Tag Archives: New York Times

Hey NY Times, Nerdeen Kiswani Wants Zionists Killed and Israel Destroyed

Posted on by
Reply

Nerdeen Kiswani is not quiet about her views. She wants the Jewish State obliterated and Zionists killed. She says it openly and proudly in front of loud cheering crowds.

So why did The New York Times soften her stance? Why did it say that she was simply assembling “protests to draw attention to the suffering of Palestinians,” when her entire movement is about the destruction of Israel?

“I hope that pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime!” – Nerdeen Kiswani, Youtube, Aug 4 2021

Why did the Times make it sound like pro-Israel groups were uniquely offended that “she supports the liberation of the Palestinian people “by any means necessary,” including armed resistance.”?

“Israel must be annihilated.” – Nerdeen Kiswani, Instagram, Mar 3 2017

Why did the Times use so much energy and so many words to say “that her activism opposes Israel, its policies and its structure as a Jewish State,” without saying that she supports targeting Jewish organizations and the annihilation of the only Jewish State?

“We marched today, we took over the streets and we visited multiple Zionist settler foundations. Multiple. We let them know we know where they’re at. We know where they work. We’re gonna find out more about where they’re at too. And we’re gonna go after them.” – Nerdeen Kiswani, YouTube, Jun 11 2021

Why didn’t the Times explicitly state that Kiswani endorses US designated terrorist groups and individuals?

Picture on left is Kiswani with pin of Abu Obaida, a spokesman for Hamas, while protesting in front of a synagogue in Teaneck, NJ on April 1, 2024 (from ADL website)

On June 10, 2024, Kiswani led a protest outside a memorial exhibit in downtown New York City about the Nova Music Festival where she said that young partygoers enjoying music was “like having a rave right next to the gas chambers during the Holocaust,” mocking not only the hundreds of murdered youth but millions of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Kiswani doesn’t hide her love of the genocidal antisemitic group Hamas. She posts her fondness to the public.

Kiswani post of a child kissing an armed Hamas terrorist, like those that burned Jewish families alive

In short, Kiswani is a proud supporter of terrorism against Jews and American allies. Yet The New York Times made it appear that her stances were simply pro-Palestinian, which some members of the pro-Israel community found offensive.

The reality is that a pro-Israel “extremist” allegedly planned an attack on a pro-Palestinian “extremist.” But the Times editorialized by showing the smiling face of an “activist” worried about the “suffering” of her people. Such is the alt-left embrace of the toxic “deformity in Palestinian culture.”

Whitewashing Antisemitism at the NY Times: Cornell University

Posted on by
Reply

What happened at Cornell University is not complicated.

A student threatened to bomb, stab and rape Jews and was eventually convicted. A professor described the mass slaughter of Jews and the burning of families as “exhilarating.” Jewish students faced open hostility in spaces that were supposed to protect them.

That is the story.

But you would not know any of it from reading The New York Times.

There, the story is something else entirely.

It is about leverage and negotiations. About a university navigating pressure from Washington, in which “[t]he principal incentive for Cornell to settle was to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in research money.”

Antisemitism is not the subject. It is merely the backdrop.

Once Jew-hatred is relegated to the background, everything else falls neatly into place. Cornell is no longer responding to hatred; it is managing a dispute. The federal government is no longer addressing civil rights concerns; it is applying political pressure. The moral stakes dissolve into process and incentives.

This is not omission by accident. It is construction by design.

Because centering what actually happened – explicit threats against Jews, open celebration of their murder – would force a conclusion that cannot be comfortably absorbed into the paper’s worldview: that serious, virulent antisemitism has taken root inside institutions it instinctively protects.

So the frame shifts.

Facts that clarify are excluded, while context that softens is elevated, and the reader is guided, carefully, away from the obvious.

It is a familiar pattern.

When antisemitism comes from ideological adversaries – white supremacists, Christian nationalists, “your father’s antisemitism” – mainstream media names it plainly and condemns without hesitation. It is the headline, the thesis, the moral center.

But when it emerges from favored spaces – elite campuses, activist movements, intellectual circles – the noxious hatred disappears. It is reframed as protest, as speech, as tension, as politics. Anything but what it is.

Because if every instance of antisemitism were treated with the same clarity, the same urgency, the same willingness to name what is happening, then the victims of preference would face unwanted scrutiny.

So it is managed instead.

Turn a story about Jews being threatened into a story about money. The antisemitic horde combines the two naturally anyway.

