In October 2025, after two years of war and the devastation of Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published findings that should have dominated headlines around the world:
Hamas remained the most popular Palestinian political movement.
More than half of Palestinians continued to view October 7 as the correct decision.
Nearly seven in ten opposed Hamas disarmament even if disarmament would prevent another war.
After two years of destruction, support for Hamas remained strong. Support for October 7 remained widespread. Opposition to disarmament remained overwhelming.
These findings did not come from Israeli politicians or government spokesmen. They came from Palestinians speaking to Palestinian pollsters.
Yet still, the New York Times publishes lengthy articles that the Gaza war continues because of Israel.
Readers were taken inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s political calculations. They learned about coalition pressures, right-wing ministers, territorial ambitions, and supporters who view the war as unfinished business.
By the end, a clear narrative emerged: the war continues because Israelis want it to continue. Because of greed for land, for power.
There was no mention that Gazans want Hamas to remain armed and for the war to continue. That is the political reality that keeps a ceasefire from taking hold.
The omission matters because it changes the reader’s understanding of the conflict. It places blame solely on Israel when a majority of Palestinians continue to seek the destruction of Israel despite the devastation in Gaza.
Until journalists devote the same attention to Palestinian motivations that they devote to Israeli motivations, Americans will continue receiving a false explanation for why this war endures.
Imagine a congressional candidate proposing detention camps for members of another minority group.
Imagine accusing that group of criminality, depravity, and collective guilt. Imagine that candidate finishing first in a major-party primary and having a realistic path to Congress.
What would journalists focus on? The candidate? Or everyone around her?
“turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35
That question hovered over the New York Times coverage of Texas congressional candidate Maureen Galindo. Readers learned about Republican efforts to boost her candidacy. They learned that Democratic leaders denounced her. They learned of fears that she could become a liability for her party.
What they largely did not receive was a full accounting of Galindo herself.
accused her opponent of being “paid by Zionist terrorism and trafficking.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35
The article informed readers that Galindo had made inflammatory remarks. It offered a glimpse of the controversy. Yet it spent remarkably little time exposing the breadth and character of the rhetoric that made her candidacy so extraordinary. Galindo’s own words appeared only in fragments. Her worldview remained mostly offstage.
The effect was subtle but significant. Readers were encouraged to view Galindo as a political problem rather than as a political phenomenon.
Jews run Hollywood and worship at the “synagogue of Satan.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35
The frame became Republican meddling.
The story should have been why thousands of Democratic voters found her acceptable.
Republican spending may have increased Galindo’s visibility. Democratic leaders may have condemned her. Neither explains why a candidate whose rhetoric would once have ended a political career finished first in a Democratic primary.
“All politicians who have taken Israeli money should be tried for treason” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35
That is the question the article never seriously explored.
The answer may lie in a reality that many journalists remain reluctant to confront that antisemitism is increasingly treated differently from other forms of prejudice.
When politicians target most minority groups, journalists lead with the offensive remarks themselves. Readers see the words and judge them accordingly.
When Jews or Zionists are the target, the instinct often shifts toward explanation. The discussion moves to grievances, movements, funding, coalitions, and historical forces. The prejudice becomes something to interpret rather than confront.
I don’t care “what any Zionist-owned politician thinks. They’re exposing themselves as Zionists which will backfire on them.” – Maureen Galindo, leading Democrat for TX-35
This pattern has become particularly visible in discussions surrounding Zionism. For years, much of the political and academic world insisted that anti-Zionism and antisemitism occupy entirely separate categories. One concerns a state. The other concerns a people.
Galindo’s rhetoric collapses that distinction.
Her remarks are not primarily arguments about settlements, borders, military policy, or diplomatic arrangements. They concern Zionists in the United States. They assign collective characteristics to an enormous population. They transform a political identity into a moral category. They depict entire groups as uniquely dangerous and deserving of extraordinary treatment.
That is why her candidacy matters.
Not because she is representative of all progressives. She clearly is not.
Not because every critic of Israel shares her views. They plainly do not.
She matters because she demonstrates how rhetoric that would be instantly recognized as bigotry in almost any other context can find an audience when directed at Zionists and Jews.
And that audience is no longer hypothetical.
Galindo finished first because real voters chose her. That fact should have been the center of the story.
Instead, the NY Times coverage drifted toward a more comfortable explanation: Republicans boosted her campaign because they wanted to embarrass Democrats.
Perhaps they did.
Political parties routinely try to elevate weak or extreme opponents. There is nothing novel about the tactic.
What is novel is the assumption that the tactic itself explains the outcome. It does not.
