What Did Israel Do To The New York Times?

The New York Times has become an unrelenting source of criticism of the State of Israel. Why? What did Israel do to The Times that it deserves such treatment?

Israel lives up to all the values of liberalism, which is the culture of The Times. It is the only democracy in the Middle East. Its inhabitants are comprised of the greatest victims in history, the Jews. From the Holocaust through the suffering of terrorism and rockets from Gaza, no one has suffered more.

It grants full rights to gay men and women. It does not have the death penalty. Women have equal rights. It has an open judicial system. And it has a free press, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion. None of these exist in the Palestinian world.

Yet, The Times takes every opportunity to condemn Israel, even in the face of boldfaced lies. Remember when The Times ran with the headline that Israel killed hundreds of people by bombing Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital? A little bit of quick fact-finding and it was shown to be an Islamist missile – shot by the Gazans – that fell short and exploded in the hospital parking lot. Whoops! By the time The Times, along with the BBC, got around to printing a small correction notice, the damage to Israel was done.

Yet, The Times gives full credence to all the reports of civilian deaths and famine from the Gazan Health Ministry, under the direction of Hamas. And just two weeks ago, a picture of an emaciated child held by its mother was splashed across the front page of The New York Times. The claim was that it was a child suffering from starvation due to Israel’s willful starvation of the Gaza population. It was only afterward that it was discovered that the child had a genetic disorder. The Times also cropped out the brother seen in the picture, who was clearly not starving. Whoops again.

The Times just loves publishing any article that is detrimental to Israel. Thus, the diabolic Peter Beinart, a severe critic of Israel, gets frequent coverage. The same is true of the other self-loathing Jew, Thomas Friedman.

Just recently, The Times gave space to Israeli-born Omer Bartov, who is supposedly a Holocaust and genocide expert and who proclaimed, “I know genocide when I see it, and Israel is guilty of genocide.”

Yet, Rabbi Blau, who authored the letter with 80 “Orthodox” rabbis signing a letter criticizing Israel for its conduct in the war, feigned surprise that his letter was picked up by The Times. What was he thinking? A letter like that is fodder for the hatred that The Times has for Israel.

So, what is it that makes The Times and the rest of the mainstream media hate Israel so much? What has Israel done to deserve such enmity?

No doubt, a lot of it is due to plain old anti-Semitism. A couple of years ago, The New York Times ran a hit piece on the yeshivah system’s curriculum. It included supposed “facts” on how much taxpayer money was being spent to support the system. The report could have easily been written by Der Stürmer. No comparisons were made between the yeshivah students’ standardized test results and those of the public school system. Not one parent from the yeshivah world was interviewed for the article. It was a total trashing of the Orthodox lifestyle.

But I think something else is playing a role here. The New York Times needs to be counterculture. It’s the way that liberalism operates: If common sense dictates one way, we must be against it. The Times knows full well that the war between Israel and Hamas is good vs. evil. They know full well that Israel is not committing genocide and certainly not guilty of starving the population. That is all Hamas propaganda. Yet they will not let go of their storyline. It does not conform to common sense.

The New York Times is an awful publication. Too bad so many of its readers are Jewish.

Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld is the Rabbi Emeritus of the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, former President of the Vaad Harabonim of Queens, and the Rabbinic Consultant for the Queens Jewish Link.