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Writer's pictureRabbi Axelman

8 Times The NY Times Was Bad For The Jews

https://www.dailywire.com/news/38493/8-times-ny-times-was-bad-jews-daily-wire


November 19, 2018

On Saturday, The New York Times ran a piece attacking Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka, titled, “Are Jared and Ivanka Good for the Jews?”

The very question that the Times poses would be ripped up and down for being anti-Semitic if it were posed by the political Right. Unlike Jared and Ivanka, the Times has genuinely been bad for the Jews — for decades.

First, let’s take a look at how the article was framed, then a look at some of the numerous times the Times was truly bad for the Jewish people.

The Times wrote, “To some Jews, the couple serves as a bulwark pushing the Trump administration toward pro-Israel policies, most notably the decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. To many others, they are the wolves in sheep’s clothing, allowing Mr. Trump to brush aside criticism that his words have fueled the uptick in violent attacks against Jews.”

Rather suspiciously, the Times spends a great deal of time quoting those who oppose Jared and Ivanka, and barely any direct quotes from those who support them. Some quotes from the anti-Jared and Ivanka crowd:

“For Jews who are deeply opposed to Donald Trump and truly believe he is an anti-Semite, it’s deeply problematic that he’s got a Jewish son-in-law and daughter. How can that be?”
“We, as Jews, are forced to grapple with the fact that Jared and his wife are Jewish, but Jared is participating in acts of Chillul Hashem.”

“Chillul Hashem” literally means to desecrate God’s name.

Another example:

“Inconceivable that Jared could stay affiliated with the administration after Pittsburgh.”

Yet another: Kushner is Trump’s “fig leaf.”

Another example:

“They certainly won’t be banned, but I don’t think most synagogues would give them an aliyah.” An aliyah is an honor given during the reading of the Torah during the week or on the Sabbath.

Now, to the crux of the matter: some of the Times’ nearly century-long record of anti-Semitism (although there are many more stories with an anti-Israel bias not covered here):

1. The Times buried the story of the Holocaust in World War II. As Laurel Leff, author of “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” noted, in March 1944, the Times buried a report from the Jewish National Committee in Poland which read, “Last month we still reckoned the number of Jews in the whole territory of Poland as from 250,000 to 300,000. In a few weeks no more than 50,000 of us will remain. In our last moment before death, the remnants of polish Jewry appeal for help to the whole world. May this, perhaps our last voice from the abyss, reach the ears of the whole world.” That desperate appeal ran on page four in the middle of a report on discussions in the British House of Commons. As Leff noted, the Holocaust never was made the lead story in all the years it was taking place, and when it did make the front page, the stories obscured the fact that most of the victims were Jews.

2. During the Second Intifada in 2000, on the eve of Rosh HaShanah, Tuvia Grossman, an American student at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, was in a taxi headed for the Western Wall. The taxi took a shortcut through an Arab neighborhood, where roughly 40 Arabs surrounded the taxi, broke the windows, and dragged Grossman out, then beat him, stabbed him once in the leg, and smashed his head with rocks. Grossman still ran to a nearby gas station, where he collapsed. An Israeli policeman wielding a club protected him, while brandishing the club against the Arabs. A freelance photographer took a picture of Grossman bleeding and crouched under the policeman, who was shouting and waving his club. The Times viciously captioned the picture, “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount.” After Grossman’s father sent a letter to the Times with the true story, the Times offered a correction, but still would not say that Grossman was a Jew or describe the beating. It took three more days for the Times to give all the information, but by that time the world had been given the false story for a week.

3. In 2013, the Times published an opinion piece that argued that saying Israel did not have a right to exist was not an anti-Semitic statement. The author wrote, “My view is that one really ought to question Israel’s right to exist and that doing so does not manifest anti-Semitism.”

4. In 2014, when Times opinion editor Matt Seaton was asked why the Times would not cover stories about Palestinian racism while they consistently ran stories about Israeli racism, he responded that the Times opinion pages would cover Palestinian racism as “soon as they have [a] sovereign state to discriminate with.” As The Times of Israel noted, “The editor’s stunning admission that he considers Palestinians exempt from scrutiny due to their stateless existence followed the publication of yet another Op-Ed which accused Israeli society as being racist.”

5. In 2015, The New York Times ran a story titled, “Lawmakers Against the Iran Nuclear Deal,” which showed a chart of Democrats in Congress who opposed the nuclear agreement. That story featured a separate column in the chart which noted which congressional Democrats who opposed the deal were Jewish and which were not. Additionally, Jewish lawmakers and those who represented a district with a larger Jewish population than the U.S. average were highlighted in yellow.

6. Also in 2015, covering a speech at the U.N. by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the Times displayed its egregious bias against Israel again, as The Christian Post noted: “The article, by Rick Gladstone and Jodi Rudoren, noted that ‘Mr. Abbas accused Israel of having systematically violated these pacts’ without mentioning the many violations of the Oslo Peace Accords by Palestinians. In an article exceeding 1,000 words, the reporters made not even one reference to Palestinian terrorism, a basic historical fact that is essential to any fair and balanced understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, since the Oslo Peace Accords, there have been 22 years of Palestinian terrorist attacks — including 140 suicide bombings — which have murdered over 1,500 Israelis (in U.S. population terms, about 60,000 people killed) and made Israeli compliance with a complex and risky ‘peace’ agreement even harder.”

7. In June 2016, the Times ran an op-ed condemning a New York City public pool for having hours where only women were allowed in order to accommodate Orthodox Jewish women. Yet in February 2016, the Times lauded a Toronto pool as a “model of inclusion “ that had a weekly women’s swim to accommodate Muslim women.

8. In May, 2018, reporting on the attempted infiltration into Israel from Gaza in which most of those killed by the IDF were members of the terrorist group Hamas, some of whom disguised themselves as protesters to infiltrate, with at least three instances of armed Hamas gunmen trying to carry out attacks, the Times did not mention those claims until the 42nd paragraph of its main story.

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