So many stories in the New York Times about Israel have been misleading or worse in recent years; it’s become virtually a full-time activity for CAMERA to rebut the mistakes in the Times’ coverage of Israel and demand corrections. I well remember the story in 2013 by then-Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren, who falsely stated that the United States considered as “illegal” the West Bank settlements on land taken by Israel in the 1967 war. The American government has at times regarded the settlements as unwise, but never as “illegal.” It would have taken a minute’s Internet searching to discover that; apparently neither Rudoren nor her editors and fact-checkers in New York could spare the time.
In its coverage of the May war in Gaza, the Times published dozens of photos of Palestinian children (and two Israeli children) under the headline “They Were Only Children” on the front page of its May 26, 2021 edition, children who were killed during the war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization. In the piece, the Times alleged that the children were killed by Israeli airstrikes. One of the photos, of a young girl supposedly killed during the May 2021 war, was a reprint of a photo from 2017. Another photo turned out to be of a Hamas terrorist. It further turned out that many of the children were killed not by Israel, but by some of the 680 Hamas rockets that fell short, and landed inside Gaza. But the New York Times never bothered to correct that part of their coverage.
Here were a few of the questions I posed to the New York Times at the time:
Why have you never published a front-page collage, or even one on an inside page, of children killed in any of two dozen recent conflicts, such continuing wars as those in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Ethiopia?
Why, in your coverage of the children who died in the latest Gaza war, did you make no mention of Hamas’ deliberate use of human shields, including children, by hiding its rockets in, and launching them from, civilian buildings such as kindergartens, schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings?
Why, in your coverage of the children who died in the Gaza war, did you make no mention of the fact that some were known to have been killed by the 680 Hamas rockets aimed at Israel that fell short, and instead struck people inside Gaza?
Why, in your coverage of the children killed in Gaza, did you not subsequently let your readers know that several of those “children” whose photographs appeared were in their late teens, and were members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad?
Why did The New York Times publish in its “They Were Only Children” collage a 2015 stock photo of a young girl, claiming Israeli forces killed her during the May 2021 war with Hamas? Why did it never apologize for that error?
Why did you not make any mention in the text that accompanies the photos of 67 dead children that Israeli pilots aborted missions when they detected children too close to the target?
Why do you nowhere mention, in the text accompanying the collage of photos of children killed in the war, Israel’s various methods to minimize civilian casualties? These include warning the inhabitants of impending targets through phone calls, leafletting, emails, and the “knock-on-the-roof technique,” giving them time – sometimes as much as two hours — to flee. Wasn’t all that worth mentioning?
Why do you trust the figures released by Hamas of “67 children” killed when, from the three previous Hamas-Israel wars, the numbers put out by Hamas proved, upon further investigation, to have been grossly inflated? Given that history, shouldn’t we be skeptical of Hamas this time?
Do we have any reason, on the other hand, to think that the figures about casualties provided by the IDF are to be trusted? Doesn’t the IDF have a long track record of putting out reliable figures?
I did not expect, and did not receive, a reply from The Times.
In a recent story on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voting “Present” on a bill to replenish Israel’s supply of defensive Iron Dome missiles (while fellow members of “the Squad” voted No), and then dissolving into tears, the New York Times, without the slightest evidence, blamed “influential lobbyists and rabbis.” Who these “rabbis” were was never specified; the antisemitic images of sinister rabbis — black-coated haredim come to mind — threatening poor AOC with electoral retribution should she not do their bidding, will remain fixed in the minds of many readers.
Jewish history has also been misrepresented in stories published by the “paper of record.”
CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) notes:
While denying and downplaying Jews’ presence in their ancient homeland has long been a mainstay of Arab anti-Israel propaganda, at times this particularly noxious type of delegitimization of the Jewish state also finds a platform in international media coverage.
Curiously, it’s precisely media items supposedly about Jewish history that tend to minimize the historical connection between the Jews and their ancient land.
In 2015, The New York Times, for example, infamously called into question whether the ancient Jewish Temples were located on the Temple Mount (“Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place“). In fact, serious archeologists agree with the indisputable evidence of the Temple’s location at the site, and The Times subsequently published a lengthy editor’s note….
This week, The Times again flunks on the facts regarding Jews in their homeland during antiquity. The Sept. 11 article examines lessons for present-day Israel from “Legend of Destruction,” an animated film about the destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Jerusalem in the Roman conquest against the backdrop of internal disunity (“For a Fractured Israel, a Film Offers Ominous Lessons From Ancient Past“)….
Thus, Isabel Kershner errs:
“. . . the Jews enjoyed two previous periods of sovereignty in the land in ancient times, but both lasted only about 70 or 80 years . . .”
In fact, the Kingdom of Judah was extant for more than 300 years, from the time of the collapse of the United Kingdom of Israel in 922 BCE until the Babylonian conquest in 586 BC. (The United Kingdom lasted for approximately a century, starting around 1020 BCE).
