Ever since March 30, 2018, much of the New York Times’ coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian war has focused on the Great March of Return in Gaza. For that was the day this ballyhooed march began, which takes place every Friday, where sometimes thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, organized and led by Hamas fighters, march toward Israel’s security fence. Their goal is simple: to breach the fence, enter Israel, and kill as many Israelis, civilian and military, as they can. They are sometimes described as “peaceful protesters.” But “peaceful protesters” do not throw Molotov cocktails, grenades, and other explosives, nor do they have guns with which they shoot at Israelis, nor do they prepare and set loose incendiary kites and balloons. These are murderously-inclined rioters, not “peaceful protesters.” The fact that the Israelis have been successful at stopping them does not make them any less murderous in their intent.
The Times’ coverage of the Great March has been taken apart by CAMERA:
Consider this headline, published during the wave of Palestinian riots along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel: “Battle Weary, Hamas Gives Peaceful Protests a Chance.”
Hamas is the internationally designated terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip. Only a day before the Times headline described the group with language from John Lennon’s classic anti-war anthem, Israel had uncovered a Hamas attack tunnel leading from Gaza into Israel. A few days before that, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar declared to Palestinians gathered at the Israeli frontier, “We will take down the border, and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies”—a chilling and illuminating threat that Times reporters opted not to report.
That tunnel and those words are not peaceful. Nor were the rocks, firebombs, and explosives hurled at Israeli targets during what another article by Halbfinger, the Jerusalem bureau chief, nonetheless insisted was Gaza’s “experiment with nonviolent protest.”
The impulse to soft-sell border riots as supposedly peaceful protests was so strong that the newspaper chose to describe well-armed Palestinian combatants as “protesters.” After eight Hamas gunmen and three bomb-planting operatives were killed while attacking Israel, Times Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh —and correspondents Iyad Abuheweila, Isabel Kershner, Megan Specia, Marlise Simons, and Alan Cowell —repeatedly included the attackers in a count of 60 purported protesters shot by the army. When editors were made aware that the casualties included at least 11 armed assailants, the paper’s standards editor Rogene Jacquette stood by their language. Why?
The Times left no stone-throwing unturned. Under a photo of Palestinian rioters, a caption insisted that “Palestinians threw stones in response to Israeli forces’ intervention during an anti-occupation rally near the Gaza Strip on Tuesday.”
The caption, it turns out, was cribbed from a Turkish state-owned news agency. The so-called rally wasn’t about the occupation, but rather focused on tearing down Israel’s borders. And the stone-throwing was not a “response” to Israeli forces’ intervention. To the contrary, as a Palestinian reporter noted in a piece by Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur: “The demonstrators threw stones and burned tires close to the fence of the border. Israeli soldiers responded with force when the protesters tried to cut the fence’s barbed wire.”
Of course, the Palestinians did not throw stones “in response to Israeli forces intervention.” The Times’ caption had it backwards. It was the Israelis who used rubber bullets and tear gas “in response” to the Palestinians, who were not just throwing stones, but also Molotov cocktails, grenades, other explosive devices, incendiary kites and balloons, and sometimes even gunfire at the Israelis, who were merely trying to prevent the security fence from being breached by those, including suicide bombers, who were hellbent on entering Israel and killing Israelis. Furthermore, this was not an “anti-occupation rally” — Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 – but an effort to breach Israeli security, and then once in Israel to kill whomever they could. The Hamas organizers made no secret of this. See Yahya Sinwar’s threat to Israelis just above, about “tearing out their hearts from their bodies.” But the Times chose to ignore what Hamas said.
The Times repeatedly reports, especially in covering Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, that the aim of BDS is to “end the occupation” of the West Bank; it continually returns to the subject of those “settlements” which the Times believes are “illegal” and obstacles to peace. But even a left-wing Americans for Peace Now official has written that “BDS’s prime motivation, if their messaging is to be believed, is not to end the occupation [of the West Bank] at all; rather, it is to end Israel.” Similarly, J Street, a group which spends all of its time criticizing Israel, has acknowledged that BDS “does not…recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state.” This isn’t about “settlements.” It’s about Israel’s existence. But the Times prefers to avoid that inexorable conclusion.
CAMERA notes that when Lara Alqasem was kept out of Israel temporarily because of her former position as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro-BDS campus group which crows that Israel’s “days are numbered,” the Times’ bureau chief in Jerusalem, David Halbfinger, described her as having been barred “over a stint as an advocate for Palestinian rights.” Is the elimination of Israel a “Palestinian right”? Another Times correspondent, Isabel Kershner, insisted that Alqasem’s “credentials as an anti-Israel activist are far from clear-cut.” The Anti-Defamation League calls the SJP, which Alqasem led, the “primary organizer of anti-Israel events on U.S. college campuses” and “has consistently demonized Israel.” Not clear-cut enough for Kershner, or the Times?