The New York Times is no longer just erasing antisemitic actions by majority-minorities and woke institutions, it is participating in the targeting of Jews for future attacks.

When Jews Are Attacked, The New York Times Worries About Jihadists

Posted on by
Reply

A man attempted to massacre Jews at a synagogue and preschool in Michigan.

He drove a truck into the building, fired a rifle, and carried explosives and gasoline. Inside were more than a hundred children and staff. Only the quick response of security guards prevented what could have been a mass slaughter of Jewish children.

That should have been the story.

Instead, in its coverage of the attack, The New York Times quickly shifted the emotional center somewhere else. The paper highlighted concern that Muslims or members of the local Arab community had “anxiety,” worried they might face might face “blowback” after the attack.

Pause for a moment and consider the moral inversion.

A man tries to murder Jewish children in a synagogue, and the newspaper of record worries about the social consequences for people who share the attacker’s background, and “communities everywhere.. confronting rising hate.”

Would this framing appear in any other circumstance?

If a white nationalist attempted to burn down a Black church, would the central concern in the article be whether white Americans might face uncomfortable scrutiny?

If a neo-Nazi attacked a mosque, would journalists pivot immediately to the anxiety of Christians worried about backlash?

Of course not.

The victims would be the story. The ideology behind the violence would be examined directly and without hesitation.

But when Jews are attacked – especially by jihadists – the narrative too often drifts away from them.

The Reality the Coverage Avoids

There is another uncomfortable fact that often disappears in these discussions.

In the United States, Jewish institutions have repeatedly been targets of ideological violence.

Synagogues, kosher markets, Jewish schools, and community centers have been attacked by extremists motivated by antisemitism and/or jihadist ideology.

The list is tragically familiar:

  • the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh
  • the Poway synagogue shooting
  • the Jersey City kosher market attack
  • the Colleyville synagogue hostage crisis

Across Europe the pattern is even clearer: the Toulouse Jewish school massacre, the Hyper Cacher supermarket attack in Paris, and numerous synagogue shootings and plots across the continent have been by jihadists.

Yet the reverse pattern is almost nonexistent.

There is no recurring history in the United States of Jews entering mosques to massacre Muslims, no wave of Jewish attackers targeting Muslim schools or grocery stores.

The asymmetry matters.

Jewish institutions build security fences, hire armed guards, and train for active shooters not because of paranoia, but because experience has taught them they are frequent targets.

The Michigan synagogue had security for exactly this reason.

Without it, the story might have been hundreds of funerals.

A Pattern of Moral Softening

The New York Times’ framing of the Michigan attack fits a broader pattern that has become increasingly visible in recent years.

When jihadist-inspired violence occurs, the language often softens. Motives become vague. Ideology dissolves into references to “grievances,” “tensions,” or the emotional distress of communities associated with the attacker.

Select context is provided for the perpetrator that make him appear a victim, such as mourning the loss of family members in the Middle East, without sharing that those family members were members of jihadi terrorist groups.

This is no longer news but distortion.

Journalism is supposed to clarify reality, not obscure it. When coverage instinctively protects the social sensitivities of the attacker’s community while barely dwelling on the intended victims, it creates a moral fog.

No serious observer believes entire communities are responsible for the crimes of individuals. That principle should remain unquestioned.

But shifting sympathy away from the Jewish victims of an attack to the jihadi attacker is a failure to report the truth clearly for the purpose of a twisted narrative. One that continues to put the most attacked minority-minority in the crosshairs while falsely painting their most frequent attackers as the ones needing sympathy.

Jihadi-washing and the Ideology the Times Won’t Name

Posted on by
2

A bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion followed a pattern Americans have seen before: young men radicalized online, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and attempting violence in the name of jihad.

But if you read the The New York Times, you might never notice the pattern at all.

Two men were charged after attempting the ISIS-inspired bombing near Gracie Mansion. Prosecutors say the suspects pledged allegiance to ISIS and threw improvised explosive devices toward a protest crowd and police. The bombs failed to detonate, but the casualties could have been catastrophic. The bombing suspects were 18-year-old Emir Balat, a high school student, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19.

The plot followed a model ISIS has promoted for years: radicalize individuals already living in Western societies and encourage them to strike where they live. No training camps. No command structure. Just ideology delivered through propaganda, social media and Muslim countries money in American schools.

America has already seen the results.

