The Case Against the New York Times
The New Blood Libel
(From Fox News, headlines from the Mainstream Media to Hassan Nasrallah)
My condolences.
Earlier this week, an anonymous reporter for the New York Times lost a beloved father figure in Hassan Nasrallah.
My condolences to the paper.
Of course, it was not just the New York Times who were bereft of their beloved warlord – the whole of the mainstream media was.
The AP, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all published obituaries for their fallen friend.
While people around the middle east were celebrating the death of the butcher, reporters for the New York Times were donning sackcloth and ashes.
Perhaps it would be more fair to target all three major publications for their journalistic malpractice. Perhaps it would be better to point out each and every piece of anti-Israel propaganda they produce. Perhaps it would be more honest to go after the journalist directly rather than the paper.
But that is just it – there is no journalist.
The New York Times published their obituary for Nasrallah anonymously – why?
As a writer myself, I would never refuse my byline.
In this industry, reputation is too important to pass up an opportunity to have one’s name in the paper.
Unless, of course, there was a compelling reason you would not want to be associated with your work.
Or, of course, if the piece was written by AI.
Or, perhaps, the piece was written by someone whose name would cause problems for the paper, like a foreign agent.
Whatever it is – the whole thing smells fishy.
The New York Times has been misreporting on Israel for decades, but this year they stepped up their attacks from disseminating general misinformation to outright and directly spreading malicious libel about Israel and the Jewish people.
The first example of this was in early October, after the New York Times incorrectly accused Israel of bombing the Al-Shifra hospital.
The result, for those who remember, was an “international day of rage against the Zionists” on October 13th.
Synagogues were vandalized, Jews were attacked, and businesses were burned.
All because of a story the New York Times published and spread.
Eleven months later, and the New York Times is publishing anonymous lamentations for one of the great mass-murderers of our time.
Something certainly smells fishy.
I remember the coverage of Michael Flynn after he had been tapped to be Trump’s National Security Advisor. The media was terrified about what having a foreign agent in the white house might mean for our country.
One might wonder what the effect would be of having a foreign agent in the newsroom, or in every newsroom. One might wonder whose interests they were serving.
Especially since the publishing business has been so weak in the past twenty years, it is very easy to imagine that someone could buy a substantial amount of influence with very moderate sums.
Or it could be less explicit.
It could just be that everyone in the newsroom graduated from an Ivy League school in the past 20 years, so they were all indoctrinated by the same professors who called October 7th “exhilarating.”
In that case, I could see a journalist publishing their elegy for Nasrallah anonymously. In that case, they would see themselves as sacrificing their ego for the cause.
If I were a lawyer, I would consider bringing suit against the Times for spreading malicious blood libels that have directly resulted in damage to Jewish people and Jewish businesses all over the world.
I would sue them for a trillion dollars, which I think is fair given the amount of pain and suffering that one paper alone has caused.
I would investigate all of their editors and everyone in the newsroom, and I would look at their finances and see where the money was coming from.
But, much to the chagrin of many of my parents’ friends, I am not a lawyer – I am a writer.
And so, like the great French writer before me, I will make my accusation not in a court of law but in the court of public opinion.
I charge the New York Times with libel – blood libel – and I accuse the editors of willful negligence and malicious intent.
Whatever legitimacy the New York Times once had choked to death alongside their beloved friend in a Hezbollah bunker.
The paper is a sham and a shame.
It is a blight upon the face of free speech.
It is an insult to the brave men and women who have died trying to honestly report the news.
And all of this is in addition to the journalistic malpractice of memory holing and ex-post facto editing (like with the 1619 Project or Kamala Harris’ role as the Border Czar).
Sadly, the greatest victim of this journalistic malpractice is us.
Without a collective understanding of basic truths, even things as simply as whether or not the phrase “border czar” was used, we cannot live together in a functional community.
After nearly a decade of discourse about fake news, misinformation, disinformation, deep fakes, cheap fakes, and the like, we are now further than ever from a collective understanding of the truth.
The case against the New York Times is grave.
They have not only endangered Israel and the Jewish people with their deceptive reporting but the whole world.
It is very dangerous to live in a world when one does not know what is or is not true – and the New York Times has been obfuscating the truth for years now.
If the paper is not made to answer for these crimes, I am terrified to think of what will come to pass.
“Democracy dies in Darkness,” is the slogan of the Washington Post, but it could just as well apply to all of the other publications.
I once read those words as a warning; now, they read much more like a threat.
Spread love, Spread Light,
Am Yisrael Chai
~