Tag Archive for: New York Times

New York Times ‘Journalist’ Accused of Participating In Oct. 7th Hamas Attacks Wins Journalism Award

The New York Times proudly announced last Monday that it had “won three George Polk awards, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.” Those prestigious journalism awards went to “Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times” for “photojournalism for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.” The Times neglected to mention, however, one telling detail: Masoud has been unmasked as a member of Hamas who participated in the Oct. 7 jihad massacres inside Israel.

The Paper of Record shows no sign of firing Masoud or returning the George Polk award he won, but the Jerusalem Post had the story on Thursday, noting that the media watchdog Honest Reporting had “highlighted his accreditation to a photo provided to the Associated Press, with the caption, ‘Palestinians wave their national flag and celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the Gaza Strip fence east of Khan Younis southern Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023.’ How had Masoud gotten on the scene so quickly, so as to be in a position to take this picture? Honest Reporting “questioned Masoud’s explanation of his presence that he’d been woken up at 5.30 a.m. by rocket fire even though the firing only started an hour later.”

What’s more, “Masoud’s name was included in an investigative report from November showing that journalists from leading news outlets, including The New York Times, AP, Reuters, and CNN, joined Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip on October 7 to document the events with their cameras.” The New York Times responded indignantly: “The accusation that anyone at The New York Times had advance knowledge of the Hamas attacks or accompanied Hamas terrorists during the attacks is untrue and outrageous. It is reckless to make such allegations, putting our journalists on the ground in Israel and Gaza at risk.”

Honest Reporting, however, said that claims it had “jeopardized the safety of all media working in Israel and the Palestinian territories” were nothing more than “a deliberate attempt to deflect from the real issues we raised.” And that’s true. Why doesn’t Masoud explain how he came to be on the scene of a Hamas operation on the morning of Oct. 7, and why he stated that he was awakened by rocket fire an hour before the rocket fire started?

After all, there is nothing remotely implausible about the idea of a New York Times “journalist” being a Hamas operative. Honest Reporting pointed out the Times’ “backing of a decision to rehire Gazan freelance filmmaker Soliman Hijjy despite HonestReporting previously revealing how he had praised Hitler on social media.” What’s more, the Times and the rest of the establishment media have for years been consistently anti-Israel, and have worked assiduously to whitewash the bloody reality of Islamic jihad. Why would the Times, or any other establishment propaganda arm, hesitate to hire a supporter of Hamas and fanatical hater of Israel and Jews? Media observer Hugh Fitzgerald states that “save for a single columnist — Bret Stephens — the New York Times has no one on its staff, among its hundreds of reporters, columnists, and op/ed contributors, who could be described as willing to give Israel a fair shake.”

We have just recently discovered how closely the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) collaborated with Hamas, allowing the jihadis to operate on UNRWA premises, employing Hamas operatives, and teaching hatred of Jews and Israel in its textbooks for Palestinian schools. If this could happen before the eyes of a watching world, what would possibly prevent a “journalist” from a deeply biased and essentially pro-Hamas outlet from going whole hog with his support for the jihad terror outfit?

The New York Times has a great deal to answer for, far beyond Yousef Masoud. Masoud may indeed have been a Hamas jihadi, in which case his George Polk award should be rescinded and the Times should not use him again. But the fact that none of that is likely to happen is in large part a result of the Times’ indefatigable efforts to make support for jihad violence respectable and mainstream. The Times should at this point perform a thoroughgoing soul-searching, and a wholesale reevaluation of its uncritical support for jihadis. But nothing is much less likely.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Finally, The New York Times Begrudgingly Admits It Was Wrong About the Gaza Hospital Attack

When there was an explosion at the parking lot at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza last week, the New York Times was quick — much too quick, rather — heedless, off the mark, claiming that an Israeli airstrike was to blame for the attack “on the hospital,” and that nearly 500 people were killed. How did the Times know? It didn’t. It simply acted as a dutiful amanuensis, transcribing what Hamas dictated to its reporters. It ran with their account of the incident, without waiting for the Israelis to provide their detailed explanation of the blast. Within a matter of hours, Israel responded with its version of events: first, it said that an errant rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad had caused the explosion; second, the explosion was not in the hospital, which was largely unscathed, but in the parking lot of the hospital; third, that while it could not provide an exact figure, it believed there were far fewer than 500 people killed. But the damage was done. The Times had put out the story as Hamas wanted it, and Israel suffered terribly in the kangaroo court of public opinion.