A campaign contribution can buy advertising. It cannot manufacture belief. A mailer can increase awareness. It cannot create enthusiasm where none exists. Electoral manipulation may shape margins, but it does not explain why a message resonates.
To understand Galindo’s success requires examining the movement that produced her supporters rather than the operatives who noticed them.
That inquiry would lead into uncomfortable territory. It would require asking why anti-Israel activism increasingly attracts rhetoric that once belonged on the fringes of political life. It would require examining how language once considered antisemitic is repackaged as moral virtue. It would require acknowledging that hatred can emerge from the left no less than from the right.
Instead, the Times watered down the belief system of Galindo’s voters. It argued that the bile had “significantly less attention in Texas’s 35th congressional district.” It claimed that “most were unaware of the controversy,” and “knew little about the specifics.” It quoted a progressive who heard about Galindo’s smears “but brushed them as a political attacks.”
In other words, the Times deliberately sought to portray the progressive voters for Galindo as NOT antisemitic nor anti-Israel, just unaware.
This is journalistic malfeasance. It would never happen for any other minority group, and certainly not one experiencing a wave of hate crimes.
Journalists are trained to recognize certain forms of extremism instantly and warn readers about their implications.
The danger is not only the prejudice they recognize. It is also the prejudice they explain until it begins to sound normal.
Maureen Galindo may or may not win her race. What matters is that a candidate who trafficked in rhetoric that would have dominated headlines if directed at almost any other minority group finished first in a Democratic primary.
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff caused a stir when he reported on the daily rape of Palestinian Arabs by Israeli dogs while incarcerated. Pro-Palestinians were appalled and pro-Israelis were shocked at the charge – what kind of inanity? How is this even possible?
New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff
Let me tell everyone about the ugly reality. I have been investigating this for years. I have a mole (an actual one) as well as a source inside the Zionist security apparatus. Let me just call him Colonel Klink to protect his identity, and I will fully expose what Kristoff only touched upon.
The Israeli prisons have vast storehouses of Bamba that they crumble and smear all over their Arab captives for interrogations. The peanut butter smell drives the dogs wild as they sexually maul the exposed Gazans and West Bank Arabs. The Israeli guards allow the abuse to go on until the Arab prisoners reveal the sordid plans they have for Israeli Jews, which the guards write down and then sell to Lior Raz for plots for the next season of Fauda.
Lior Raz of Fauda during a fundraiser for the Zionist ambulance service
This is only the tip of the canine iceberg.
Israeli border collies have been herding Palestinian sheep into “open air prisons” for years. The Israel Guide Dog Center for the Blind offers the yellow Labradors and Golden Retrievers to Jews, while reserving the black Labradors for Israeli Arabs because of the deep racism embedded in Israeli society – even for blind people.
The animal cruelty knows no bounds.
ASPCA locations around the United States have been used as Mossad safe houses since the founding of the Zionist state. Dogs that people adopt have chips in them which the Israeli government uses to track millions of Americans.
The colonialists have even established an elite cat unit trained in pickpocketing, emotional manipulation, and knocking over glasses of water during hostage negotiations. One tabby roaming tourist cafes allegedly stole three passports, two vapes, and an unopened yogurt from a Scandinavian journalist.
In New York, Israeli units have dispatched Portuguese Water Dogs in Times Square where they operate Thee Card Monte tables to rob tourists. The same unit uses Standard Poodles to sell knock-off Gucci handbags while they gather intel on Muslim Halal food cart vendors, who are in turn, casing American streets for easy targets.
In the Holy Land, Palestinian Authority President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of “weaponizing pigeons” to deliberately defecate across public spaces in Palestinian cities. “This is organized biological warfare,” Abbas reportedly declared. “The pigeons target only Palestinian vehicles, Palestinian balconies, and Palestinian laundry.”
The humanitarian crisis expanded into the political sphere this week after activists accused Israel of operating what one NGO called “a sophisticated interspecies apartheid system” stretching across land, sea, air, and now apparently pollination networks, as Israeli bees are chemically treated to be unable to approach plants in Arab fields.
Speaking emotionally before reporters, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) condemned what she described as “the ongoing Animal Nakba. Not only are Palestinians suffering under the imperialist Zionist regime,” she declared, “the indigenous animals and insects are suffering too.”
One Gazan who was set free in a prisoner exchange told me that he witnessed parrots repeatedly curse prisoners in multiple languages to degrade the Palestinian spirit. Worst of all, the parrots deliberately spoke in Arabic with a lisp, which made several Palestinians admit to raping Israelis.
