Shameless NY Times’ Depiction
of Jewish ‘Bloodlust’ Sparks Outrage
Former Israeli diplomat Lenny Ben-David said that he has ‘never seen worse anti-Israel propaganda,’ calling Times coverage ‘a blood libel’ demonizing the Jewish state.
By Ira Stoll, The Algeimeiner
Outrage is mounting at New York Times coverage of the recent Israel-Gaza war, with prominent Israeli and American Jewish leaders denouncing the newspaper using terms like “shameless,” “bias,” “propaganda disinformation” and “blood libel.”
Lenny Ben-David, a former Israeli diplomat, commented, “I have never seen worse anti-Israel propaganda disinformation than this @nytimes piece in my 40+ yrs of defending #Israel in media trenches. Every child’s death is a disaster, but the Times presents a blood libel vs Israel.”
The national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, wrote, “The New York Times continues to be shameless in its coverage of the Hamas war against Israel and its citizens. Its bias against Israel and Jews who support Israel is reflected in its coverage internationally, domestically and on the opinion pages. NYT readers deserve better!”
The assistant managing editor for international news at the New York Times, Michael Slackman, did not respond by deadline to a request for comment submitted through the New York Times website.
At issue are not only an avalanche of harshly anti-Israel Times opinion pieces, but news coverage faulting Israel for inflicting what the newspaper has described in news articles as a “high civilian death toll” in Gaza.
For example, a top-of-the-front page headline on Friday reported, “More than 250 Dead, Mostly Civilians.” An article by Ronen Bergman in Sunday’s New York Times reported that Israel “claims to have killed about 200 Hamas operatives.”
The math is hard to reconcile, unless the Times is double-counting as “civilians” the people Israel is describing as “Hamas operatives.” That’s certainly possible, given that Hamas is not a uniformed conventional military force but rather an Iranian-backed terrorist group that also controls religious and civil affairs in Gaza.
But describing Hamas operatives merely as “civilians” could convey to Times readers the false impression that they were innocent people killed by Israel either deliberately in a war crime or accidentally in a mistake or as collateral damage. The Times cited no source for the headline claim that the dead were “mostly civilians.”
In addition to the headline, the Times has published two long, heart-tugging recent articles that put a face on mostly Arab suffering. One carried the online headline “Life Under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict,” as if it were primarily what the Times calls “the routine indignities of occupation” that accounts for Iranians funding and training Gazans to launch rockets at Tel Aviv from territory Israel left in 2005.
Another project, “They Were Only Children,” identifies children, noting that “while most of the children were Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes, there are exceptions. At least two of the children killed in Gaza — Baraa al-Gharabli and Mustafa Obaid — may have been killed when Palestinian militants fired a rocket at Israel that fell short, according to an initial investigation by Defense for Children International-Palestine.
And one of the children killed in Israel, Nadine Awad, was Palestinian.”
The best comment on the topic may have come from, of all places, a Times staffer, Bret Stephens, whose May 24 column said, “the accusations made against Israel — stealing Palestinian land (despite the fact that Israel vacated the territory from which it was subsequently attacked) and wanton violence against Palestinian civilians, particularly children (despite the fact that Israel regularly warned its targets to vacate buildings before targeting them) — can’t help but make me think of ancient libels about Jewish greed and bloodlust.”
Good for Stephens for calling out the libels, ancient and contemporary. His voice at the Times these days seems, alas, a lonely one.
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.
Finally, journalism keeps getting wilder and wilder:
On Emily Wilder, and why no one believes the media
The Associated Press’s admission of fault after staffers fumed over the firing of a fledgling reporter for spewing anti-Israel propaganda on social media explains everything that is wrong with contemporary journalism.
(May 27, 2021 / JNS) What befell Emily Wilder could not have happened to earlier generations of journalists. Before the start of platforms like MySpace and Facebook in the early 2000s, no one was held accountable for the things that they said or wrote when they were in college or even high school. In the era before social media, the musings of students were not a matter of public record. And prior to the rise of the Internet, when anything can be “Googled,” accessing even published articles would have required in-depth research in libraries or scrolling through microfilm and microfiche archives to be brought into public view.
