It’s taken me a while to fathom how anti-Israeli (or even antisemitic) the New York Times is, but the article below exemplifies this bias, which constantly leaks into the paper’s news reporting and non-op-ed stories. In fact, I find that the Times of Israel gives more accurate information about the war than does the NYT. If you read the NYT article below article and can’t see how it’s slanted to make Israel look bad, then I think you’re missing something.
The story in the article is one I reported on December 1 and on December 7 of last year—about the shooting of three Palestinian (or Palestinian-American) friends, all attending American colleges, as they took an evening stroll in Vermont. As I said at the time (the Wikipedia account is here):
You have surely heard that three young Palestinian-Americans, Kinnan Abdalhamid, Hisham Awartani, and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, were shot on November 25 in Burlington, Vermont. Two of the injured were American citizens; the other a legal resident. The alleged shooter, Jason Eaton, was captured and appears to be mentally ill. From the NYT:
They were shot and wounded on Saturday by a white man with a handgun while they were walking near the University of Vermont, the police said. Two of the victims were wearing Palestinian kaffiyehs, a traditional headdress.
The young men told family members they were speaking a hybrid of English and Arabic before the man shot at them four times without saying anything before the attack, according to a family spokeswoman.
Two of the victims were in stable condition, the authorities said. The third sustained much more serious injuries.
The one with serious injuries was shot in the spine, and may never walk again. This is a terrible attack, and, while we can be grateful that nobody was killed, losing your ability to walk is horrible. The shooter has been charged with second-degree murder, and, if he’s guilty, which seems likely, will be spending a long time in either prison or a mental hospital.
Tahseen was shot in the leg and recovered, but Hiasham is still in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. This story attracted a good deal of attention at the time because of the possibility that it could have been a hate crime: the young men were speaking Arabic and wearing keffiyehs (scarves that symbolize Palestinian solidarity). Plus the victims are considered “people of color,” which always gets progressives furiously speculating, and then—as in this case—asserting that it must have been a hate crime. Someone, it was said, was trying to kill Palestinians because they were Palestinians.
Now there’s no doubt that someone committed a horrible crime. Although nobody was killed, Hisham will probably never walk again, and since he’s only 20, I see that as a terrible fate. (The article below notes that he seems to be accepting it pretty well.)
But was it really a hate crime? Even on December 7 the police, searching furiously, couldn’t find any evidence that the perpetrator, one Jason Eaton, was motivated by hatred of Palestinians. Instead, he appeared to be mentally ill, and what meager evidence there is suggests that he might be pro-Palestinian! Even so, the students, the family, and some of the media were asserting or implying that Eaton was “Islamophobic.” As Wikipedia reports, Eaton has been “charged with three counts of attempted murder in the second degree” and investigations into it being a hate crime are continuing. The trial has yet to begin, and if there’s no evidence of a hate crime, then they can’t tack that on as another charge.
As the NYT story begrudgingly notes below, there’s still no evidence of anti-Palestinian bigotry in the shooting, even after four months. If you read about this shooting, you slowly realize that the media and many Palestinians actually want it to be a hate crime, for that would fit a narrative of minority students being victimized.
I would think that Palestinians would want it NOT to be a hate crime, because that would mean that there’s less hatred that turns into violence. But the narrative overtakes the facts.
The NYT has found a new way to use this four-month-old shooting to demonize Israel, and that’s why the article below is so long. It ties together the shooting and the victims’ lives since November, but also works into the article repeated demonizations of Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians, leaving out some salient facts. In other words, it’s coopting the shooting, which is bad enough on its own, to push an anti-Israel narrative. The author, Rozina Ali, is clearly anti-Israel, as you can see clearly from her “X” feed. No agenda here!
Click below to read the piece from the NYT Magazine, or you can find the article archived here.
I’ll just give some quotes from the long piece, quotes critical of Israel’s behavior towards Palestinians (there’s nothing positive about Israel, of course). Some of her quotes (the three boys met and became friends in Ramallah, on the West Bank) are below, indented:
The friends largely avoided run-ins with Israeli forces or the settlers surrounding Ramallah. Still, they were growing up in the shadow of the second intifada. Security was tight. Long gun barrels followed them at military checkpoints, prickling them with fear. As a child, Hisham heard about a friend of his cousin’s who was killed by Israeli soldiers. A friend’s father was arrested and disappeared into the prison system for a year and a half. No one knew precisely why. Once, when Hisham was hiking, a group of soldiers demanded to see his identity card. They let him go, but he was rattled.