Students for Justice in Palestine at Harvard, having heard of this, set up in the center of the campus with placards “Polly want a ceasefire!” Brown University faculty followed launching a new course “Decolonizing Veterinary Power Structures.” Col. Klink has been drafted to be one of the lecturers. The university is seemingly unaware that he is a double agent, trashing the Jewish State to progressive audiences while simultaneously surveilling them.
Brown University online lecture about decolonizing Palestine, seeking to replicate Hamas around the world
Francesca Albanese of the United Nations said the latest findings are deeply upsetting and more evidence regarding the “occupation of bees, apartheid Labradors, militant parrots, and psychologically traumatized hamsters,” although no reports of hamsters being involved in Zionist oppression have emerged. Yet.
Anti-Israel members of New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team have urged the mayor to stop the Celebrate Israel Parade, which the mayor is reportedly considering. He has also suggested banning all Jews from adopting pets in the city, but his lawyers said that crossed the line into antisemitism. Zohran reportedly just shrugged and said “so what?”
In Washington, DC, President Trump has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about deploying the specially trained animal units in the Islamic Republic of Iran and against various anti-American groups inside the United States. “Bibi” is expected to not only comply, but share data from the sleeper pet cells in millions of American homes.
A new front in the Zionist war has been exposed which runs much deeper than even the most virulently anti-Israel groups ever imagined. It’s inter-species, which Candace Owens claimed further proved that Jews aren’t even 100 percent human. (Her agent continues to state that she is not antisemitic).
A video shows officers from the New York City Police Department attack an unarmed man. That kind of footage demands scrutiny—what happened, what justified it, and what didn’t.
The video is clear; the surrounding facts with each side’s narrative needs to be heard, filtered and assessed.
But such steps are not needed if someone is so sure of his sense of right-and-wrong, and smarter than everyone else. Able to discern motivation, backdrop and situation even sitting comfortably and smugly many miles away.
Especially if named Thomas Friedman.
You see, Thomas Friedman is so so so much smarter than all of you. He knows that everything bad in the world stems from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe occasionally Donald Trump, but his beat is the Middle East so he prefers to haul Netanyahu’s name before his reader base more frequently.
You see, “Israel Lost its Way,” according to the Great Sage Friedman, because Netanyahu has infiltrated Israeli society so deeply. Bibi’s love of Jews and hatred of non-Jews in Friedman’s worldview, has permeated everything in Israel today. So much so, that a soldier fighting in Lebanon who never met Netanyahu in his life, knows that the right thing to do is assert Jewish superiority, even outside of Israeli borders.
Thomas Friedman points to Israeli soldier destroying a statue as attributable to Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.”
Somehow, a rogue soldier – one of thousands exhausted by a multiyear, multifront war – who destroys a religious icon is a perfect encapsulation of Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.” It’s such an absurd comment, that only someone so full of himself would have the chutzpah to place it in the opening paragraph of an opinion piece in The New York Times.
Would Friedman argue that the two NYPD officers were acting under the political strategy of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Of course not. Friedman would write that the officers were rogue and acted against Mamdani’s wishes. But Friedman is convinced that Israelis under Netanyahu have all become lunatics. They are not fighting defensive wars that they never wanted; they are engaged in ethnic cleansing in a raw campaign of Jewish superiority.
Friedman mentioned another picture from the anti-Netanyahu Israeli paper Haaretz, the Israeli version of the NY Times. He referred to “right-wing Israeli ministers” celebrating a new community being built that allows Jews – counter to the stated goal of the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations – to live in the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines.
To add a little punch to the piece, Friedman added that this was “just another day of the Netanyahu government playing President Trump for a fool” to rile up Americans against Israel.
Friedman has been telling readers this for years: Netanyahu is an evil puppet-master. If that sounds like an antisemitic trope, he won’t apologize. He will double-down.
Cartoon in the international edition of The New York Times shows Netanyahu leading a blind Donald Trump around
Because this is the theory that explains everything. Jews are now the jihadists.
Now, every action is merely an expression of someone else’s “climate.” Responsibility floats upward until it becomes untethered from behavior itself. The soldier, the new “settlers”, the police officers no longer matter. Only the chosen author of the “atmosphere” matters.
The New York Times has inverted victim and villain in the Middle East, and Thomas Friedman is all too eager to say “I told you so,” with whatever irrelevant recent media he can find.
The latest The New York Times piece on a JDL-linked murder plot tells a very specific story—and then stretches it into something much larger than it is.
Start with the facts. One individual in a fringe offshoot movement, often described as a ghost of the old Jewish Defense League, allegedly plotted a murder that never happened because law enforcement stopped it. That is the entire event. Not a movement. Not a wave. Not a trend. A single actor orbiting a marginal group.