In 2015, a radicalized couple carried out the San Bernardino attack. Syed Rizwan Farook was 28 and Tashfeen Malik was 29.

In 2016, Omar Mateen, 29, murdered forty nine people in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando while declaring loyalty to ISIS.

In 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, also 29, drove a rented truck onto the Hudson River bike path in Manhattan in the 2017 New York City truck attack, killing eight people and leaving a note pledging allegiance to ISIS.

This pattern is not accidental. ISIS propaganda deliberately targets young Muslims in their late teens and twenties, the age when identity and grievance can be shaped by ideology. The strategy is not to import terrorists into the West. It is to cultivate them here.

Yet when the New York Times recently referenced the Hudson River attack, it described it simply as “a terrorist driving a truck killed eight people.”

The ideology behind the attack vanished from the story.

When the ideology behind violence disappears, the violence itself begins to look random. But it is not random. It is ideological.

The same pattern of New York Times’ language appears elsewhere.

After the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas, the New York Times described social media posts celebrating the attack as being “supportive of the Palestinian cause.” One of the examples involved Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had liked posts praising the attack shortly after it occurred. At the time, Duwaji was 26 years old.

October 7 was a terrorist assault in which more than a thousand Israelis were murdered and civilians were kidnapped. Describing celebration of that massacre as support for a “cause” transforms the event itself, and radical jihadi terrorism disappears.

ISIS and Hamas operate in different places and pursue different strategies, but they draw from the same radical Islamist narrative that frames Jews as enemies and violence as religious duty.

Online, that narrative increasingly reaches the same audience: young people in Western societies, including young Muslims searching for identity and purpose.

In New York the consequences are already visible. According to the New York City Police Department, Jews consistently account for the largest share of hate crime victims in the city, far out of proportion to their share of the population.

We now face two related problems.

First, there is an ideology problem. Radical Islamist movements openly encourage violence against Western societies and portray Jews as enemies in a religious struggle.

Second, there is a sanitization problem. When that ideology is softened, blurred, or renamed as a “cause,” the public cannot see the pattern.

San Bernardino.
Orlando.
The Hudson River bike path.
Bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion.
Young people celebrating Muslim massacres of Jews.

A sick 60% of Americans aged 18-24 polled said the October 7 massacre was “justified,” 50% support Hamas, and 51% said Israel should end and be handed to Hamas

Different attacks with the same ideological current reaching the same young audience, and pointing toward the same enemies.

The violence makes headlines yet the ideology poisoning western youth is being whitewashed. That is jihadi-washing, and it endangers us all.

The New York Times Calls the Massacre of Jews a “Cause”

Posted on by
1

Words matter. Especially when a newspaper chooses them carefully.

In a recent article, The New York Times wrote that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Ms. Duwaji had “liked Instagram posts supportive of the Palestinian cause immediately after the attacks,” referring to October 7.

Read that sentence again.

October 7 was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas terrorists murdered about 1,200 people, raped women, burned families alive, and kidnapped 251 civilians.

Yet approval of posts celebrating that moment is described by the Times as support for a cause.

A cause sounds political. Principled. Even noble.

But immediately after October 7 the images circulating online were not debates about borders or statehood. They were videos of murdered Israelis, kidnapped civilians, and triumphant Hamas fighters.

Calling appreciation of those posts “support for the Palestinian cause” launders the meaning of the act. The language turns approval of atrocities into activism. And it did the spin repeatedly.

Then the article pivots.

The Times raises concerns about a Jewish congressman from New York because his wife had “liked or reposted” posts from right wing accounts that some people considered hateful or insensitive.

So approval of posts DIRECTLY ABOUT a terrorist massacre is softened, while a Jewish public official becomes controversial through a chain of ASSOCIATIONS.

One situation involves praise for the moment Jews were slaughtered. The other involves subjective offense. Yet the newspaper treats them as comparable.

And this pattern did not begin here.

For years the Times has regularly described Israel’s elected government as “the most right wing in its history,” a political judgment embedded in news reporting. At the same time, the paper often avoids stating a simple fact: Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

So the judgmental language is applied freely to Israel and the factual label is avoided for Hamas.

Frighteningly, the framing has sunk even lower. The New York Times has moved from absolving terrorists to sanctifying the antisemitic genocidal terror itself as a “cause.”

It is a moral inversion that reflects a deeper rot in how the story is being told.

And it arrives at a moment when hostility toward Jews is rising once again across the world, seemingly with the endorsement of The New York Times.