Until last month, Wilder was an unknown left-wing college activist who aspired to a career in journalism. But today, she is something of a celebrity, acclaimed as a martyr to a right-wing smear campaign while her fate is being cited by veteran journalists in well-known publications like Politico and Vox as emblematic of the cruel abuse that those in the mainstream liberal press must endure at the hands of conservatives.
Wilder, a recent graduate of Stanford University, came under fire when she was hired at the Associated Press after a brief stint at The Arizona Republic newspaper. When that became known, the Stanford College Republicans group thought it relevant to note that her years of college activism consisted of smearing Israel and its supporters, including calling Sheldon Adelson, the late Jewish philanthropist and contributor to Republican candidates, “a naked mole rat.” In their opinion and that of others, that ought to have been disqualifying for someone who wanted to work as a reporter.
Wilder posted that insult of Adelson by way of explaining her support for Jewish Voice for Peace’s “return the Birthright” campaign, which opposed the Birthright Israel program for young American Jews to visit Israel on free trips that Adelson helped fund. Those who supported that campaign believe that Jews should not visit Israel until all the descendants of the 1948 Palestinian Arab refugees are allowed to “return” to Israel, which is shorthand for saying they wish to eliminate the Jewish state.
The Stanford Republicans were under the impression that being a member of an anti-Zionist group that, despite its Jewish title, has promoted anti-Semitic blood libels against American Jews should have been relevant as to whether or not she would be trusted to report the news fairly. That notion was supported by conservatives like journalist Ben Shapiro and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).
Though nothing about what they said about her was inaccurate, Wilder and her many well-connected supporters characterized the attention brought to her past comments as a “smear” campaign against a young Jewish progressive.
Those who engage in the kind of vicious rhetoric employed by Wilder—let alone someone whose idea of activism is supporting efforts to destroy the only Jewish state on the planet—are undeserving of sympathy. But treating all things that college students say, do, believe or tweet as evidence to be held against them later on in life is a harsh standard that few of us (especially those who came of age before the Internet and social media) would wish to be judged by.
Numerous examples now exist of foolish or hateful things posted by teenagers coming back to haunt them and essentially ruining their lives as the politically correct cheer their public shaming. The New York Times’s decision to run a lengthy feature about one such victim underlines the way the press has enabled the worst forms of cancel culture to flourish. It should only matter when college excesses point to subsequent behavior, as was the case with newly confirmed Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who was an anti-Semite in college and then subsequently defended other anti-Semites many years later.
Which is to say that perhaps even Wilder deserved a fresh start once she left the hothouse atmosphere of an elite college campus where left-wing hate speech is in fashion. She was entitled to the presumption that once in journalism, she would stop being an “activist” and stick to her new job of reporting the news; as such, her private views, however odious, would be kept private.
And so they would have if she had been transitioning from college to journalism 20 or 30 years ago. But not today.
When the story about her college tweets broke, the AP ignored the criticism and stuck to their decision to hire her. To back that up, she was apparently given some instruction about maintaining at least the appearance of objectivity by avoiding social-media use that would mark her as an ideologue or partisan.
Nevertheless, Wilder—no doubt following a practice commonplace throughout journalism these days—didn’t stop tweeting her support for the Palestinians and her contempt for Israel. At that point, her supervisors clearly felt that she considered herself about the rules and fired her.
The response to her firing illustrates the fact that many in the profession share her apparent belief that trying to establish even a veneer of objectivity is no longer necessary. AP employees expressed outrage about the treatment of Wilder, as did others at mainstream and legacy outlets. The AP subsequently apologized for the way it handled her firing but has not yet retracted it.
How is it possible that someone like Wilder could be supported by so many in the profession, let alone treated like a martyr?
To most of those who currently work in many, if not most, mainstream media newsrooms, partisanship and openly promoting leftist causes and talking points are not incompatible with being a reporter, even if that creates a clear conflict of interest.
For some, this was justified by their conviction that former President Donald Trump was so awful that it was necessary for the media to give any and all assistance to his opponents. But this goes way beyond bias about Trump. Indeed, as we saw last summer, when just such a woke mob of journalists forced The New York Times to retract an op-ed by Cotton because of its stance towards the Black Lives Matter movement and the riots it inspired. They intimidated the Times’ management into forcing out the editor who approved it. Similarly hostile attitudes toward Jews and Israel, as well as anything about anti-Semitism unconnected to Trump, was the reason that Bari Weiss gave for leaving the paper.
