New York Times Marks Oct. 7 With New Display of ‘Constant Anti-Israel Bias’

The New York Times coverage of the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel has been marred by the same inaccuracies, misconceptions, and biases that have characterized the newspaper’s coverage of the war for the past year.

The print Times front page of Oct. 8 featured a picture of one of the anti-Israel protests that have been a feature of college campuses, European capitals, and some American cities over the past year. “Calls for peace, and protests of the fighting, have come from around the world, including in New York City on Monday,” the photo cutline said.

By characterizing the anti-Israel protests as “calls for peace” rather than support for terrorism or for the violent eradication of Israel, the Times editors are expressing an editorial opinion that doesn’t necessarily fit the facts.

In New York City on Monday, individuals who were among those anti-Israel protest groups beat up the board co-chair of Democratic Majority for Israel, Todd Richman. And later in the week, a Times headline and news article conceded, “A Columbia Student Group Endorses Hamas and Oct. 7.” Figuring out which keffiyeh-wearing, Palestinian-flag-waving, groups in the streets are protesting the fighting and calling for peace, and which are merely cheering on the Hamas and Hezbollah side of the fighting, or calling for peace as a way of assuring that Hamas survives to attack Israel again in the future, is a job for skeptical reporting, not gullible front-page photo cutline writing.

Times photo selection was also the focus of a complaint by the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Abraham Foxman. “New York Times, you never disappoint — your anti- Israel bias is a constant,” Foxman wrote in a social media post. “Today on the most painful day for Israel and the Jewish people since the Holocaust — Oct. 7 — after Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas — your journalistic moral equivalency — publishes photos of both victims and perpetrators. It’s as if, when we commemorate Pearl Harbor — you would publish photos of Americans and Japanese.”

On a substantive level, Times attempts to explain the fighting to readers relied heavily on mistaken analysis and assumptions, and on Times-selected “experts” pushing theories that are not supported by strong evidence. One front-page article was headlined “Gazans Are Trapped in a Prison That Was Decades in the Making.” The “prison” notion is semi-comical, because the Times also regularly insists that Israeli bombing is destroying “every one” of Gaza’s “12 universities.” The Times can’t seem to make up its mind whether Gaza was a prison or a paradise destroyed by Israel.

The Times “prison” story concludes with a quote from a Times-selected expert.

“Everybody has got culpability here,” said Michael H. Posner, a former US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor who now teaches at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “It’s a collective failure on the part of the West — the US and the Europeans — and the Arab states to force the parties to sit down and sort out their differences.”

Not named as culpable are the Palestinians.

If there’s a “failure” here, it’s that the Times reporters and their editors imagine that all problems are solvable if only people would be forced to “sit down and sort out their differences.” Imagine if after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing, or after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Times had reacted by saying what was really needed was for someone “to force the parties to sit down and sort out their differences.”

How is the US going to “force” Israel and Hamas to “sit down and sort out their differences” when the difference is that Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map and kill all the Jews, while the Jews want to exist in peace in their own land?

Perhaps someday eventually there can be a negotiated peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza. For now, though, there’s no indication that Hamas would accept any such long-term solution that stops short of a total Israeli surrender. The morality of forcing Israel into concessions to a bunch of would-be murderers of Jews is sketchy, because if the would-be-murderers don’t wind up keeping their end of the deal, a lot more Jews could be killed. A year after the Oct. 7 attack, that somehow still manages to elude the Times and its sources.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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