Names and Narrative: Administered There. Occupied Here.

Posted on by
1

The choice of words reveals more than the facts.

In a recent article about Iranian influence among Shiite communities, The New York Times described Kashmir this way:

“Many Shiites live in Indian-administered Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region with cultural ties to Iran that go back centuries.”

Pause for a moment and consider what is happening in that sentence.

The New York Times wrote about Kashmir in a manner totally different than how it writes about the West Bank

Kashmir is not a settled territory. It is one of the longest running territorial disputes in the world. Since 1947, the region has been fought over by India and Pakistan, with both claiming sovereignty and both controlling different portions of the territory.

Yet the phrasing chosen by the Times is calm and almost pastoral. Kashmir is “administered.” The Shiite population is described as having “cultural ties to Iran that go back centuries.” The wording conveys history, continuity, and legitimacy. It sounds organic, even inevitable.

Now compare that language with how the same newspaper routinely describes the territory known historically as Judea and Samaria, today commonly referred to as the West Bank.

There the language changes dramatically.

Israel does not “administer.” Israel “occupies.”

Jewish communities are rarely described as having ancient ties. Instead readers are told that settlements are new and “considered illegal by most countries.”

Notice what disappears in that framing. The region called the “West Bank” only since 1967, contains places that formed the very center of Jewish civilization for more than a millennium. Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shiloh appear throughout the Hebrew Bible and in continuous Jewish historical memory. The kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah rose and fell in these hills long before modern states existed.

Before Islam existed.

In other words, if the standard applied to Kashmir were applied consistently, readers might encounter sentences like this:

“Many Jews live in Israeli-administered Area C in Judea and Samaria, a region with cultural and historical ties to the Jewish people that go back more than three thousand years.”

But that sentence never appears.

Instead, the history is compressed into the language of illegality and occupation, as if the Jewish connection to the land began in 1967 rather than in antiquity.

This is not merely semantic. Language frames legitimacy. When one disputed territory is described through the lens of administration and centuries-old cultural ties, while another is defined primarily through the vocabulary of occupation and illegality, readers absorb very different impressions of the conflict.

The facts on the ground may be complicated in both cases. Kashmir is disputed. So is the West Bank.

But journalism that claims neutrality should apply the same descriptive standards to both.

Otherwise the language itself becomes the argument.

New York Times Shows How To Mainstream Antisemitism

Posted on by
1

Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, wrote a piece called “How Israel Lost America,” which made it sound like a country actively did something to turn Americans on it. She wrote:

“Conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them.”

Pause there.

The claim that Israel manipulates America into war is not new. It echoes dual loyalty accusations against Jews who support Israel. It echoes the suspicion of hidden influence. It echoes the charge that Jews entangle great powers in foreign conflicts.

To say such conspiracies will flourish is observation.
To say they contain “a grain of truth” is validation.

That sentence does not merely predict antisemitic rhetoric. It lends it credibility.

The column builds toward that moment.

Goldberg wrote:

“Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters.”

Israel behaves appallingly – seemingly against America’s values and/or interests – and then pulls out the antisemitism card to try to silence critics, and that combination arms the Jew haters.

The causal arrow points away from the antisemite and toward the Jewish state. Hatred becomes consequence. Antisemitism becomes reaction. And it becomes so, because Israel itself decided to flag it, not the Jew hater.

To give credence to her theory, Goldberg quotes Jeremy Ben-Ami of the left-wing group J Street, warning of “blowback” when antisemitism is invoked in political disputes:

“You’re going to get some blowback against the people doing that.”

Again, antisemitism is framed as backlash. The focus shifts from the existence of anti-Jewish hostility to whether Jews and Israel are provoking it.

Layer these claims together and the pattern emerges:

Israel behaves badly.
Antisemitism claims are overused.
Blowback follows.
Conspiracies flourish.
There is “a grain of truth.”

The article never touches upon the truth of Gazans slaughtering Jews. The column doesn’t write about the antisemitic genocidal Hamas Charter. Goldberg doesn’t discuss the anti-Israel mobs in America celebrating the slaughter of elderly Jews, raping of Jewish women, and the burning of Jewish families alive. Other than to validate their feelings.

But the most consequential move in the column is quieter.

