New York Times’ blatant antisemitic coverage should repulse truth-loving advertisers and readers

Dear Friend of Israel, Friend of FLAME:

The New York Times has rarely been good for the Jews or the Jewish state, despite the paper’s nominally Jewish ownership since 1896.

At best, the Times’ coverage of Jews and Israel reeks of misinformation and half-truths. At worst, its coverage is openly biased and hateful.

A recent study confirms blatant anti-Israel bias on the part of the paper. It shows the Times consistently omits or minimizes critical details about the threats Israel faces. The Times also contains disproportionately negative content about the Jewish state and dramatically understates crimes committed by Palestinian terrorist groups against Jews and Israel.

This research was conducted by veteran Israeli journalist Lilac Sigan, in collaboration with International Communication and Public Diplomacy expert Professor Eytan Gilboa of Bar-Ilan University.

Findings of the study shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the Times’ decades-long record of anti-Jewish bias, underreporting the events of the Holocaust and most recently singling out the Hassidic Jewish community in New York for criticism of education in its yeshivas.

The Times’ obsessively cynical tradition of attacking and misrepresenting the Jewish people and their state certainly fits the IHRA definition of antisemitism. It demonizes and works to delegitimize Israel, while applying double standards against the Jewish state to which it holds no other people—certainly not to Palestinians murdering innocent Israeli civilians.

Should the Times or any mainstream medium report on Blacks, Muslims or trans people as it does Jews and the Jewish state, a nationwide protest would arise to cancel the paper. In fact, the Times’ nefarious track record should be a toxicity-warning alert to advertisers and readers alike.

Tragically, the Times gives Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, more bad press than even Iran—a genocidal Islamist dictatorship currently engaged in a brutal crackdown on its own people, who are protesting their despotic rulers. Indeed, the Sigan-Gilboa study found that last year the paper published 20 negative opinion pieces against Israel compared to just 13 for Iran.

The Times repeatedly uses libelous terms in describing the Jewish state. The Sigan-Gilboa study noted that the words “Israel” and “apartheid” appeared together 39 times during 2022, while the words “Israel” and “colonialism” appeared together 16 times. In contrast, the words “Hamas” and “terrorist organization” appeared together only 13 times.

The Times claims that the majority of Palestinians killed in 2022 were non-involved civilians, though the Israeli military asserts that most were combatants. The paper also repeats the common lie that Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is illegal under international law, when in fact, Israel has a stronger legal claim to this territory than any nation or group on Earth, especially the Palestinians.

However, the Times blatant anti-Jewish bias is not just derived from sins of commission—it is equally remiss in its omission of critical facts. Start 65 years ago, when the Times regularly glossed over horrors of the Holocaust. In her book, “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” author Laurel Leff notes that between 1939-1945 the paper published approximately 1,200 news items related to the fate of the Jews, only 26 of which appeared on the front page, and only six times were Jews identified in headlines as Nazi victims.

The Times rarely mentions the names of the armed groups responsible for the bulk of the terrorist activities against Israelis. Iranian-backed terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad merited only eight mentions in headlines by the paper in all of 2022. Hamas and Hezbollah were mentioned in a negative sense only once, while Islamic Jihad garnered negative mentions twice.

By comparison, 192 headlines mentioning Israel in 2022 held a negative or critical tone. Overall, 53% of the Times‘ news coverage of the Jewish state was negative during the first 10 months of 2022. However, when Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected as Israel’s Prime Minister in November last year, this figure rose to 68%.

Indeed, once Israelis elected a new, right-wing government, the Times’ anti-Israel machine went into overdrive. On Feb. 5, 2023, a New York Times front page article and web headline proclaimed, “In West Bank, Settlers Sense Their Moment After Far Right’s Rise.”

The Times used this article to paint “the settler movement,” “settlers,” “settler-activists,” and “settler leaders” as international criminals responsible for the conflict with the Palestinians, and for “an unusually intense wave of settler violence against Palestinians and their property.”

But if the Times wanted to tell a balanced version of the truth, it would have explained that violence perpetrated by Israeli “settlers” in Judea and Samaria pales in comparison to Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis.

While annually Palestinians experience on average some 300 attacks on their property and 100 attacks on individuals, Israelis every year endure an average of 5,000 Palestinian terrorist attacks designed to kill them. However, the Times’ deceptive journalism gives readers the impression that the Palestinians bear no responsibility for the conflict.

Even more outrageous, the Times’ bias against Israel and the Jews is often explicit and openly antisemitic. This was the case in 2019, when the Times published a cartoon depicting then-US President Donald Trump wearing a kippah (yarmulke) and blind, being led by a guide dog with a Star of David around its neck and the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Most recently, the Times ran a series of articles alleging educational malpractice among Hassidic yeshivas. One of these articles suggested that the Hasidic schools find “ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money,” adding that “city and state officials have avoided taking action, bowing to the influence of Hasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc and have made safeguarding the schools their top political priority.”

The implication of this kind of reporting is that Jews behave differently than auto workers or teachers using their political influence. Such content simply rehashes the age-old antisemitic trope: Jews have an insidious agenda that they secretly promote by unfairly pulling levers of power.

I urge you in conversations with friends, colleagues, family—and in letters to the editor—to emphasize that as long as the New York Times persists in telling half-truths and perverse lies about Israel and the Jewish people, it deserves openly to be branded antisemitic. Advertisers have no business supporting it and truth-loving people have no reason to read it.

I hope you’ll also take a minute, while you have this material front and center, to forward this message to friends, visit FLAME’s lively Facebook page and review the P.S. immediately below. It describes FLAME’s new hasbarah (explanatory article)—”Democracy Thrives in Israel”—which exposes false claims that Israel deprives Arab Israeli citizens and Palestinian Arabs of their rights.

Best regards,

James Sinkinson, President
Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME)

P.S.

You’ve surely seen headlines describing increasing attacks on Jewish students—in the classroom and in the public square—by radical anti-Zionist students, as well as faculty members. So far, university administrators have failed to prevent this kind of antisemitism on campus. At the heart of this discrimination, Israel’s enemies outrageously claim that Zionism is not part of being Jewish. No wonder more and more Jewish students are hiding their Jewish identities on campus. I think you’ll agree that we supporters of Israel need to speak out. FLAME’s new hasbarah—explanatory message—“Demand Justice for Jewish Students” tells how new law suits based on Title VI anti-discrimination laws are putting pressure on college administrators to protect Jewish students from such attacks. I hope you’ll review this convincing, fact-based editorial, which FLAME intends to publish in the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News. This piece will also be sent to all members of Congress, Vice President Harris and President Biden. If you agree that this kind of public relations effort on Israel’s behalf is critical, I urge you to support us. As of today, more than 15,000 Israel supporters receive the FLAME Hotline at no charge every week. If you’re not yet a subscriber, won’t you join us in receiving these timely updates, so you can more effectively tell the truth about Israel? Just go to free subscription.