Now, many days after it became crystal clear, through visual and audio evidence, including a view of the very small depression left by the blast, and after the American government, conducting its own forensic investigation, determined that Israel’s version of the incident was correct, the Grey Lady finally, albeit reluctantly, has had to admit it was wrong. The Times did not, of course, apologize for such an egregious and grievous error, nor take note of the likely violent consequences of disseminating that false claim, which in fact cam quickly to pass, with violent anti-Israel demonstrations all over the Arab and Muslim world. The Times is far too arrogant an institution to do that. More on how the high-and-mighty New York Times was brought low when it had to admit its error in the way it had covered the “hospital blast” story, can be found here: “NYT admits error in Gaza hospital report,” by Matt Berg, Politico, October 23, 2023:

The New York Times walked back its initial coverage on the explosion that killed hundreds of Palestinians at a Gaza Strip hospital last week, saying in an editors’ note that the newspaper “relied too heavily on claims” made by the Hamas militant group.

Just “an editors’ note”? On an inside page? The admission of its error ought by rights to have appeared where the misleading report had appeared — that is, on the front page, and in the same size type as the original.

Soon after a huge blast rocked the al-Ahli Hospital on Tuesday, finger-pointing over its source began.

Hamas, which has been battling Israel since its Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israeli soil, called the blast a “horrific massacre” and blamed the Israeli government. Israel, however, blamed the Islamic Jihad, a smaller, more radical group that often works with Hamas….

“The Times’s initial accounts attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast,” reads the Times’ editors’ note published on Monday. Early coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”

It took the Times six full days, from when the Israeli and American governments had presented their separate conclusions that Israel was blameless and that an errant rocket, launched from Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, had caused the “parking lot blast.” Why so long? What is it that makes the Times so reluctant to own up to its errors?

The newspaper’s coverage had a clear impact, according to the note: “The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”…

That’s too weak. Make it stronger: “All the evidence supports Israel’s version of the incident.” Israel has explained, and provided the evidence, for what happened. The visuals show the rocket coming from Gaza toward Israel, and then suddenly breaking up, then heading downward and landing on the ground where the light of an explosion can be seen. And we have, too, the recorded telephone conversation of two Hamas operatives, discussing the fact that the rocket was fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Why doesn’t the Times mention any of that in its “Editors’ Note”?

Five days ago, PBS presented Israel’s version of the cause of the blast. Three days ago the AP accepted Israel’s version after Washington had confirmed it. Two days ago, it was CNN that held Israel blameless. But the New York Times waited until six days had passed, long after everyone in the Western world had learned that the American government, having conducted its own investigation, had concluded that Israel was blameless.

Here was what National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson tweeted the day after the blast: “While we continue to collect information, our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday.”

The Times stopped short of an apology for its initial coverage but said editors should have been more careful with the way the blast was represented….

Here’s what one would have wished from the Times: a full-throated, unbegrudging apology for the haste of its initial report, its credulous acceptance of a Hamas libel, and its unwillingness to wait just a few hours for Israel’s response. Surely it knew that putting the blame on Israel was likely to cause, and did cause, outbursts of anti-Israel hate all over the Arab and Muslim lands. Nor does the Times explain why the admission of its mistake came so many days after everyone else had admitted that Israel’s explanation of the blast was correct. Why was that? Perhaps the Times can assign a reporter to provide an “anatomy of an error ” to supplement that “Editor’s Note,” so that readers can find out exactly how, and why, that initial mistaken report came to be.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Recovering a more perfect union: A rebuke of the 1619 Project

A new book describes the importance of memory, history, and national identity in saving America from desolation.


One of the worst sins of the present — not just ours but any present — is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time.
— Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

Jay Leno used to do a regular schtick, Jaywalking, in which he would interview random persons on the street, often young ones, and ask them questions about American history, such as: “Who did America fight in the Revolutionary War?” “How many branches of the U.S. government are there?” “What year was the War of 1812?” Invariably, they could not answer the question, standing mute with Leno’s impertinent microphone pointed at their gaping mouths, or they gave a ridiculous answer.

As deflating as these performances were, it turns out that the state of American education is even worse than Leno documented. Not only does ignorance characterise so much of the citizenry, but Americans are now also imbibing, i.e., being taught, pernicious lies or partial truths about the founding and history of the United States from a tendentious, ideological, and solidly left-wing perspective.