The northern Kingdom of Israel, the other half of what became of the United Kingdom when it fell apart in 922 BCE, lasted for approximately 200 years, until the Neo-Assyrian empire conquest.
Besides these three separate kingdoms of Jewish rule (two of which were contemporaneous), there was also the Hasmonean dynasty, which achieved autonomy from the Seleucides in 147 BCE and independence in in 129 BCE. The Kingdom lasted for some 80 years.
Thus, four Jewish kingdoms pre-dated the modern Jewish state during antiquity, and the longest one lasted more than three centuries, not 80 years. By falsely reporting that the longest Jewish rule in Israel fell in less than 100 years, The Times minimizes the historic Jewish connection to ancient Israel, eroding the legitimacy of the present Jewish state.
This was such a gross error that The Times felt it had to correct it, and did. But as always, how many people read the original story but didn’t bother to read, days later, amidst a list of corrections printed on an inside page, the one that corrected Isabel Kershner?
Recently, The Times covered popular reaction in Iraq to the meeting held in Erbil where 312 Iraqi notables called for recognition of, and normalization of ties with, Israel – only to recant their declaration under threats of arrest, imprisonment, and even death. From Algemeiner:
A New York Times dispatch from Baghdad reports on reaction to a conference about peace between Israel and Iraq. In the process, the Times news article offers a peculiar and misleading account of the history of Jews in Iraq.
The Times reported, “While the conference linked the two issues, many Iraqis draw a sharp distinction between feeling an affinity for the country’s former Jewish community and openness to the state of Israel.” The Times lets that make-believe distinction — we love Jews, it’s just Israel that bothers us — pass with no comment, consistent with the desire of many Times readers to minimize the considerable overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The Times even lends backing to the supposed distinction with its own capsule summary of Iraqi Jewish history: “The Iraqi Jews — an ancient community and an integral part of Iraqi society — were pressured by the government to give up their citizenship and property and leave Iraq after the creation of Israel in 1948.”
That falsely suggests that it was only “the creation of Israel in 1948” that turned Iraqis against the Jews. Yet the Times itself acknowledged back in 2016: “Iraqi Jews had always been the targets of sporadic attacks. But the danger soared with the rise of the Nazis’ influence in the 1930s as well as unhappiness around the Arab world with Zionism’s push for a Jewish state. A pogrom in June 1941, the Farhud, killed nearly 200 Jews in Baghdad.” The 2021 Times article makes no mention of the Farhud or of Nazi influence in Iraq.
The Farhud was before the creation of Israel, not “after.”…
Back in 2017, the Times erroneously attributed Iraqi anti-Jewish sentiment to “Israel’s defeat of its Arab neighbors in 1967,” so I suppose it’s a kind of modest progress that the Times is now falsely blaming the events of 1948 for Iraq’s turn against the Jews, rather than the events of 1967….
Jew-hatred in Iraq did not begin after the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War. It did not begin, either, with the 1948 war. It did not begin with the “Farhud” in 1941, when several hundred Jews were set upon by Arab mobs in Baghdad and murdered. The Jew-hatred comes from the texts and teachings of Islam — the Qur’an, the hadith, and the commentaries of Islamic scholars on both. In Robert Spencer’s useful compilation, “the Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the wellbeing of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); as fabricating things and falsely ascribing them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); claiming that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); loving to listen to lies (5:41); disobeying Allah and never observing his commands (5:13); disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more.”
The Jew-hatred in Islam dates to the seventh century, and there is nothing Jews can do about those passages in the immutable Qur’an that form Muslim attitudes about them, for the Qur’an’s many negative statements about Jews cannot be undone. Nor can the hadith stories, in the most reputable collections of Bukhari and Muslim, be ignored. These hadiths tell of Muhammad personally taking part in the killing — by decapitation — of the 600-900 male members of the Jewish Qurayza tribe, of Muhammad’s attacking the inoffensive Jews of the Khaybar oasis, and taking the 17-year-old Jewish girl Safiyya as his concubine, of Muhammad asking his followers to rid him of three people who had mocked him, including Asma bint Marwan, Abu ‘Afak,and K’ab bin al-Ashraf. Two of the three — Abu ‘Afak and K’ab bin al-Ashraf — were Jewish.
But the New York Times has never dared to carry a single story on what the Qur’an says about Jews (or, for that matter, what it says about Infidels in general). Nor has it ever reported on how Muhammad interacted with Jews, as set out in the most reliable hadiths. No doubt this lapse is deliberate; the people who run the Times do not want the public to know how profound is the Jew-hatred among Muslims, so deeply rooted in immutable texts, lest that call into question all the peace-processing and two-state-solutioning that the Times favors, a hatred whose existence argues instead for a policy of deterrence by an overwhelmingly more powerful Israel, as the only sure way to keep the peace between the Jewish state and its Muslim enemies.