Yet from this narrow incident, the long article pulls a wide arc—Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, decades-old ideology, insinuations about modern Israel. The reader is led to see not one unstable actor, but a resurfacing Jewish extremism problem.
“apparent resurgence of far-right Zionism” – The New York Times
That framing collapses under the weight of what is actually happening.
2025 saw the highest number of Jews murdered in antisemitic attacks in over thirty years. Not plots—killings, specifically because they are Jews. Across cities and continents. In New York, Jews remain the primary target of hate crimes by a wide margin. Assaults are not hypothetical. They are routine. Visible Jews are attacked on the street, not in theory but in daylight.
So the inversion becomes obvious.
A stopped act by one fringe Jewish extremist becomes a sweeping narrative. A global surge in antisemitic violence becomes less than background noise.
“a disturbing message to New York City: the ideology of the Jewish Defense League has resurfaced.” – The New York Times
This is not balance. It is misdirection.
Every society has extremists at its edges. Jewish communities are no exception. They should be confronted early and without hesitation. But scale matters. Sequence matters. When coverage elevates a single fringe actor into a defining story while minimizing the sustained targeting of Jews, it sends a clear signal about whose fear counts and whose does not.
“voted for President Trump,” – The New York Times non-sequitur about member of the JDL, seemingly painting all Jews who voted for Trump as a potential extremists
And it feeds something deeper: the growing belief among Jews that institutions—from media to politics—are more comfortable scrutinizing Jewish reaction than confronting antisemitic aggression.
The real story is not that somewhere on the margins there are Jews capable of violence. Every people has that margin.
The real story is that Jews, in New York and across the diaspora, are once again living with a level of threat that is measurable, visible, and rising—and that too many prefer to mock the real security fear of Jews and cast Jews as the crux of the problem.
The images out of Gaza arrive stripped of their foundation. Open the The New York Times opinion pages this week and the story feels preassembled: civilians suffer, Israel strikes, outrage follows. It reads cleanly because something essential has been left out. This war does not begin and end on the surface.
Cover page of Sunday TimesTwo-page spread which never mentions Hamas or tunnels
It runs underground.
Beneath Gaza sits one of the most extensive underground military networks in the modern world, built by Hamas over years with money, materials, and time that could have gone elsewhere. The elaborate system of reinforced corridors, command centers, weapons depots, communications lines was designed to survive bombardment and keep a war going no matter what happens above.
Call it what it is: a vast network of bomb shelters.
Now say the part that rarely gets said clearly: Those shelters were never meant for civilians. They were never opened to families. They were never opened to children. They were never opened to the elderly. They were reserved—by design—for fighters, for leadership, for the preservation of the war machine itself.
In any other place, that would be unthinkable. Governments build shelters to protect their populations. When sirens sound, people go underground. Here, the system was inverted. Protection went below ground for those prosecuting the war. Exposure remained above ground for those living in it.
So when the bombs fall, the images follow. Families in rubble. Crowded rooms. Children pulled from collapsed buildings. The world reacts to an outcome shaped long before the first strike in this round of fighting. The protection existed. It was built. And Gazans were never allowed to use it.
That is the story that flips the frame.
This is not only a story of what Israel is doing. It is a story of what Hamas chose to build, and who it chose to protect with it. The tunnels are not just military infrastructure. They are a hierarchy set in concrete. Survival below ground for the regime. Exposure above ground for everyone else.
Once you see that, it becomes impossible to unsee. The destruction remains devastating but it has critical context. It sits alongside a governing strategy that hardened one layer of Gaza while leaving the other to absorb the war.
And that strategy is not finished. It points directly to what comes next. If Hamas remains, Gaza does not rebuild in the way people hope. It continues in the direction it has already taken. More tunnels. More infrastructure embedded beneath dense civilian areas. More resources pulled downward into war instead of upward into life.
The future of Gaza is not being debated. It has already been built.
It just was never built for the people living above it.
And the socialist-jihadi media like The New York Times, will paint a picture of pure fiction, one in which Gazans are the victims of rubble, not tunnels; victims of the Jewish State, not Hamas; victims of “genocide,” not perpetrators of genocide.
And for good measure, it will add a cartoon of a Jewish Holocaust survivor protesting about Israel committing a genocide in Gaza, to completely embalm its inversion of genocide.
Hamas built bomb shelters for the exclusive use of its terrorist army while it let women and children get attacked overhead. We are similarly witnessing the socialist-jihadi media build narrative shelters for those same jihadi terrorists, leaving Jews to take the brunt of the antisemitic tidal wave.
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?
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.”?
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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
First One Through 