Twisted narrative

This sorry state of affairs is documented in excruciating detail in Timothy S. Goeglein’s enlightening, depressing, and, ultimately, hopeful new book, Toward a More Perfect Union: The Moral and Cultural Case for Teaching the Great American Story.

The distortion of history now routinely fed to elementary and high school students, as well as those attending hopelessly “woke” universities and colleges, has produced many young people who are “cynical, entitled, and aggrieved.” Continues Goeglein:

Rather than being thankful, they are indignant. Rather than proud, they feel ashamed. Rather than feeling free, they feel oppressed. Rather than wanting to fix America’s faults, they want to burn America down. Rather than asking what they can do for their country, they demand to know what their country can do for them — and the answer is increasingly to “cease to exist.”

We have created “a citizenry divorced both intellectually and emotionally from its heritage.” Further, “[w]hen we disassociate history — and memory — from facts, we are lost,” writes Goeglein, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, a former Senate staffer, and, presently, vice-president of external and government relations for Focus on the Family.

Our predicament is exemplified by the absurd, anti-historical 1619 Project of the New York Times, an initiative repudiated by many respectedliberal historians. It is being taught in roughly 4,500 schools nationwide.

In a feat of historical and moral inversion, it maintains that the American Revolution was designed primarily to protect the institution of slavery from being destroyed by the British Empire.

Such a one-sided view of history will alienate Americans from one another, given the dissolution of a common identity and love of country, and disregards those who struggled to make the Declaration of Independence a reality in spite of its obvious flaws, such as slavery.

On the matter of slavery, always a leading complaint against America’s founding, the Washington Post’s George Will has rightly observed that the founders’ Constitution “gave slavery no national validation. It left slavery solely a creature of state laws and therefore susceptible to the process that, in fact, occurred — the process of being regionally confined and put on a path to ultimate extinction. Secession was the South’s desperate response when it recognized this impending outcome that the Constitution had facilitated.”

So, it comes as no surprise that, as “a 2020 Pew Research study found a month before the presidential election, roughly eight in ten registered voters in both camps said their political disagreements with others were about core American values, with roughly nine in ten — liberal and conservative — worried [that] a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States” [emphasis added]. We are now in a situation in which tribe is pitted against tribe, race against race, rich against poor, red against blue states.

We have succumbed to the “termites of self-loathing,” to use a term coined by Ben Stein. There is hardly a historic personage — Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Columbus, St Junípero Serra — who is not vilified, “cancelled,” and banished into outer darkness by woke activists and educators. One should be grateful that at least Frederick Douglass and Dr Martin Luther King Jr are spared such treatment, given their devotion to American ideals in the Declaration of Independence, classical literature, and Scripture. They are just ignored.

Dearth of patriotism

Recently, a friend whose daughter attended one of the tonier prep schools in Washington, DC, related that his conversations with her on US and Western history were disappointing. She, and her friends, showed no “piety” toward her country or heritage.

It was an interesting word choice and recalled my own school days studying Virgil’s Aeneid, an epic poem written between 29 and 19 BC. It tells the story of the Trojan Aeneas, who fled the destruction of his city, travelled to Italy, and would later become the ancestor of the Romans.

I remember my Jesuit instructor lauding “pius Aeneas,” “pious” being the most used adjective throughout the poem. In following the will of the gods — he even left the captivating Dido in Carthage — Aeneas demonstrated pietas, a virtue in the eyes of Virgil and my teacher, in his devotion to family, country, and mission. Such piety is no longer encouraged in our educational institutions, or so it would seem.

Major culprit

What brought America to this sorry state? In the beginning there was the “Original Zinn” — Howard Zinn, that is, a Boston University professor of political science and “the godfather of the radical attack on America’s history”, as Goeglein outlines in a pivotal chapter of Toward a More Perfect Union.

Zinn’s “epic screed,” A People’s History of the United States (1980), and his supplemental book for high schoolers, A Young People’s History of the United States (2007), have had an unparalleled impact on social studies teachers. The historian refram[ed]” and “reimagin[ed]” facts to fit a Marxist critique of the US and a Western civilisation marred, claimed Zinn, “by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money.” For Zinn, “standards of historical analysis are merely ‘technical problems’ to be dismissed.”

