Arab-Israeli wars and in every day life. It similarly highlights Islamophobia, even though Muslims in America suffer a fraction of Jewish hate crimes.
The paper’s jaundiced coverage is continuing during the 2023 Gaza War.
In two separate incidents, a Muslim boy and an elderly Jewish man were killed in the United States. The Times reporting on the tragedies were polar opposites.
For the killing of the Muslim boy, the Times referred to it as an active event with “fatally stabbed…attack” while the Jewish man passively “died.” One situation was clearly out-of-the-blue killing a child, while the 69-year old Jew was cast as partially to blame in an “altercation at dueling protests.”
In describing the attack on a Muslim, the Times called it an “Anti-Muslim Attack” and “a hate crime,” but no such language was used for the murdered Jew.
The uncle of the Muslim boy is featured face-on and his name was used. For the Jew, the picture was of just the backs of several people. His name and age went unmentioned.
The effort to minimize antisemitism is not accidental, as the paper actively tries to tell its declining readership that anti-Zionism and antisemitism have nothing to do with each other, and antisemitism is not really that big a problem.
Take a look at past NY Times coverage to appreciate this deformity.
Hamas, the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, is seemingly getting some media support from The New York Times.
Just two weeks after the brutal slaughter of 1,400 people in Israel in an unprovoked attack, The Times is softening language around the evil group.
Despite raping women and dragging them by the hair through the streets, cutting the throats of children, shooting old people at bus stops, burning families alive, and kidnapping over 200 people in one of the largest hostage seizures ever, the paper decided to not call the group “terrorists” or even “militants.”
Cover of New York Times on Saturday October 21, 2023
In two articles on the cover page of the paper, the paper referred to “Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza” and “Hamas, the group that controls the territory.”
It’s as though the Times thinks Hamas is a co-op board.
In 2014, after the terrorist group Boko Haram kidnapped 200 Nigerian girls, the Times was apoplectic. It wrote that Boko Haram was a “ruthless Islamist group” which committed a “horrifying abduction.” And the group didn’t even beheaded anyone.
Israel is still trying to identify the victims of Hamas’s atrocities, with people so dismembered and incinerated beyond identification, that two weeks on, the number of dead and missing is unknown. But the media has moved on to their victims of preference.
As Israel pursues maximum justice for the savagery of Hamas, New York’s liberal paper is distancing the terrorist group from its evil roots and actions. It’s a form of antisemitism in which justice for Jewish victims is being reframed as an unprovoked attack on 2 million helpless and innocent residents of Gaza.
The New York Times publishes a large “Opinion” section each Sunday which typically features a dozen opinions which tilt to its far-left readership. On occasion, it publishes center and right perspectives to provide readers a wider view of a situation.
In the aftermath of the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust, the Times opted to serve up exclusively left-wing opinions which essentially offered that Palestinians really aren’t at fault for the October 7 atrocities, and even if they were somewhat to blame for the massacre, you cannot take it out on them.
The New York Times opinion section on October 15, 2023
Using Peter Beinart, an anti-Zionist as the main feature on the cover to discuss “How did we get here and how do we get out of here?” was setting the stage for a pile of bile. Another contributor listed on top of the front page was “Nicholas Kristof on how bombing civilians promotes extremism” was certainly going to be a blame-the-victim spectacle.
All this, while Israelis were still trying to identify the dead who were burned to death and hacked to pieces.
There were seven articles in all. All gave the same message of “why can’t we all just get along?” and blamed religious radicals in Israel and Palestinian territories for all the death and hatred. But especially the Israelis. As the stronger party, calling them out serves the progressive idols.
These are opinion pages, so people can repeat each other in their echo chamber to make them feel as if their opinions have miraculously transformed into facts all they want.
Alas, it is not so.
