The New York Times Finds the IDF ‘Ferocious,’ But Not Hamas

The New York Times displays every day in its reporting, in its columns, and in its editorials, its bias against Israel. Ira Stoll takes on some subtler examples of this, in the choice of pejorative adjectives and adverbs the Times deploys in describing Israel but refrains from using when describing Hamas. You can find his piece here: “Jewish Leader Slams New York Times for ‘Dreadful’ Bias as Paper Faults ‘Ferocious’ Israel, ‘Rabidly Partisan’ Adelson,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, June 28, 2024:

Usually the Times gets faulted for false moral equivalence between the Hamas terrorists and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) defending the Jewish state. In this case, there’s no equivalence; there’s just a straight-out smear of the Israelis as “ferocious” with no parallel negative description of the Gazan attackers.

For the New York Times, the IDF is “ferocious,” but Hamas? There is no negative adjective attached to Hamas, despite the terror group having carried out horrific atrocities — rape, torture, murder — on October 7. What is the reason for this curious omission?

The Times is similarly ferocious in its description of a pro-Israel philanthropist and political donor, Dr. Miriam Adelson. A front-page article about her declares: “She is, in some ways, a political carbon copy of her husband: intensely pro-Israel, rabidly partisan, and a believer in the nobility of using her money, north of $30 billion, and her media empire to buy influence and shape the world.”

“Rabidly partisan?” It’s not enough for the rabid partisans at the Times to call Adelson partisan; they need to escalate it to “rabidly” partisan? The Times published a profile of a pro-Biden Democratic political donor, Jeffrey Katzenberg, without calling him rabid….

What makes Miriam Adelson “rabidly partisan”? The adverb “rabidly” suggests a kind of mad-dog ferocity in her politics.She doesn’t seem to me to be any more “rabidly partisan” than the other big donors in American politics. And if she is to be described by the Times as “rabidly partisan,” don’t the same words apply, with even greater justice, to the far-left billionaire George Soros? But you never hear Soros described in the Times in anything other than glowing terms. His political activism is depicted as admirable, as he criticizes the Israelis and tries to undermine Israel’s support among Americans.

Since the adjectives and adverbs are the main vehicles for the Times’ expressions of bias toward Israel, the author of the article, Ira Stoll, suggests that the Times editors should take special care to excise most of them.

The American Jewish community is already increasingly losing patience with the paper. The CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York, a longtime partner of the New York Times in its Neediest Cases Fund, Eric Goldstein, wrote a letter to the editor of the paper faulting the Adelson profile and a Times online headline that said US Rep. Jamaal Bowman had been “Overtaken by Flood of Pro-Israel Money.”…

The role of AIPAC’s money was important, but not decisive in defeating Jamaal Bowman. Of the $25 million his opponent’s campaign received, only $15 million of it came from AIPAC. Bowman, with his increasingly bizarre antics, mouthing the lyrics of the most foul-mouthed hip-hop songs as he strutted across public platforms, embarrassed black voters who were turned off by Bowman behaving as a parody of a thug. And he also had a record of not helping constituents. He was too enamored of himself, thought himself too important a personage to have to bother overmuch with the nitty-gritty of constituent services, and instead tried to make himself, such as his pal Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, into a national figure who might someday ride his blackness and progressiveness all the way to the Senate. Instead, he infuriated so many who had previously supported him that he lost the primary in a landslide to George Latimer. And the fire alarm he deliberately set off at the Capitol to delay a vote – and then lied about the incident, claiming he had only intended to open a door – did not help him, either.

The Bowman headline — “US Rep. Jamaal Bowman Overtaken by Flood of Pro-Israel Money” — was factually incorrect, because there were several reasons having nothing to do with Israel that also contributed to Bowman’s loss, and worse still, it summoned up the antisemitic trope of rich Jews who “run the world.”

Will the New York Times learn anything from this latest contretemps? Will it call a halt to its blatantly anti-Israel coverage, and the antisemitic tropes it so unthinkingly employs? Of course not. It’s the New York Times. The Newspaper of Record.The Grey Lady. It answers to no one.