The New York Times, press sponsor of terrorism

by Lev Tsitrin

“[S]ome of the toddlers who were in the [Jenin] camp in 2002 are now the young men of the Palestinian resistance. … today’s children will no doubt take up arms … until these structures of control are dismantled.”

This comes not from a Hamas flier, but is a punchline to a very recent New York Times‘ “guest essay” titled “The Tale of Two Invasions: What the Last Attack on Jenin Tells Us About Israel Now” by one Tareq Baconi, “a former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine at the International Crisis Group [who] serves as president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.”

Think about it for a second. The author’s envisioned solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, broadcasted from the pages of the New York Times, is the perpetual anti-Israel terrorism operating from Palestinian areas of self-rule like Jenin. In the Israeli operation that destroyed stores of explosives (some hidden under a mosque) along with the labs for their production, that confiscated many weapons, that killed a dozen terrorists as they were shooting at Israelis, and arrested more, Mr. Baconi (and by extension, the New York Times that obligingly lent its pages to his screed) saw only “weeping women, children, and the elderly marching down the street with their hands raised or waving white garments from slow-moving vehicles.” In Mr. Baconi and the New York Times‘ telling, Palestinians shooting at Israelis are mere innocent victims of “structures of control” imposed on them by the cruel Israel.

Now, Mr. Baconi may be forgiven for not knowing that all Palestinians in Gaza, and the bulk of Palestinians in West Bank (Jenin including) live under Palestinian control: being the “president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network” naturally makes him blind to this inconvenient fact that turns Palestinian attacks from those areas into undisguised anti-Israel aggression, which Israel has every reason (and right) to crush. But why is the New York Times’ unaware of this basic fact? Why does it soil its pages with willful disinformation?

Mr. Baconi’s verbal trash is not an outlier. A few days prior to publishing it, the paper published a tearful report titled “‘Don’t Be Sad, Father’: Farewells Reflect Deadly Period in West Bank,” authored by the two ideologically-blinded ignoramuses on its own payroll, Raja Abdulrahim and Hiba Yazbek. who focused on the “testaments” left by the teens who sneak out of Palestinian-controlled areas to shoot at Israelis. Those pseudo-journalists thusly explain away such attacks: “The occupation is the biggest driver among the youth who ask why they should stop when they are subjected to war and death.”

Now, who is “occupying” the Dheisheh Camp from which Abdulrahim and Yazbek are enlightening us via the New York Times? Who is subjecting those young innocents “to war and death”? The answer to the first question is — “the Palestinian Authority,” because it rules there. The answer to the second question is also “the Palestinian Authority” — because it encourages terrorism by lionizing the dead terrorists, and by paying pensions to their families in a “pay for slay” program. The Palestinian outrage is strictly of the Palestinian making. Abdulrahim and Yazbek may not know this because they don’t want to know this — but is it so hard for the New York Times‘ Dear Editor to fact-check?

So why aren’t the New York Times editors doing their job? I don’t know — I regularly write to them, but they don’t reply. We can only guess. Are they — as Tevye so memorably put it in the “Fiddler on the Roof” — “either crazy, or out of their mind”? May be. Have they been paid by the likes of Qatar, or Iran? That’s a possibility, too. Or are they under the influence of “wokeness” — the current cultural craze that decouples guilt from the wrong-doing, and the wrong-doing from guilt, instead associating guilt with whiteness, power, and wealth, and rightness with blackness and poverty, irrespective of who actually commits the crimes — absolving the “disadvantaged” from the mayhem they commit, and blaming that very mayhem on the people who have nothing whatsoever to do with it?

I don’t have the answer to this question of “why” — but the fact remains that the New York Times does support terrorism. It supports it differently than “state sponsors of terrorism” like Iran — not by supplying weapons and money, but by assuring terrorists that their cause is righteous — righteous enough to be trumped by the New York Times. This, psychological and [mis]-informational support is not important. Not only does it firm up terrorists’ determination to keep going, but it also confuses and disinforms American public, creating a wider network of political support for anti-Israel terrorism inside the US.

The “state sponsors of terrorism” are designated by the US government, and shunned. The First amendment ensures that the “press sponsors of terrorism” cannot be similarly sanctioned — but still, let’s be aware of who is who. The New York Times is very much a “press sponsor of terrorism.” Let’s be forthright about it, and keep it in mind.