The occupation affected Tahseen intimately: He couldn’t visit his relatives in Gaza, including his grandmother, because Israel restricted movement between the two strips of Palestinian territory. One of his earliest memories was of being rushed away by his dad from a tear-gas canister that landed near him. When he was 11, soldiers barged into the living room of his house without warning, pointed their guns at the family and shouted out a name — Tahseen’s neighbor. They had the wrong house. Years later, it happened again.
. . . Kinnan and Hisham appeared to be more troubled. Early one afternoon in May 2021, when Hisham was 18, he ventured to El Bireh, an adjoining city where people were protesting. Demonstrations had erupted across the West Bank in response to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and efforts to expel Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. The teachers at Ramallah Friends regularly discussed the occupation — a subject that could hardly be avoided even in a class on poetry. Still, they discouraged students from attending demonstrations, where they could be killed. A classmate who attended one had been shot in the leg. But Hisham was tired of feeling humiliated and oppressed. I don’t accept this, he thought. I’m not going to take this lying down.
The NYT doesn’t note that the “response to Israeli airstrikes on Gaza” was, as you can see from the links, a military response to Hamas rockets fired at Israel from Gaza! The paper implies, as it often does, that an Israeli defensive response to an attack from Palestine is really an attack mounted by Israel.
Next we hear about Israel “pounding” Gaza after the barbaric attacks on October 7. Note the choice of words:
Then, last October, as he started his second year, Hamas gunmen breached a fence and attacked towns across southern Israel, killing civilians and capturing hostages. And then Israel began pounding Gaza.
. . . The friends missed home. Not just Ramallah, which was rapidly changing under Israel’s latest incursion, but a particular time, the one they couldn’t return to. They missed the life before they came to the United States to study, before the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. . .
Hamas “attacks” while Israel “pounds” and bombards “relentlessly”. The whole narrative implies that, in general, nothing that Palestinians do is bad and everything Israel does is bad.
More:
Still, deadly violence in the United States seemed rare compared with that in the West Bank, where Israeli forces were detaining Palestinians en masse. Even before the Oct. 7 attacks, 2023 was a particularly deadly year; now deaths shot up. By the end of the year, Israeli forces and settlers would kill 507 civilians there, including 124 children — the highest death toll since the United Nations began recording such statistics in 2005. The friends were planning to meet in Burlington, Vt., and stay with Hisham’s grandmother for Thanksgiving. Some of the parents encouraged them to stay in the United States for the winter holidays, too. They thought their children would be safer there.
There is no mention about why Paletinians were detained and some killed by the IDF. I doubt it was because the IDF just likes to kill Palestinians.
There is plenty of discussion of hate crimes against Muslims, and no discussion about the fact that religious hate crimes against Jews are not only more frequent in number than “Islamophobic” hate crimes, but farmore frequent on a per capita basis. From the Dept. of Justice data in 2022:
- Religion-Based Crimes: There were 2,042 reported incidents based on religion. More than half of these (1,122) were driven by anti-Jewish bias. Incidents involving anti-Muslim (158) and anti-Sikh (181) sentiments remained at similar levels compared to 2021.
The Times of Israel, using FBI data from 2022, gives slightly different numbers but they’re roughly similar:
There were 1,305 offenses committed against Jews in 2022, the FBI reported in its tally Monday of national crime statistics, far outnumbering the second-largest category, anti-Muslim crimes, of which there were 205.
Taking the Justice Department statistics, and assuming the observation that there are 7.6 million Jews in America and 3.45 million Muslims, this works out to a per capita yearly ratio of hate crimes against Jews to that of Muslims being 3.2 to 1 (I hope I did my math right). That is, the chance of a Jew being the victim of a religiously-based hate crime is roughly 3.2 times the chance of a Muslim being a victim. But of course the antisemitic crimes are rarely discussed, because although Jews are the victims, they are—being “white adjacent”—not seen as victims.
