The New York Times’ Obsessive Demonization of Israel

The New York Times has a long record of biased reporting on Israel. One particularly egregious example was the Times’ coverage of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the mastermind of Iran’s nuclear program whom Mossad assassinated outside Tehran. He was reported on most sympathetically in a New York Times article. We learned that Fakhrizadeh liked to take long drives in the country. He loved to read poetry. He enjoyed spending time with his children. Who cares if he was preparing a nuclear weapon that the Tehran regime had made clear it would use to “annihilate” the Jewish state, when he had all those other winning traits? A lover of nature and a family man, forsooth!

Barbara Slavin, who heads the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, editorialized in the Times that “the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh isn’t about stopping a bomb — it’s about preventing diplomacy.” She wrote, in words that seem quaint in their naivete now (and did then — November 28, 2020 — as well): “Iran has said repeatedly that it will go back into full compliance with the nuclear agreement if the Biden administration agrees to do the same, and lifts the onerous sanctions piled on by President Trump. So why kill Mr. Fakhrizadeh now? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, with the support of President Trump, seems intent on scorching the earth to make it harder for any return to diplomacy under President-elect Joe Biden. Israel and the Trump administration apparently fear that a Biden administration would seek a quick return to the nuclear agreement, which could revive Iran’s struggling economy and make it harder to contain its influence in the Middle East. Killing Mr. Fakhrizadeh makes that all the more difficult.” A year and a half later, the talks have broken down over Iran’s insistence that its Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps be removed from the terrorist list. The Biden administration has said that it is “worried” that Iran could be just weeks away from gathering all the materials it needs to construct a nuclear bomb. Administration officials were silent about the possibility that their appeasement policies have exacerbated, rather than calmed, the situation, and emboldened the Iranians into thinking that now, with a weak president in the White House, was the time to act on their nuclear ambitions.

The New York Times, meanwhile, is still up to its same old tricks, demonizing Israel at every turn (note the gratuitous reference to Benjamin Netanyahu amid Slavin’s scolding about the killing of Fakhrizadeh). Instead of trying to make its reporting on matters concerning Israel more balanced and fair, it has chosen to make matters worse with its latest hire, who is reported on here. Meanwhile, its coverage is as biased as ever:

And just last week, the newspaper’s Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley penned an article that suggested Israel had acted “aggressively” in its response to Palestinian rioters who had congregated at the Temple Mount armed with stones, Molotov cocktails, and other weapons.

In the piece, Kingsley does acknowledge the violence that prompted a police intervention at the holy site upon which the Al-Aqsa mosque was built:

On Friday morning, video posted online by a Palestinian outlet showed that the clashes began after dozens of Palestinian youths threw stones at and set off fireworks in the direction of a police outpost on the edge of the compound. Only afterward did riot police enter the forecourt of the mosque. [emphasis added]

There were not “dozens” of “Palestinian youths,” but hundreds of them, many who were not “youths” at all, but grown men. The mob soon swelled to thousands of participants. They were not armed, as Kingsley says, with “stones,” but rather, with more lethal “rocks.” They threw not just “fireworks,” but Molotov cocktails. Thus was the lethality of the rioters’ attacks seriously underreported.

Finally the Palestinian rioters – those so-called “youths” – did not throw their rocks and Molotov cocktails only at the police; they had started, in the early morning of April 15, by throwing their rocks and Molotov cocktails from the Temple Mount at Jewish worshippers praying at the Western Wall far below. The report by Kingsley neglects to mention that attack as prompting the Israeli police to intervene, to try to stop the rioters from endangering the lives of Jews at the Western Wall. Why did he so downplay such an important part of the story?

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