The U.N. Human Rights Council relentlessly pillories Israel, the only county which has a permanent place reserved for it on the UNHCR agenda. In a story about the UNHCR, the Times reporter Gardiner Harris claimed that “conservatives have been complaining about the council since its inception in 2006.” He then mentioned such critics as George Bush, Benjamin Netanyahu, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and Ellliot Abrams. This was intended to make readers think that only “conservatives” deplore the UNHCR’s obsession with Israel, and therefore their criticisms can be dismissed as partisan. But the UNHCR has also been condemned for its kangaroo-court treatment of Israel by Obama administration ambassadors Susan Rice, Samantha Power, and Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe; by Democratic senators Jeff Merkley and Bill Nelson; by UN Secretaries Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan; by senior officials from Human Rights Watch; and even, in 2006, by the New York Times editorial board itself, which criticized the UNHCR’s “shameful pattern” of bias against Israel. One must wonder why it was that Gardiner Harris chose not to mention a single one of those – Obama administration appointees, Democratic Senators, UN Secretaries, NGO officials, even members of the Times’ editorial board – who have criticized the Council, but who could not be plausibly labelled as “conservatives.”
Oh, and while we are at it, we’d still like to know why the Times allowed Rebecca Flint Marx to describe Rasmea Odeh, the convicted murder of two Jews, as merely a “controversial activist.”
This year, while the Great March of Return has not been overlooked, the main story about Israel in the Times focuses on Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two Muslim congresswomen who are virulently anti-Israel, believe that all American aid to Israel should be ended, and want Americans to see Israel not as an ally, but as an enemy of American ideals. When anti-BDS legislation was being considered by Congress, on Twitter Tlaib said of the anti-BDS congressmen that “they forgot what country they represent. This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality.” U.S. Senator Marco Rubio responded at once: “This ‘dual loyalty’ canard is a typical anti-Semitic line.”
In the New York Times, reporter Catie Edmondson wrote this: “Ms. Tlaib took a swing at anti-B.D.S. legislation this month, writing on Twitter that ‘this is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality.’” Note what Edmondson carefully left out: that “antisemitic canard” about dual loyalty. Times’ readers would not know that Rashida Tlaib had tweeted that anti-B.D.S. congressmen “forgot what country they represent.” She did report Marco Rubio’s response, but because she had left out the very thing he was denouncing (Tlaib’s antisemitic canard about “dual loyalty”), Rubio’s criticism was made to appear nonsensical.
There are several subjects that in its coverage of the Israel/Palestine war, the New York Times fails to adequately cover. The first is the massive scale of the corruption by leaders of both Hamas and of the Palestinian Authority. Although there are occasional vague allusions to “corruption” as a general problem in the PA, the Times has never deigned to give us the figures that would make a deep impression.
The amount Abbas has stolen from the Palestinian Authority is staggering. Muhammad Rashid, Arafat’s economic and financial advisor and head of the Palestinian Investment Fund, said that in 2012, Abbas has a net worth of over $100 million. In the last seven years, that $100 million has surely increased, and not just through inflation. $200 million is a low estimate, counting both inflation and further “deposits” Abbas made from 2012 to 2019. Another PA official, former security minister Mohammed Dahlan, has claimed that $1.3 billion vanished from the Palestinian Investment Fund since it was turned over to Abbas’ control in 2005. Depending on your Palestinian source, Abbas has managed to accumulate between $200 million and $1.3 billion, all of it diverted from the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians know he is corrupt; they are long inured to leaders who steal from them; they may not, however, have realized the full extent of Mahmoud Abbas’s grand theft. And what has made the New York Times so strangely unconcerned with this story which tells us so much about Abbas and the other Palestinian lords of misrule?
It’s not only what he has secretly stolen from the foreign aid given to the PA, but the further sums Abbas has officially allocated to his own well-being, that rankle ordinary Palestinians and that the Times should report on. Abbas had the PA spend $50 million, for example, on a private jet so he could travel in the same style as world leaders. He had also been building a lavish presidential palace in Ramallah, costing $13 million, but following an uproar over the expense, Abbas prudently decided that his planned “palace” would instead become the National Library. None of this was reported in the Times. Why not?
And then there is the wealth of his sons Tarek and Nasser. They have amassed personal fortunes through such things as monopolies on American-made cigarettes sold in the territories; USAid funding; public works projects, such as road and school construction, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, and special preferences for their own retail enterprises. They have won these contracts through the intervention of their doting father. The estimated net worth of Abbas’ sons, from their business empire, is at least $300 million. Surely their story, too, should be covered in the Times, if it wants readers to understand the deep unhappiness among Palestinian Arabs with Abbas and his family.
Abbas has had quite a run, though as a crook he is not a patch on Yasir Arafat, who spirited away between one and three billion dollars when he was the PLO head. Did the New York Times run stories on the billions that disappeared when Arafat was alive? Or tell readers the amounts that went to his high-living widow in Paris? Why not? Perhaps most telling of all, why did the New York Times not let its readers know about two former leaders of Hamas, Moussa Abu Marzouk and Khaled Meshal, each of whom has amassed a fortune of at least $2.5 billion? The parlous economic state of the Gazan Arabs is the result of many things including, especially, the Grand Theft of more than five billion dollars, by just two Hamas leaders. There are also said to be 600 Hamas “millionaires” in Gaza. But not a word about any of this hallucinatory level of corruption has appeared in the New York Times. Again one has to ask: why?