New York Times and Reuters Demonize Israel Regardless of the Facts

The New York Times has a long history of biased reporting on Israel. Reuters is no different. A recent example is reported on here.

In our piece that exposed Yazbek’s contentious Twitter history, we questioned whether global news wire service Reuters has a habit of associating with and hiring individuals who have openly expressed their hostility towards the Jewish state.

We revealed that one such reporter for the agency, Henriette Chacar, has accused Israel of “apartheid,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “Jewish supremacy.”

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Reuters is one of the largest wire services in the world. It appears to have no problem in keeping in its ranks reporters whose hostility to Israel is palpable, and whose charges against the Jewish state are absurd. Henriette Chacar is one of those Reuters reporters who has accused Israel of “apartheid,” a grotesque charge, now endlessly repeated by the army of Israel haters. We need to go over the obvious yet again, by way of rebuttal. In Israel, Arabs serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, go abroad as ambassadors. The chairman of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. Jews and Arabs study in the same universities. Jews and Arabs are treated by Jewish and Arab medical personnel in the same hospitals. Jews and Arabs work in the same offices and factories. They play on the same sports teams – the captain of Israel’s national soccer team is an Arab – and in the same orchestras. They go into business together, from restaurants to high tech start-ups. All of this is widely known, but apparently not to Henriette Chacar, which is surprising, given that she is a reporter whose remit covers Israel and the Palestinians. Has she not noticed that Arabs are participants at every level of Israeli society?

Recently, Chacar contributed to an April 15 report that appeared to link the recent Hamas-ordered violence at the Temple Mount to Israel’s policy of demolishing the homes of terrorists who have perpetrated attacks, in addition to a completely incongruous reference to the granting of “building permits to Jewish settlers.”

The riots on the Temple Mount, incited by Hamas, were not held to protest house demolitions by the IDF – that is, demolitions of the family houses of terrorist murderers, a measure that has long been used by the IDF to discourage other, would-be, terrorists. House demolitions were not even mentioned by the rioters; their concern was only the supposed “threat” of the Zionists taking over Al-Aqsa; it was that fear that prompted the riots in mid-April. The Temple Mount clashes were first of all the result of the desire to make sure that the world, now focused on Ukraine, would not forget the Palestinians, and second, those clashes were prompted by Hamas, and designed to show that terror group as the “protector of Al-Aqsa,” while depicting its rival the PA as impotent in defending Al-Aqsa from the hated Israelis.

Such references in a piece that is ostensibly about the recent clashes in Jerusalem tacitly justify the actions of armed rioters who enter a place of worship with the intent of causing bloodshed and mayhem. And given its recent hire, we can also continue to expect more of the same for The New York Times.

Given its dismal record of biased reporting on Israel and the Palestinians, it would be pleasant to report that the New York Times had now decided to hire someone who might report the truth about the Palestinian war on Israel, about Israel’s attempts to defend its citizens from attack, and about the Israeli effort to protect the Temple Mount itself from those Arab rioters who would “desecrate” the holiest site in Judaism, as well as “desecrate” the Al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest site in Islam — by using the mosque as both a storehouse of weapons and a staging area for rioters, with mayhem and murder on their minds, who were throwing rocks and explosives from inside the mosque at Israeli police .

But there has been no change at The New York Times in its coverage of Israel and the Palestinians. The execrable Patrick Kingsley is still the senior reporter covering Israel and the Palestinians as head of the Times office in Jerusalem. Among his other follies, he provided a sympathetic treatment in the paper to Refaat Alareer, a professor in Gaza whose carefully staged poetry class fooled Kingsley into thinking Alareer was a true moderate seeking an accommodation with Israelis. Kingsley reported that Alareer praised the poem “Jerusalem” by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai to his class. He was impressed. But he might have been less impressed had he done any research on Alareer. Had he done so, he would have discovered that in 2019 Alareer tore that very poem apart – the one he had pretended to admire for the credulous Kingsley’s report on the class –describing it as “horrible” and “dangerous.” The teacher of poetry turns out to be the very opposite of the “exponent of tolerance” Kingsley described. Alareer was putting on an act, with his praise of Amichai, and the credulous Times reporter let himself be fooled.

Don’t’ expect any change in the New York Times coverage of Israel and the Palestinians. Not with Patrick Kingsley continuing as the head of the Jerusalem bureau, ably abetted by two recent hires, both well-versed in Israel-bashing: Raha Abdulrahim, and Hiba Yazbek. HonestReporting.com and similar sites will just have to keep sweeping back the tide of Times misinformation. And some of that “honest reporting,” we can allow ourselves to believe, will ultimately stick.

The Truth Must be Told

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