There’s also a sense that many of those who are BLM supporters in the press believe that Israel should be treated in the same manner as the police officer who killed George Floyd. That’s a particular issue for the AP because of its role in sharing a building in Gaza with Hamas operatives and then behaving as if they were wronged when Israel bombed the place, even though it first warned the journalists to vacate the building, and no one was harmed. Former AP staffer Matti Friedman wrote about the organization’s anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian bias in The Atlantic in 2014.
In the past, much of the media bias against Israel was rooted in ignorance on the part of many in the press. But in an environment where the behavior of someone like Wilder—both in college and once she began working as a journalist—is not only considered defensible but actually normative, then such journalism has zero credibility.
At stake in this minor controversy is more than the fate of one young woman, though it’s likely that her claims to martyrdom will ensure her a future in the field. If we are now at the point where we assume that all journalists are going to slant the news in favor of causes or politicians they support, there is no reason to believe anything that you read, hear or watch from news outlets unless it confirms your pre-existing beliefs and prejudices.
People like Wilder and those who support her are killing journalism. The consequences for the future of democracy—let alone a Jewish community that has already seen how smears of Israel can inspire anti-Semitic violence—are ominous.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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It's only your money:
Breaking: Americans STUNNED to Learn How Much The Bill Was for National Guard Troops in DC
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Atlanta has not had a truly decent Mayor since Hartsfield and Ivan Allen. Massel. Jackson,Young were acceptable. I lived there during all their administrations and then some.
More on Atlanta's Mayoralty candidate. Another dud?
Council Member Votes to Defund Police – Gets Victimized Instantly
BY Ryan H.
City Council Member Antonio Brown is running for Mayor of Atlanta.
He recently “voted to withhold $73
million of the Atlanta Police Department’s budget.”
Shortly after this vote, Brown’s
Mercedes coupe was stolen by a group of kids in broad daylight.
I’m not kidding.
Brown said the oldest was maybe 11
or 12 years old and the youngest maybe 6 or 7.
So how in the world did this happen?
City Council Member Antonio Brown
had just arrived at a ribbon-cutting ceremony and jumped out of his white
Mercedes coupe, which features a keyless ignition, and was chatting with
community leader Ben Norman.
“Brown told police that he
noticed four children no more than 11 or 12 years old, the youngest possibly 6
or 7 walking around a nearby store. Within seconds they were in his car,”
WAGA-TV reported.
“One kid was in the driver’s
seat,” Brown told the station. “Ben attempted to open the door to get him out
of the car. He fought with Ben. I then engaged and tried to get him out of the
car. The three other kids were trying to figure out how to get in the car or
stay out of the car. He started to hit on the gas. Ben let go.”
But Brown said he held on and got
dragged a short distance before he let go. “As he started to speed up, and
I knew that if I had not let go, I knew I probably could have killed myself
because he was going so fast, I would have started to tumble. And I would have
hurt him,” he said.
Brown doesn’t plan to press charges
against the kids, saying, “This is a generational poverty issue.”
Is Brown extending grace due to his
own past behavior? Just last July he was indicted by a grand jury on federal
fraud charges.
He was indicted on multiple fraud
charges “in connection with Brown’s attempts to defraud several financial
institutions by taking out loans and making credit card purchases – and then
falsely claiming that he was the victim of identity theft and was not
responsible for the charges or repaying the loans,” said the
U.S. Attorney’s Office in Georgia.
“For years, Antonio Brown
allegedly sought to defraud a number of banks and credit card companies by
falsely claiming that he was the victim of identity theft,” said U.S. Attorney
Byung Pak. “Brown’s scheme was eventually brought to light, resulting in his
indictment by the grand jury.”
So to sum up…
A man who’s been indicted on federal fraud charges voted to defund the police, got his car stolen by a gang of kids in broad daylight, and now wants to be the Mayor of Atlanta
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It is true , Georgia is a stepping stone for Stacey to get to the Oval Office but it is also true I see far too many provocative ads and articles being sent in order to raise money:
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