How the NY Times misreports the Gaza war

The New York Times has made every effort to portray Israel as a hostile actor and an ‘aggressive’ force, where in reality it’s defending its very existence.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

The New York Times has quite a dismal record when it comes to reporting on Jews and those who would harm them.

Beginning in the late 1930s and continuing through World War II, the paper’s reporters downplayed the Nazi murders of Jews, and what articles the Times did publish were often placed in the middle of the paper, low down on the page.

Laurel Leff has covered this deplorable history in her study, Buried By The Times.

She attributes this scandalous underreporting of the persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews to the Sulzberger family that owned (and owns) the Times.

The Sulzbergers, who are Jewish, did not want, through their paper’s coverage, to give the appearance of special pleading on behalf of Jews, and instead, chose to ignore or minimize the horrors that European Jewry endured.

Now the Times is at it again, in its misreporting on the war in Gaza, where it displays a distinct want of sympathy for the Jewish state as it fights for its survival against the terror group Hamas, whose operatives raped, tortured, and murdered 1,200 Israelis on October 7, took 250 hostages back to Gaza, and has openly declared that it hopes to repeat the October 7 attack on Israelis “again and again.”

More on the Times coverage of Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza can be found here: “New York Times Calls Israel ‘Aggressive,’ Explains Away Hamas Tunnels,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, June 21, 2024:

Read the New York Times news coverage carefully enough, and the subtle language tricks that the paper’s reporters and editors use to excuse Hamas and demonize Israel start to seem less subtle, more blatant and outrageous.

Two recent articles provide examples of the Times’s techniques….

“Jan Danckaert, the university’s rector, had started a listening tour of the campus soon after Hamas led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.

About 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage in those attacks, according to the Israeli authorities, setting off an aggressive Israeli military response that has killed more than 37,000 Gazans, according to health officials there.”

The Times sprinkles an adjective, “aggressive,” into its description of Israel’s response, but the Hamas-led attacks get no such pejorative label from the Times.

Why use an adjective at all to describe the IDF’s response to the mass atrocities? Why not just stick with something neutral, such as “setting off an Israeli military response”?

Why stress that the response was “aggressive”? What should it have been? Passive? Subdued? What, exactly?

If the adjective “aggressive” is to be affixed to Israel’s response, shouldn’t Hamas be dealt with similarly, for example, by reporting that “more than 200 were taken hostage in those brutal attacks”?

And why didn’t the Times report that the number of “37,000 Gazans” killed did not come from “health officials,” but from Hamas itself?

Furthermore, that number has been shown to be greatly exaggerated, with Western authorities now insisting that there were 10,000 fewer deaths than the number reported by Hamas.

Of those 27,000, a thorough reporter would at least have reported that, according to the IDF, about 16,000 of those killed so far have been Hamas fighters.

Furthermore, prior to October 7 there were 800 deaths in Gaza each month from natural causes, which would add up to 6400 deaths over the first eight months of the war.

Surely the Times ought to make those figures, and their sources, clear.

But no: its reporters have continued to claim that there were “37,000 Gazans” killed in the war — and that number – that comes from Hamas, via the Gaza Health Ministry – is still climbing.

Elsewhere in the same dispatch, we hear that, “The three Jewish students [mentioned in the article] disagreed on politics, expressing views ranging from mostly pro-Palestinian to largely siding with the Israeli government line.”

Some editor should have edited out “line.” There’s an asymmetry between “pro-Palestinian” and “largely siding with the Israeli government line.”

Why not just “pro-Israel,” or, if the Times insists on going down the road of accusing people of taking a party line, what about “siding with the Palestine Liberation Organization line”?

“Siding with the Israeli government line” implies that the Israeli government has a single “line” that it wants to be followed when the current government is perhaps the most divisive and quarrelsome in the 75 years of Israel’s existence.

The word “line” also implies a mindless adherence to opinions sent down from on high, rather than the exercise of independent judgment.

Mr. X “follows the Communist line,” while “Mrs. Y follows the Fascist line,” und so weiter. The Times report should have read, less tendentiously, “siding with the Israeli government.” Why didn’t it?

Another Times article, by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, is about a Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. That article explains in passing that, “Hamas has constructed a network of tunnels beneath Gaza to shield the group from Israeli surveillance and attack.”

That seems like an awfully benign, to the point of inaccurate, way of describing the reason Hamas built those tunnels.

It might also be said that Hamas built the tunnels so they could pursue, under cover of secrecy, their mission of killing Jews and wiping Israel off the map.

It could be said that the tunnels also advanced the Hamas purpose of hiding from the rest of the world the scale to which they were looting Gaza’s economy and diverting humanitarian aid resources for military use.

The “shield…from Israeli attack” language the Times uses makes it sound like the tunnels are defensive, when in fact the tunnels were offensive, used to conceal preparations for attacks on Israel that were perpetrated by Hamas.”…

Nothing need be added to Ira Stoll’s complaint. Those 500 miles of tunnels under Gaza were used to hide men and weapons, and to move them about.

They were also intended to be used to transport Hamas operatives from Gaza into Israel.

They were thus not only, and not even mainly, intended to “shield the group from Israeli surveillance and attack,” but to make the launching of a large-scale attack, via tunnels undetected by the IDF, possible.

It would be fascinating to find out how many people have cancelled their subscriptions to the New York Times because of its tendentious, slanted, and at times even hostile, coverage of Israel.

This is evident not only in its reporting but in its columnists, only one of whom — Brett Stephens — can be considered favorable to Israel.

In the meantime, let me recommend as an antidote to the Times that relatively new entry into New York journalism, the New York Sun.

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