But I digress. The final bit of the long story is the evidence that the shooter was Islamophobic. Here’s what the paper says about that:
Within hours, the police came to talk to [the three shot students]. Hate crimes, which are predicated on the state of mind of the aggressor, are challenging to prove in court. This case was even more tricky: The shooter said nothing out loud before, during or after the shooting, and the man the police had charged in the attack, Jason Eaton, was a somewhat complicated character. He had returned to Vermont the previous summer, after some years in upstate New York. Things had taken a bad turn — a series of troubled relationships and jobs that didn’t work out. He spent Thanksgiving with his mother, who later told a reporter that he had had mental-health struggles but was “totally normal” that day. Eaton appeared to have engaged in political discussion online. According to a local Vermont paper, he had left comments on X about an op-ed piece about Gaza — “What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” — and described himself as a “radical citizen pa-trolling demockracy and crapitalism for oathcreepers.” Per a police affidavit, Eaton had a pistol, a rifle and two shotguns in his apartment, along with ammunition consistent with casings found at the crime scene. (Eaton has pleaded not guilty to three charges of attempted second-degree murder.)
The link to the story at a Vermont site, however, makes Eaton seem even more pro-Palestinian:
While Seven Days has not been able to view all of Eaton’s social media posts, what was provided to the paper suggests he had some sympathy for the Palestinian side of the conflict.
“What if someone occupied your country? Wouldn’t you fight them?” he wrote in a November 16 post responding to a VTDigger.org commentary by U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) that called for a cease-fire. “Brittan [sic] wouldn’t let ships with food sent by other countries into Ireland during the famine. My people starved.”
In an October 17 post on X responding to a different article, Eaton wrote that “the notion that Hamas is ‘evil’ for defending their state from occupation is absurd. They are owed a state. Pay up.”
There is no suggestion that he hated Palestine or Palestinians; in fact, it’s quite the contrary. But that doesn’t stop the boys or their families—or prominent voices in the Palestinian community—from asserting it was a hate crime. For some reason, and in the absence of evidnece, they just know that Eaton was motivated to shoot Palestinians. And so The Narrative must be obeyed.
In the end, what we see in this article is not evidence for a hate crime, but strong evidence that the NYT wants to make the shooting into a “hate story”, with the anti-Israeli author using her venue to gin up hatred against Israel. As I said the other day, this is the way the mainstream liberal media operates in America today: the narrative is more important than the truth.
And did it strike the author (or the editors) that all the anti-Israel stuff in this post has absolutely nothing to do with the shooting of these students?
______________
By the way, here’s something that looks at first like an antisemitic hate crime: a man of Arab descent killing a Jewish dentist. However, one local source reports that the killer “identified as 29-year-old Mohammed Abdulkareem, was believed to be a ‘disgruntled former customer’ of the dental office, authorities said”. I don’t know any more details, though, as I can’t find a mention of it in the MSM. (It would be there if it was a Jew killing a Muslim!) But sometimes a killing is just a killing, and has nothing to do with religion or politics.
San Diego shocking murder – Mohammed Abdulkareem, 29, was arrested after shooting & killing Jewish dentist, Dr. Benjamin Harouni, at his SmilePlus Dentistry practice in the El Cajon suburb.
Demand El Cajon Police investigate if antisemitism was a factor in this shocking crime -… pic.twitter.com/chBqrrRVH1
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) March 1, 2024
All the intolerance, violence and hatred is from the Left. While espousing “inclusion” and “tolerance”.
Not all of it: there’s plenty on the right (gays, immigrants, blacks, and so on). I report more often on the Left because plenty of others are doing the Right and I also want to purify my own political wing.
Where’s the violence, demonstrations and calling for “Kill all Gays” or “Bring Back Slavery”? Which would be the mirror image of the Left’s actions and rhetoric.
Not just that. But there is an asymmetry. Hard right idiocy has NO cultural, institutional or popular power at all. You’ll gather more flat earthers than actual white supremacists in a Marriot conference center. They’re laughably absurd.
The woke idiot left is driving this country – THAT is the imperative- to counter them.
D.A.
NYC
It’s similar in the UK. For months we’ve had intimidation and worse by Islamist, anti-Jewish protest marches. Our PM has just made a speech about it, but he made sure that every mention of Islamism was accompanied by a condemnation of the “far right” (e.g. “Islamist extremists and far rights groups are spreading a poison …” link.)