As a stark example, take one paragraph from Kristoff’s piece “What Does Destroying Gaza Solve?” He decided to veer from enlightened-snobbery opinion to give statistics from a Palestinian poll. He lied outright when he wrote:
“Gazans voted in Hamas in 2006 but have a mixed view of it, with 70 percent saying in a July poll that they would like Hamas to hand over administration of the territory to the much more moderate Palestinian Authority. Some 62 percent of people in Gaza said this summer they wanted to continue the ceasefire with Israel.”
Sounds like Gazans have moderated, right? It’s a total fabrication.
79% of Gazans are in favor of forming new “armed groups such as the ‘Lions’ Den’ and the ‘Jenin Battalion,’ which do not take orders from the PA and are not part of the PA security services”
55% of Gazans believe that they will “recover Palestine”, meaning take over all of Israel
78% of Hamas-supporters believe Israel won’t exist in 25 years
If presidential elections were held today, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would win with 65% of the vote in Gaza
“Level of satisfaction with the performance of president Abbas stands at 17% and dissatisfaction at 80%…. Moreover, a vast majority of 80% of the public wants president Abbas to resign while only 16% want him to remain in office.”
“31% say Hamas is most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people while 21% think Fatah under president Abbas is the most deserving”
“63% say the PA is a burden on the Palestinian people”
“Only 28% support the two-state solution”
“53% support a return to an armed intifada”
“52% believe that armed action is the best way to end occupation”
Does that sound like a region that wants to hand administration over to the Palestinian Authority or supports a ceasefire? That has moved away from armed conflict and wants to pursue coexistence with Israel?
Even an opinion piece needs fact-checking when completely false data is presented to bolster the opinion, and the Times is either incompetent or complicit in lying about Gazans actual evil intentions.
The Beinart piece was a work of inversion of cause-and-effect. He blamed the frustration of Gazans being under blockade for causing their violence, rather than Gazans feeling that all of Israel is rightfully theirs and want to kick out the “colonial invader” Jews.
The blockade of Gaza started in 2007 when Hamas killed members of Fatah and seized the area. The formation of Hamas, with its antisemitic genocidal charter was written in 1988, roughly twenty years earlier. There’s a clear cause-and-effect and getting the sweet cover picture promotion by the Times doesn’t change facts.
To answer the question posed on the cover “how do we get out of here?” requires being honest about the situation to produce possible solutions. The New York Times believes that openly lying to its readership about a peaceful Gazan population under the domination of a handful of radical Islamists will produce a solution. It will not. The media lies will only produce more anger against Israel, especially as civilians in Gaza die in Israel’s attempt to save hostages, bring the Hamas perpetrators to justice, and end the threat posed from Gazan terrorist enclave.
ACTION ITEM
Write to The New York Times letters@nytimes.com: “The Kristof statistics about Gazans favoring the Palestinian Authority and a ceasefire are complete lies as shown in the June PCPSR poll.”
October 7, 2023 will be marked in Israeli and Jewish history as one of the most horrible days in modern times. Not since the Holocaust had such Jews experienced such savagery.
It would be hard to understand that from looking at pictures in The New York Times coverage of the Hamas massacre.
The attack was featured on the front page as well as in two other pages with many color pictures.
Front page of NY Times on October 8, 2023
Four pictures were featured under the headline “Palestinian Militants Stage Attack On Israel.” The four pictures included two of Palestinians attacking Israel, one with rockets and another with a bulldozer ripping down a fence. The other had an Israeli soldier walking past “bodies of Israelis killed by militants in the city of Sderot,” which gave no clarity as to whether the Israelis were soldiers, like the one standing in the picture, or civilians. The last picture had people in Gaza carrying “the body of a slain militant.”
From the pictures on the cover, one would imagine a battle between armed opponents, Palestinian militants and the Israeli army.
Page 12 would build on this theme.
Page 12 of The New York Times on October 8, 2023
Three small pictures on the top of the page show missile strikes and debris. One shows an Israeli town being hit and two pictures show Gaza being struck. The large picture in the center of the page has an Israeli woman, shown from the back, running for cover from a “rocket siren”, and the bottom picture has young Palestinian Arabs looking up at the sky from the “sound of airstrikes.”
