Did The NYT Sanitize Illegal Pro-Hamas Protest? (Update)

To read the New York Times, protests against Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu were not only peaceful, but protesters were the victims of needless police force and abuse. For this reason, one might be hard-pressed to question why people who read the paper of record might believe that this was a lawful exercise of First Amendment rights in support of Palestinians.

But how did the New York Times manage to miss the rest of it?

Is this what they mean by pro-Palestinian?

The obvious argument is that not all protesters engaged in lawless conduct. Not all protesters support terrorists. Not all protesters hate Jews. But some do, and the ones who claim they do not hate Jews and want to destroy Israel do nothing to stop those who do or vet them from their ranks.

The New York Times could have presented the protests in all their dimensions, but instead put together a presentation that somehow manages not to mention or show any of the illegal conduct, the assaults against US Park Police, the stealing, burning and replacing of the American flags at Union Station and the vandalism of memorials and a replica of the Liberty Bell with calls for terrorism.

One of the most significant problems is that America no longer has a common source of news, of legitimate, trustworthy information. For the most part, the New York Times recognized its failures during the George Floyd protests of its writers placing ideology over facts, and by doing so lying in its pages for the sake of what the woke deem “moral clarity.”

And yet, this flagrantly misleading presentation that somehow managed to convey a shockingly false impression of “mostly peaceful protests” appears in its online pages. Granted, its fawning adoration of Kamala Harris, who has yet to express her position on either Israel or the criminal conduct of “protesters,” has consumed its reporting for the past few days, but does that mean the Times is once again lost to the ideological lies of “moral clarity” rather than a fair and accurate portrayal of the facts that would enable readers to see the truth and make up their own minds?

Update: Even though the NYT did not deem this important enough to report, Kamala Harris did and issued an good statement in response.

 

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8 thoughts on “Did The NYT Sanitize Illegal Pro-Hamas Protest? (Update)”

  2. RJ

    Yes, the point here is beautifully made. And if the same “protest” took place by antisemites on the right, this would be a two-week news cycle, with pressure on A.G. Garland to track down all who attended, and the Times proclaiming the End of Democracy.

  3. Elpey P.

    Clever how they launder the information that protesters are explicitly supporting Hamas by presenting it as an accusation from Netanyahu. Wonder if they debated including their standard hypocrisy of “…claimed without providing evidence…” but possessed just barely enough self-awareness not to.

  4. Michael Watson

    I’d like to narrow in on this specific line: “But some do, and the ones who claim they do not hate Jews and want to destroy Israel do nothing to stop those who do or vet them from their ranks.”

    I’m curious what the ideal response from the peaceful protesters should be when they become aware of hostile elements at a given event. My understanding is that protests are not something you need to sign up for–someone might put out a suggested time and place but ultimately even those who attempt to organize can’t control who shows up and have no ability to compel behavior from participants.

    1. Elpey P.

      Schrodinger’s Agitator. The answer is both nothing and everything until we know what the protest’s Corporate Social Responsibility Score is.

  5. L. Phillips

    This is a lot easier for me to understand in an economic context based on the assertion that newspapers don’t provide a public service, much as they would like us to believe they do. They are a for profit business and provide a perishable product.

    I don’t read the NYT and likely never will. Why on earth would they seek to provide a product I’m not willing to pay for. Almost none of their advertisers provide products that are within my core economic interests, so their advertising dollars are essentially wasted on me even if I were a reader.

    A simple corollary would be a neighborhood bakery that decides they are going to produce nothing but parsnip pies (yes, there is such a thing and it tastes awful). Their only customer would be my mother because she loved the fool things. But, she’s dead. So the bakery changes its offerings or closes. Or finds a stupid billionaire sugar-daddy.

    One woman’s divine truth is another man’s insipid, untruthful drivel. We vote with our dollars.

  6. B. McLeod

    Around the Internet this morning, legal experts educated by the Internet are advising the public the the Supreme Court has validated tearing down and burning U.S. flags as a first amendment right. Hence, they reason, the police were simply wrong from the outset.

    Sometimes, they fail to recognize slight factual differences that might render a first amendment precedent inapplicable.

  7. Chaswjd

    There is a line from Dangerous Liaisons which goes something like, “I read philosophers to know what to think”. The New York Times is invaluable because it lets us know what some want us to think.

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