There’s a big difference. In the UK a “far right” march would attract a couple of dozen people, likely fewer than 100. Currently, Islamist-led anti-Israel marches are attracting tens of thousands, sometime in the hundreds of thousands (not all will be Islamist extremists, but a large fraction will be).
There is a very good interview on YouTube with Ayaan Hirsi Ali “Elites have allowed this to happen” about Jihadists takeover of Muslims in western countries.And she says that the politicians have to grow a spine and counteract the extremists. Because otherwise you will have large groups of people on both sides become radicalized.
The Winston Marshall Show #008 3/2/24
There is no “ far right” in the UK in my opinion but, unless cowardly idiot politicians halt islam in its tracks there will be one and it will not be nice.
“That is, for every Muslim who’s the victim of a hate crime, there are 3.2 Jewish victims.”
Correction: roughly 7 victims. The 3.2 is per capita.
Agreed. To be correct, the quoted sentence should be prefaced with “If we considered a cohort of equal numbers of Muslims and Jews, then, for every …”.
Pedantry: given the figures the overall ratio is 6.4 (1305/205), so nearer 6 than 7. Also, the per-capita ratio seems to be 2.9 (1305/7.6)/(205/3.45) rather than 3.2.
Yeah, I have to fix that, thanks.
The nature of “ hate crimes” against Jews is also much worse than that ascribed to muslims who scream “islamophobia” at every criticism.
Idiot New Woke Times. Never enough dead Jews, never enough terrorists to coddle and carry water for.
F them.
D.A.
NYC
Not just that. But there is an asymmetry. Hard right idiocy has NO cultural, institutional or popular power at all. You’ll gather more flat earthers than actual white supremacists in a Marriot conference center. They’re laughably absurd.
The woke idiot left is driving this country – THAT is the imperative- to counter them.
D.A.
NYC
I disagree that the Woke Left is the only dark force that’s driving this country to ruin. What about January 6? And Trumpism more generally?
As an actual liberal, I feel increasingly caught between two extremes: The radical identitarian/authoritarian right (which, remember, actually managed to elect a President of the United States–an utterly appalling President!); and the radical identitarian/authoritarian left (which I agree absolutely has more power in the halls of academe and in the centers of “cultural power” like Hollywood). So far, the radical identitarian/authoritarian left has not–yet–managed to *completely* capture the Democratic Party the way the radical identitarian/authoritarian right has now seized total power over the Republican Party.
I really think there are a lot of Americans who feel caught in the middle between all these crazies. Maybe even a majority of us. But, this whole cultural and political moment also feels very 1930s to me–then, it was Fascism battling it out with Communism–and, well, we all remember how THAT decade turned out.
Exactly. International Communism ended up giving Hitler a helping hand and brought about WWII. Now it’s the woke left and Jihadists.
“Trumpism” isn’t threatening those with whom they disagree with genocide or outright elimination. There are no violent “Trumpist” demonstrations, attacks on individuals or property. They haven’t burned down courthouses, set cars on fire or beat those waving flags with whom they disagree.
+1
I don’t take the NYT, and the archive didn’t load, but I think I got enough from your narrative to conclude—as I’ve said a couple of times in the past two days—that the media hate Israel *a priori* and that the stories they tell follow. This is not only the case for the NYT but seems to obtain quite broadly across the major outlets. I, too read different narratives at the Times of Israel, the Jerusalem Post, and elsewhere. Of course they, too, have a point of view.
The fact that the NYT felt the need to tie the status of the three students to the war in Israel is enough to tell me to expect bias. The Times doesn’t care a whit about the students; it is revisiting this old story about the students to exploit their tragedy and demonize Israel.
I don’t think establishment orgs like the NYT or BBC are necessarily anti-Jewish, I think it’s just that they’re run and staffed by true believers and representatives of an ideology that is innately opposed to and hostile toward the idea of an ethnostate, and that Israel occupies a fraught territory (literally and figuratively) where it is both a Western liberal democracy and a state built by and for one faith and people.
The reigning global(ist) ideology is neoliberal, egalitarian, dedicated to maximum personal autonomy, universalist in its aspirations (I call it Social Justice Inc.), and wants to both guard and spread its power and share its Good News with every human on the globe; Israel is opposite in that it’s particularist and wants to preserve a land where one tribe is exalted and protected, rooted in an ancient faith and not the dictates of liquid modernity.