Israelis are discussed in ways readers instinctively map onto Jews. Israeli Arabs are transformed into “Israel’s Palestinian citizenry”, separating them rhetorically from the category of “Israelis.” Roughly a quarter of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, yet that demographic fact disappears from the frame. Israeli Arabs are no longer part of the “Israel” that is “losing America” because they are really part of the counterparty in the war. That means that only Israeli Jews are the problem. The contrast is especially stark as the world cannot conceive of a “Palestinian Jew.”

The result is a subtle transformation. The conflict shifts from a dispute between a sovereign state (Israel) and a national movement (Stateless Arabs from Palestine, SAPs, seeking a new state) into something older and more volatile: Jews versus non-Jews in the Middle East.

Once that transformation occurs, every Israeli policy becomes Jewish policy. Every American alignment becomes Jewish influence. The state and the people fuse.

Now return to the “grain of truth.”

If Israel has already been rhetorically collapsed into Jews, then the suggestion that conspiracies about Israeli manipulation contain truth does not land on a neutral government. It lands on a people historically accused of secret power.

This is how respectable language normalizes ancient suspicions. The words are measured. The tone is analytic. The effect is corrosive.

Criticizing Netanyahu is legitimate. Opposing war is legitimate. Debating American foreign policy is legitimate. People do it all of the time about leaders and policy for all countries all over the world.

Yet people don’t turn the vile behavior of Iran into criticism of all Muslims. People don’t say Catholics run the drug cartels of Colombia, where a greater percentage of the country is Catholic than Israel is Jewish. People do not make people of faith the subject, unless it’s Jews.

Framing antisemitism as a foreseeable reaction to Israel’s – which we are informed should be read as “Jews'” – conduct while granting partial legitimacy to manipulation conspiracies crosses a line. And it leads to a public that no longer wants to combat antisemitism, as it has become conditioned to rationalize the ancient hatred.

A Capital Crime for Jews—and a Paper and World That Look Away

Posted on by
1

One fact should dominate any serious discussion of land and power in the West Bank: under Palestinian Authority law, a Palestinian who sells land to a Jew can face the death penalty.

That is not rumor or polemic. It is statute.

In areas governed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and by Hamas in Gaza, selling land to Israeli Jews is prosecuted as treason. The charge is brought under Jordanian Penal Code No. 16 of 1960 — particularly Articles 113–118 and Article 114 on aiding the enemy — still in force in the West Bank, along with the PLO Revolutionary Penal Code of 1979. A 2014 decree by Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed that such land sales constitute “collaboration with the enemy.” Courts have issued death sentences under these provisions.

The defining element is the identity of the buyer. A private real-estate transaction becomes a capital crime because the purchaser is Jewish and therefore legally framed as part of the “enemy.” Most countries reserve treason for espionage, armed rebellion, or wartime assistance to a hostile state. The Palestinian framework instead applies classic treason law to a civilian property sale — explicitly treating Jews, as a national collective, as the enemy for purposes of capital punishment.

Yet when the New York Times recently acknowledged this, it did so quietly, almost apologetically, inside an article whose primary concern was Israeli policy. The focus was not the law itself, but the risk that Israeli transparency might expose Palestinian Arabs to danger because the law exists.

That framing reverses cause and effect.

Israel was portrayed as aggressive and ideological, while the Palestinian Authority’s capital punishment for a racially defined transaction was treated as background context. Israeli officials were labeled “right-wing” and scrutinized by name. The PA, which enforces a law rooted in religious antisemitism, was spared comparable description. Its ideology went largely uninterrogated.

The article even suggested that sealed land records once served as a form of protection for Palestinians. That sentence alone concedes the nature of the regime. A governing authority from which citizens must be shielded because it may kill them for selling property to Jews is not a peace partner. It is a theocratic system enforcing ethnic taboos with lethal force.

If a Jewish state executed Jews for selling land to Arabs, that law would dominate media coverage. Instead, when Jews are the forbidden buyers, the death penalty becomes an inconvenience and the exposure of it becomes the problem.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “warns that the current trajectory on the ground, including this decision [to unseal the names of the owners of land making private real estate transactions easier], is eroding the prospect for the two-State solution. He reiterates that all Israeli settlements [the physical presence of Jews east of the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and the Kingdom of Transjordan, which specifically stated were not to be considered borders] in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and their associated regime and infrastructure, have no legal validity and are in flagrant violation of international law, including relevant United Nations resolutions.”

This is how extremist antisemitism is normalized: by treating it as an immutable local condition, while directing moral outrage at those who reveal it. When selling land to a Jew carries a death sentence, that fact is not incidental. It is the moral center of the conflict.

