The New York Times has long been notorious for its severe bias and hatred against Israel and the Jewish people.
The Times’ systematic failures to report on the Holocaust in the 1940’s and the Times’ cartoon in 2019 depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading a blind, kippah-wearing President Trump are just two of the more infamous examples, among the Times’ daily diet of deceptive, distorted articles falsely portraying Palestinian Arab terrorists as victims of Israeli misdeeds.
The Times reached new lows on May 11 by publishing Nicholas Kristof’s disgusting, false, unverified, sexual abuse blood libels against Israel, including Kristof’s preposterous, anatomically impossible assertion that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian Arabs.
After Jews protested these blood libels, the Times defended and refused to retract Kristof’s falsehoods. Further, the Times doubled down by printing a front-page opinion section headline and a two-page spread of Kristof’s false Palestinian Arab accusations.
The New York Times’ treatment of the moral, philanthropic, human-rights-abiding Jewish people and Jewish State amounts to “Jews-drop dead,” moreover, the Times’ publication of Kristof’s blood libels on May 11 was surely deliberately and maliciously timed to detract attention from Israel’s release, on the very same day, of the thoroughly-documented 284-page report, “Silenced No More: Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity,” by The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children.
The Civil Commission’s report detailed verified, real, systematic, widespread, depraved sexual atrocities committed by Hamas and accompanying Gazans on October 7 and thereafter – including gang rapes, disfigurement of faces and genitals, torture, mutilation, and other unimaginable cruelties.
The Civil Commission reviewed over 10,000 contemporaneous photographs and videos (including the videos Hamas and accompanying Gazans took of their own atrocities) and over 430 testimonies and interviews.
No verified evidence or journalistic integrity
By contrast, Kristof’s op-ed had no verified evidence or journalistic integrity. As Honest Reporting and others have explained, Kristof relied on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (a designated, main Hamas operative with a history of making false allegations against Israel); Sami al-Sai (whom Kristof called a “freelance journalist” without revealing that al-Sai regularly celebrates October 7 and other Palestinian murders of Israeli civilians); anti-Israel activist Issa Amro; and anonymous, unverifiable supposed sources.
Further, al-Sai’s and Amro’s invented stories radically changed and contradicted themselves from one telling to the next. And The New York Times spread yesterday continues its habit of serving as a propaganda mouthpiece for the unverified lies of the same and additional Palestinian Arab terrorists, terror-promoters, and propagandists.
Like Euro-Med, additional NGOs that Kristof cited (PCATI – the so-called Public Committee Against Torture in Israel; B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence) are part of the network of foreign-funded anti-Israel NGOs that manufacture stories to smear and demonize Israel, even after their allegations demonizing Israel have been repeatedly proven false.
Former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya’alon condemned Breaking the Silence for inventing “malicious” fabrications, and stated that investigations of Breaking the Silence’s allegations found that the allegations “turned out to be groundless.”
Such NGOs moreover have no compunction about supporting terrorists, such as PCATI’s support for Samer Arbid, the commander of the PFLP cell that murdered Rina Shnerb, and Breaking the Silence’s tweet after October 7 blaming “our Jewish supremacist govt.”
JNS chief Jonathan Tobin accordingly correctly wrote that: “The Kristof piece is a classic case of ‘mirroring’ in which criminal regimes and movements attempt to falsely claim that their opponents are committing the very crimes of which they themselves are guilty.”
The Israeli leaders mentioned or alluded to in Kristof’s op-ed thus deserve to prevail in their planned defamation lawsuit against The New York Times for printing such malicious, incendiary Der Sturmer-style fabrications.
What can be done now, after The New York Times refused to restore any semblance of journalistic integrity, rejected demands to apologize, refused to retract its shameful blood libels, and instead doubled down on them?
Many pro-Israel citizens have already terminated their subscriptions to The New York Times in response to the paper’s previous outrages. (The only people we know who still subscribe do so solely to learn what the enemy is saying.)
But if readers are still subscribing to The New York Times for the crossword puzzles or because they believe in the Times masthead, it’s time for them to get their puzzles and news from other sources. They should also be sending letters to the Times, complaining and correcting
It’s time for much stronger remedies. ZOA accordingly calls for all government press conferences and offices to deny credentials and entry to The New York Times.
ZOA agrees with Jonathan Tobin’s clarion call that: “No one in public life – be they Jewish or not – should treat [New York Times] employees as if they are credible journalists or answer their queries.
Times reporters should no more be entitled to credentials to cover government or any other sector of public life than would those who work for rags produced by hate groups that also traffic in blood libels against Jews or anyone else. The paper deserves to be shamed and shunned at least until the unlikely event of its retracting Kristof’s article.
There should be no reticence about making it clear that [The New York Times] is helping to incite the growing toll of antisemitic violence against Jews in this country and around the world.”
The writer is the National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
