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New York Times defends ‘swastika crossword’ on first night of Chanukah

“Only the New York Times would get Chanukah going with this is the crossword puzzle,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote. 

By World Israel News Staff

The New York Times has come under fire for publishing a crossword puzzle with an eerie resemblance to a Nazi swastika on Sunday, with outraged readers noting its release coincided with the first night of Chanukah.

Donald Trump Jr. blasted the publication for being “disgusting,” and went on to charge that “only the New York Times would get Chanukah going with this is the crossword puzzle.”

“Imagine what they would do to someone who did this and was not ideologically aligned with them? I’ll give them the same benefit of the doubt they would give those people… exactly zero,” Trump Jr. wrote.

Pro-Israel group S.A.F.E. CUNY wrote, “Today’s Crossword Puzzle from the New York Times for Chanukah. Pretty much sums up the @nytimes for the past few years in regard to Jews and Israel.”

“Many open grids in crosswords have a similar spiral pattern because of the rules around rotational symmetry and black squares,” Jordan Cohen, the Times’ executive director of communications, told Newsweek in response to the outcry.

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A spokesperson for the Times told The Jewish Chronicle: This is a common crossword design: Many open grids in crosswords have a similar spiral pattern because of the rules around rotational symmetry and black squares.”

The controversial crossword puzzle was published a day after the Times published a scathing editorial warning that the incoming Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu poses a “significant threat.”

On the same day the crossword puzzle was released, Netanyahu accused the Times of “demonizing Israel for decades” and even attacked its nefarious record of hiding the Holocaust.

In a Twitter thread on Sunday, Netanyahu said the newspaper was guilty of “burying the Holocaust for years on its back pages and demonizing Israel for decades,” and charged that it now “shamefully calls for undermining Israel’s elected incoming government.”

Saturday’s editorial, titled “The Ideal of Democracy in a Jewish State is in Jeopardy,” argued that while Netanyahu “clearly has the support of the Israeli electorate,” the concessions he is offering his “ultrareligious and ultranationalist” partners jeopardize the country’s democratic values.

The editorial went on to note that the so-called newspaper-of-record “has been a strong supporter of Israel” — this despite the many, many column inches saturated with anti-Israel bias, from accusing Israel of war crimes to calling for the end of Israel as a Jewish state and replacing it with a binational “Israel-Palestine.”

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It warned that Netanyahu’s government poses “a significant threat to the future of Israel — its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland.”

Continuing with a logical fallacy to prove its point, continued: “For one, the government’s posture could make it militarily and politically impossible for a two-state solution to ever emerge.”

The editorial does not explain how a two-state solution would secure the security of the Jewish state. A European think tank of international law experts recently released a detailed study of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that concluded that the European Union should do away with the two-state solution because it has proved to be a failed policy that does not align with EU interests.

The Times also called on the Biden administration to “do everything it can to express its support for a society governed by equal rights and the rule of law in Israel, as it does in countries all over the world. That would be an act of friendship, consistent with the deep bond between the two nations.”

Sunday’s swastika scandal marked the second time the New York Times has published a crossword resembling the Nazi symbol.

In 2017, the Times dismissed the ensuing outrage, with the New York Times Games Twitter account posting, “Yes, hi. It’s NOT a swastika. Honest to God. No one sits down to make a crossword puzzle and says, ‘Hey! You know what would look cool?'”