This is obviously intolerable to the modern cosmopolitan globalist: not only is it a direct rebuke of their sacred beliefs, it outrages them that an Arab there may be “excluded” and feel his faith disrespected, as Thou Shalt Not Exclude is a Social Justice Commandment. To any committed universalist, a particularist person, place or thing must be condemned for its crimes against their desired One World future global utopia (which has John Lennon’s “Imagine” for its anthem).
Now of course there are many Arab ethnostates, but as these places don’t pretend to be Western liberals and would tell any Westerners who wanted to change their beliefs and traditions to pound sand, they are spared demonization.
Umm. . . . my point is that it’s not just the ethnostate of Israel that’s being criticized by the media: it’s Jews who aren’t even Israeli. Look at how fast the media was to pin a label of Islamophobia on the shooter of those three Palestinians, or how much attention hate crimes against Palestinians get compared to crimes against Jews. How is that explained by deploring an ethostate rather than Jews themselves. And of course look what’s happening on college campuses.
I would just say that the Israel/Palestine conflict has also now gained a heavy symbolic weight—especially for younger Americans who are short on history but raging to battle “oppression” even if that means manufacturing it.
And as the main symbolic narrative mold now is Oppressed/Oppressor (with Israel being cast as Oppressor here), the 6 Degrees of Oppression mindset that occupies most plugged-in brains computes thusly:
Anything a Jew does is immediately equated with Israel and painted as crimes of the Oppressor punching down, with the converse being anything bad that happens to an Arab must in some way be linked to their Victim status.
It is not rational or realistic, but these are the comic-book narratives that are most popularly bought and sold, that can be molded to craft the juiciest clickbait, and most people think and act more according to tribal loyalties and symbols than to factual parsing.
Or more simply: the desire to participate in a glorious struggle to free the Oppressed and punish the Oppressor is the emotional engine here.
I agree that you’re right in part, but you’re couching your theory as universal and have also defined it so it’s nearly unfalsifiable: any time someone is antisemitic in America, they’re really going after Oppressor Israel, not against Jews. But I would argue that the behavior of some antisemits–attaking Jews because they’re Jewish, and not mentioning Israel, argue that you’re not 100% right about everybody. Yes, this is all promoted by DEI, but antisemitism existed long before people started criticizing Israel as an oppressive white colonialist state.
“ where it is both a Western liberal democracy and a state built by and for one faith and people”
Ironically, it is the only country in the Middle East that is a democracy and extends equal rights to all citizens, including the 2 million Arabs. Approximately 1 million Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries where they’d lived for centuries sfter 1948.
All of the surrounding Arab countries are one form or another of a dictatorship or theocracy that tolerate no dissent and nothing approaching a political democracy.
I’m “not 100% right about everybody…”
Now that is something I definitely agree with!
Of course I was just using broad strokes, and mostly thinking of media-class liberals and other members of the Left clerisy (or their students and acolytes).
I would never argue or claim that the world isn’t infested with Jew hate—and boy have the Jew haters come out of the woodwork!—but I guess I’m blessed to live in more rarefied circles where Jew hate can be veiled by geopolitical discourse and that beast called Theory.
Cheers!
You have some excellent points, Mr. Pupkin. I’m undecided as to the “mix” of antisemitism vs “anti-colonialism” like you assert.
The former, in its current formation, is pretty new. Obviously antisemitism is ancient but JUST antisemitism wouldn’t get our downtowns as crowded with the morally and intellectually retarded as we’ve seen lately.
It is a convenient mix for loads of idiots we see in our cities and unis.
I wrote about this before 10/7
https://democracychronicles.org/what-pro-palestine-student-groups-get-wrong/
In the end what % of the mix is what doesn’t matter as much as the larger problem.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Sorry to be so late to the party. The article and subsequent comments renewed my curiosity about the roots of the NYT’s publishers’ family. The article referenced below is one description of the paper’s and its publishers’ complicated history with Judaism, Zionism, and the Holocaust. To my mind, it helps explain the paper’s absence of empathy for the people of Israel in the wake of the October 7th massacres. That and the propensity of its management to fold to periodic “social justice” tantrums by some of their young reporters.
https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/the-sulzberger-family-a-complicated-jewish-legacy-at-the-new-york-times/