The picture coverage started to move to civilians, with the war being a battle from the skies.
Page 13 of NY Times on October 8, 2023
The final page of coverage continued with the theme of rocket fire, with a large picture on top showing a strike in Gaza, then a small picture of a house in Israel with damage. Below the fold was an Israeli family running from “a site that was hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip.”
This pictorial narrative is utterly and completely disgraceful.
Well over 1,000 Palestinian terrorists stormed into Israel and slaughtered over 1,000 people. They set fire to homes and burned people alive. They shot up people in the streets and in their beds. The raped women and dragged them through the streets. The Arabs chopped the heads off babies and soldiers.
It was a vicious slaughter committed by people in close proximity, mostly of armed Hamas terrorists against civilians.
All unprovoked, in an attack on the Jewish Sabbath and holiday of Simchat Torah.
The New York Times attempt at showing a similar number of pictures of damage from rockets in both Israel and Gaza right after the massacre distorts the entire narrative of the grotesque slaughter of Jewish families and young people, to warrant being called antisemitic and libelous.
The New York Times belittled Mayor Adams’ flowery compliments of Israelis.
WHAT HAPPENED: New York City Mayor Eric Adams visited Israel and extolled the people of Israel for overcoming hardships and creating an incredible country. The New York Times not only ignored the mayor’s compliments to Israeli Jews, it wrote that his comments were incomprehensible.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams in Tel Aviv, Israel, August 2023
THE TAKEAWAY: The liberal paper feels that the Democratic Mayor is too illiberal and the Jewish State is unworthy of praise. It wants to make sure that its readership does not get facts but the paper’s jaundiced narrative.
WHY IT MATTERS: The NYT is saturating its news articles with its biases. It will undermine political candidates, countries and people it dislikes, even when simply relating a quote. It is perfecting #FakeNews and deepening distrust in the media.
DETAILS: New York City Mayor Eric Adams went to Israel for a few days in August 2023, and shared how deeply impressed he was with the food, technology and people. As he wound up an event discussing battling antisemitism, the current debates about reworking the power of the judiciary and the “start up nation” which remarkably produced dozens of billion dollar companies (“unicorns”), he said the following to the crowd:
“Hard is starting this country being surrounded by people who hated you. Hard is figuring out how to do drop irrigation so you can start growing your own products. Hard is building and being not only a start-up nation, but now leading a number of start-ups you’re seeing across the globe. And the reason you’ve survived layers and layers of difficulties and you’re still here, it is not because of the soil but because you’re made of good quality. It’s the people, folks!”
In covering the story, the NYT offered that Adams saying “Israel is a unicorn,” is “a metaphor open to interpretation.”
Unless this reporter has been living under a rock, everyone knows that a “unicorn” is used to describe companies which have achieved billion dollar-status. Israel has a remarkable number of them, despite its small size.
Even if the Times is clueless, how can anyone misinterpret “you’re made of good quality”?
New York Times belittling compliment to Israelis, August 26, 2023
WRITE THE TIMES “Your ongoing coverage of Israel is pathetic”
New York City is home to the largest Jewish diaspora. It is also home to some of the worst antisemitism in the world.
According to the ADL, 2022 was the worst reported year of antisemitic attacks since it started tracking incidents in 1979, and New York State and New York City had record breaking numbers of incidents. The NYPD data showed that Jews were the most targeted ethnic group by a wide margin.
The city now has members on the city council (left-wing DSA member Shahana Hanif) who refuse to condemn Jew hatred in the city saying Jews don’t care for anyone but themselves. Two DSA-supported members of congress from the NYC area, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman are both openly hostile to the Jewish State, a phenomenon never seen in the metropolitan area’s history.
So it was curious to see how the news reacted to New York City mayor Eric Adams visiting Israel in August 2023.
