SCRUBBED BY THE TIMES: NY TIMES ROUTINELY ERASES EXTREMISM FROM “PRO-PALESTINIAN PROTESTS”
BY: GILEAD INI JUNE 14, 2024
The extremism is a pattern. So is the New York Times’ commitment to concealing it.
This week in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., anti-Israel activists wished for Hitler’s return; chanted for the murder of “Zionists”; assaulted, threatened to kill, and slurred a rabbi; threatened a Jewish family by painting a symbol of Hamas violence on their home; held banners supporting the terror group behind the Oct. 7 massacre; donned the headbands of the terrorists; waved their flags; glorified their “resistance” broadly; justified the murders at the music festival specifically; smashed and bloodied the face of a security guard; and downplayed the Holocaust.
The New York Times covered each of the “protests” where the ugly episodes occurred. But it hid each one of incidents, as well as other examples of the demonstrators’ extremism.
Washington, D.C.
At a June 8 demonstration in Washington, D.C., a group of demonstrators, faces covered with keffiyehs, held a large banner aligning themselves with “al Qassam,” a reference to Hamas’s gunmen who led the Oct. 7 attack. They called for murder: “Hezbollah make us proud, kill another Zionist now!”
A man holding a “Stand with Hamas” sign defended the October 7 slaughter as “brilliant” while decrying what “the Jews—yeah, the Jews” are doing to the Palestinians. Another sign justified “resistance.”
The Times, whose article on the demonstration cast them as little more than a “call for an immediate cease-fire,” said nothing about the celebration of terrorist groups, the explicit calls for “killing,” or the defense of Oct. 7.
Statues in D.C.’s Lafayette Square were vandalized with pro-violence and eliminationist graffiti. “Glory 2 the resistance.” “Long live Hamas.” “Intifada.” “From the river to the sea.” “Death to Amerikkka.” And plenty of upside-down red triangles, the symbol used in Hamas propaganda videos to mark targets for violent attacks.
The New York Times reported only on “handwritten scribbles” that read “free Palestine.”
Men wearing the headbands of Hamas and PFLP, designated terrorist groups known for their suicide bombings targeting Jewish civilians, shouted, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.”
The newspaper disingenuously steered readers to believe the calls were more or less innocuous:
Many of the protesters on Saturday chanted slogans that some groups have said incite violence against Jews, such as “There is only one solution: intifada, revolution,” as well as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
But according to one protester, such slogans were not a call for violence against Jewish people, but for a broader resistance against the status quo.
The gathering was co-organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, a group that responded to the Oct. 7 attacks, on the very day of the attacks, with celebratory “long live the resistance” calls, and which had previously called for “resistance and intifada until victory.” (The group has made clear that victory, to them, means the elimination of Israel.)
The New York Times absurdly characterized it as a “left-leaning” group.
Although video from the demonstrations showed demonstrators throwing objects at a park ranger and punching punching park police, the story had failed to mention this, even while noting in the first paragraph that police used pepper spray on a protester.
Two days after the piece was published, it added a statement from the National Park Service noting “an assault of a park ranger” and “injuries to two U.S. Park Police officers.” (According to the newspaper, the statement also referred to empty water bottles being thrown at the park ranger. Fuller versions of what appeared to be the same statement, published elsewhere, made no reference to empty water bottles.)
Manhattan
On June 10, the extremist group Within Our Lifetime, which supports the Oct. 7 massacre, organized a demonstration in Manhattan.
At Union Square a man told counterprotesters, “I wish Hitler was still here, he would’ve wiped all you out.” Other demonstrators unfurled a large banner reading, “Long live October 7th.”
After a mass subway ride, during which demonstrators insisted that “Zionists” identify themselves and insinuated harm would come to them if they didn’t leave the train, demonstrators converged on Wall Street, where they waved the flag of the group behind the Oct. 7 massacre and that of another terrorist organization.
They were there to protest an exhibit memorializing the hundreds murdered by Hamas at the Nova Music Festival, to justify the murders, and to minimize the Holocaust by claiming the kids gunned down at the festival were worse than the commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp.
The New York Times initially ignored the hate fest. A day later, after members of Congress, the mayor of New York City, and the White House condemned the rally, the paper did report on the condemnation.
The piece said nothing about the Hitler language, and nothing about the terrorist flags. (The paper was surely aware of the flags —it quoted from of White House statement that criticized the flying of “profane banners of terrorist organizations,” but ignored that line, and quoted from a statement in which the mayor criticized the terror flags, but ignored that line.)
And while the story did refer to demonstrators shouting “long live the intifada” — the call for violence that the paper had previously suggested might not be a call for violence — it didn’t quote those same demonstrators’ chant that “resistance is justified,” a defense of the Oct. 7 massacre and other terror attacks.
Brooklyn
Two days later, vandals smeared paint on the homes of the director of the Brooklyn Museum and two of its trustees. On the home of the director, who is Jewish, they painted the upside-down red triangle that symbolizes a Hamas target, a menacing threat of violence.
The newspaper’s story about the graffiti failed to reference the Hamas triangle. (It can be seen in a photo on the online piece, but the caption or the story itself doesn’t mention the triangle, let alone what it means.)
An upside-down red triangle is visible in a photo published in the York Times. Neither the caption nor the story mention the triangle or its meaning. Credit: Nate Schweber for The New York Times
U.C.L.A.
On the other side of the country, demonstrators gathered at the University of California, Los Angeles.
As the Chabad rabbi at the school was recording video of the event, a demonstrator wearing a checkered headscarf smacked the phone out of the rabbi’s hand, threatened to kill him, slurred him as a pedophile, and called for “death to Israel and anyone who supports that sh*t.” Another demonstrator told him to “go back to Poland.”
The New York Times covered the rally. It said nothing about the antisemitic incident or death threats.
Elsewhere on campus, a security guard was battered in the face with a hard object. The paper said nothing about the violence. (The piece did, however, twice make a point of referencing aggression by pro-Israel protesters from months ago.)
This week’s stories, in which the New York Times manages to erase vile extremism from four separate demonstrations, are hardly the first example of the paper coming to the aid of anti-Israel extremists. It had previously come to the aid of those tearing down posters of Israeli hostages by suggesting this was perhaps just a “release valve” for the “anguished,” while giving equal weight to the idea that those putting up the posters might be the real problem. Another piece absurdly suggested that calls for a Palestine “from the river to the sea” did not necessarily refer to a Palestine from the river to the sea.