Who Gets Context: Ilhan Omar, Josh Shapiro, and the Media’s Double Standard

Posted on by
Reply

When Rep. Ilhan Omar was squirted with a liquid by an assailant, the story was not the act itself. The story was the atmosphere. Readers were immediately given Minnesota ICE protests, Trump’s rhetoric, the temperature of MAGA politics, and speculative motive pathways pointing firmly rightward. Political attribution preceded investigative certainty. Context did the work and assigned blame.

Yet when Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home was attacked by arson in April, context vanished.

There was no mention of the documented surge in antisemitic incidents. No reference to months of anti-Israel rhetoric saturating elite politics. No discussion of the “No Genocide Josh” campaign. No acknowledgment that the attack occurred during Passover—a fact ordinarily noted when violence intersects with religious or communal significance, but here omitted entirely. No exploration of whether sustained accusations of genocide, ethnic-cleansing chants, or the casual demonization of Jews in power might have contributed to a permissive climate. Investigative caution preceded any discussion of political backdrop.

This was not restraint. It was a choice.

The same media institutions that insist “words have consequences” suddenly treat words as irrelevant when the victim is Jewish and the potential inciters sit on the progressive side of the aisle. Context, once treated as morally essential, becomes editorially radioactive.

The pattern is no longer subtle. When violence – staining a shirt – touches a left-wing Muslim lawmaker, identity and ideology are framed as explanatory forces. When violence – arson and attempted murder of an entire family – touches a Jewish, pro-Israel official, identity is scrubbed clean and politics are declared off-limits. One story expands outward into meaning. The other … nothing.

The issue is not what motivated the attacker. The issue is why certain motivations are never even permitted to be discussed.

To contextualize the attack on Shapiro would require acknowledging uncomfortable truths: that anti-Israel rhetoric frequently curdles into antisemitism; that political incitement is not confined to one end of the spectrum; that portraying Jews as uniquely malevolent actors has consequences beyond protest slogans and campus chants. Easier, then, to say nothing.

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle had no issue clearly identifying the “Pro-Palestinian arsonist” and the support for targeting the Jewish governor, something liberal media scrubbed clean. The Steel City Food Not Bombs group is associated with the Socialist Rifle Association which seeks “to combat the toxic, right-wing, and exclusionary firearm culture in place today.”

But silence is not passive. It is editorial.

For Ilhan Omar, context was everything.
For Josh Shapiro, context was invisible.

If context is essential when violence can be plausibly traced to the right, it must be highlighted when violence engulfs Jews as well. Anything else is antisemitic choreography.

When Terror Is Rebranded as “Tension”

Posted on by
Reply

The most consequential move in the New York Times coverage was quiet. It described Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s response to pro-Hamas chants as an effort to avoid inflaming “tensions on either side of the Israel–Gaza war.” The language sounded responsible. It also erased the central reality.

The New York Times is attempting to allay fears of Jewish New Yorkers but softening image of extremist mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 17, 2026

There were no equivalent sides involved. One group openly chanted support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for mass murder, rape, kidnapping, and calls for genocide. The other side was a Jewish community standing outside its own synagogue, defending it from terrorist sympathizers.

That location matters. This did not unfold at City Hall or on a random street corner. It took place in front of a synagogue. For Jews, synagogues are communal sanctuaries, not neutral backdrops for geopolitical theater. Geography conveys intent. Bringing terror slogans to a Jewish house of worship transforms speech into targeting.

The New York Times chose to smooth this away. By framing the episode as “tension on either side,” it recast explicit support for Hamas as a legitimate pole of community expression. The chant was softened. The targeting dissolved into abstraction. Readers were reassured that calm was being preserved with statements such as “Mr. Mamdani’s team repeatedly debated the wording and fairness of the language,” as if a group chanting for the genocide of Jews required “fairness.”

This is how extremism gets normalized. When terror advocacy demands careful calibration rather than moral clarity, the boundary quietly shifts. Such framing would collapse instantly if crowds praised ISIS outside a mosque or neo-Nazis gathered at a Black church.

Protesters understand what editors seem determined to whitewash: location is the message. No amount of “Palestine-washing” can absolve the antisemitism in the Times coverage.

Reassurance purchased at the cost of truth carries consequences. It teaches extremists that intimidation can be reframed as passion and that targeted terror speech will be treated as just another civic grievance. That does not cool tensions. It redraws the line of what is acceptable.