The Jewish sites zeroed in on the current wave of Jew hatred. The Times of Israel led with the mayor coming to Jerusalem to combat antisemitism. The Algemeiner led with the same, and added a bit about learning about Israeli technology. The Forward also focused on the same issues. The Jerusalem Post captured Adam’s first day of touring discussing his meeting with various faith groups to fight against antisemitism.
The New York Times went in the opposite direction. It made the trip predominantly about Adams seeking reelection and wanting to win over Orthodox Jewish voters in New York. The NYT article didn’t delve into the trip’s focus on antisemitism until the third to last paragraph. Much of the article was about political crises and New Yorkers being unhappy about the direction of the Jewish State “who fear Israel is abandoning its democratic traditions.” When it wrote about the mayor’s visit to an interfaith group it was to “address global problems, such as migrant crises and wars,” not Jew hatred.
While The New York Post also led with a focus on politics, it had a very different narrative than the NYT. It spent time discussing antisemitism towards the top of the article: “Adams spent Monday speaking with Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Druze representatives in Israel, saying now is the time to act on one’s faith, according to the Times of Israel. “What we learn in our churches, synagogues and mosques cannot remain in the sterilized environment of our places of faith,” the mayor said. Hizzoner’s visit also comes as antisemitic violence continues throughout the five boroughs, although hate crimes citywide declined by approximately 8% compared to last year, based on a recent NYPD report.” It tied the meeting with interfaith group to fighting antisemitism, not migrant crises as the Times opted to write.
The exact same story told from three different perspectives: Jewish publications focused on rampant antisemitism in NYC; New York’s right-leaning paper implied a city broadly supporting Israel and worried about antisemitism; and the left-wing Times which conveyed that New Yorkers generally disliking the current Israeli government and not very worried about global or local antisemitism.
The media writes for its audience, and The New York Times’ readers do not like Israel and aren’t very concerned about antisemitism.
CNN posted an article called “Palestinian leader calls on world to ‘protect us,’ and his people respond with bitter laughter,” which highlighted how much the Palestinian Arab street dislikes its acting President Mahmoud Abbas. It cited various media posts that mocked the old man and his visit to the UNRWA camp in Jenin which housed Arab terrorists killed by the Israel Defense Forces.
The article continued that Palestinian people had “frustrations and aspirations” that were not met by the unpopular leader, and referenced a poll conducted by PCPSR in September 2022 that showed how dissatisfied people were with his leadership.
There have been three polls since that time, so it is unclear why CNN chose to highlight the one from September 2022. In that poll, Palestinian support for another intifada was at 48% (Q46_5), 56% favored NOT engaging in peace talks under international sponsorship (Q55) and 45% supported killing Jewish civilians inside Israel (Q65). The June 2023 poll showed an even greater desire for violence, with 53% supporting an intifada (Q38_5) and 57% support violence against Israeli Jews (Q70).
CNN wrote an article that made Palestinian Arabs “aspirations” seem peaceful and “frustrated” by an inept leader who has not advanced their appeal for sovereignty. The reality is that Arabs’ aspiration is for a land free of Jews and their embrace of violent jihad to achieve such aims.
The New York Times wrote an article about deaths by drowning on July 8, 2023. It made sure to follow its particular progressive editorial bent while quoting statistics from the Center for Disease Control.
The Times wrote that CDC research “shows that Black children between ages 5 and 9 are 2.6 times more likely to drown in swimming pools than white children, and those between ages 10 and 14 are 3.6 times more likely to drown. Disparities are also present in most age groups for Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Native American and Alaska Native children.” Those CDC facts fit well within the Times orientation of a racially discriminatory society that hurts minorities.
Yet the Times failed to quote another statistics from the CDC that “Nearly 80% of people who die from drowning are male,” meaning males are four times more likely to drown than females.
Picture from CDC website about drownings
We should all want to prevent everyone from drowning. That the NY Times should pen an article to exclude the disproportionate number of male drownings highlights a deeply ingrained and noxious bias that has taken over the paper.
First One Through 