“You wanna read a real history book?” Matt Damon’s titular character, Will, asks Robin Williams’ Dr Sean Maguire in the movie Good Will Hunting (1997). “Read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f***ing knock you on your ass.” Indeed, it does. It also boggles the mind.

Zinn claims that the nation “has been taken over by men [the founders] who have no respect for human rights or constitutional liberties.” Again, in service to ideology, Zinn does not believe in objective history as documented by Mary Grabar, PhD, a refugee of communist Yugoslavia, on whom Goeglein draws heavily.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the main author of the 1619 Project, backtracked after respected historians critiqued her work. She claimed that the project was not about history but about “memory.” This is not historically grounded memory, but memory saturated with ideology and politics. This is pure Zinn in methodology. Hence, noted historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Eugene Genovese, and Michael Kammen — hardly a crowd of right-wingers — criticised Zinn as a “polemicist, not a historian.”

“His ultimate goal is not a historical one but a political one,” writes Goeglein. “[H]e wanted to depict the United States as an illegitimate enterprise, one demanding a revolution.”

Pushback

According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, today, only 18 percent of colleges require that students take a US history or government class to graduate. Maybe that is a blessing, given what passes for “history” in today’s woke environment. Ultimately, however, this is devastating to national unity.

Goeglein describes survey after survey that all indicate Americans’ ignorance of their rights under law and history. When the Constitution is taught, it is derided as being not radical enough in terms of the outcomes desired by left-of-centre teachers and advocates.

Toward A More Perfect Union does not specify a political agenda for reform, although it does note efforts made by some governors to reign in educational bureaucracies on, say, critical race theory. It does make a plea for parents to make a concerted effort to teach and counsel their children on the history of the nation and to pay close attention to what their schools are teaching.

It points to excellent resources available with which parents can educate themselves and their children on the complete story of American exceptionalism, not excluding the darker chapters. Parents who can afford the cost should look for alternatives to public schools that sacrifice true learning for the sake of ideology. “Classical” schools, home schooling, and parochial schools — all of which boomed during the COVID lockdowns — are possible options.

Parents who cannot afford private schools or who have special-needs children “must be extra vigilant and expect to receive the full wrath of Leftist activists if they stand up and demand that civics be taught while also standing against the indoctrination their children are receiving.” Specifically, they need to insist on the rights to inspect curricula, to opt out of the teaching of certain subjects, and to insist that controversial issues be discussed impartially. No easy tasks these.

Goeglein concludes:

[W]e must rededicate ourselves to the teaching of history — true, verifiable, factual history, with all its glories and tragedies. We need not fear to teach the ugly truths about America alongside the beautiful ones, because America’s founding vision is pure and her ideals are noble. Our failures do not change that.

Toward a More Perfect Union makes a compelling case that the country’s future, as one nation, demands a reclamation of our educational system and a recovery of the authentic teaching of history and constitutional government rightly understood.

This article has been republished from The American Spectator with permission.

AUTHOR

G. Tracy Mehan III

G. Tracy Mehan, III, was Assistant Administrator for Water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the Administration of President George W. Bush. He is an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School,… More by G. Tracy Mehan III

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Yet Another Muslim Journalist Working for The New York Times Praises Hitler

What if Honest Reporting hadn’t revealed anything about Soliman Hijjy? Would he still be working for the Times? Sure. They’re only concerned about this kind of behavior when they get caught.

Unearthed: Another Hitler-Praising New York Times Gaza Journalist

by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, August 28, 2022:

After the New York Times terminated its relationship with a Gaza-based journalist who said he favored killing and burning Jews “like Hitler did,” the newspaper is looking into additional reported instances of its journalists praising Hitler on social media.

The same watchdog group, HonestReporting, that unearthed the post by Fady Hanona also dug up a 2012 Facebook post by a Times videographer, Soliman Hijjy, who HonestReporting said wrote “How great are you, Hitler.” Hijjy also shared variants of the post again in 2018 and 2020, HonestReporting said.

HonestReporting also expressed concern about social media posts made between 2011 and 2018 by Hosam Salem, a freelance photographer whose work has appeared in the Times.

The Times told HonestReporting it reviewed the concerns and took “appropriate action.”…

And, at least in Hijjy’s case, a video he created for the Times, “Gaza’s Deadly Night: How Israeli Airstrikes Killed 44 People,” was denounced when it came out as a “shocking” “hatchet job.” So the issue isn’t just the social media posts, it’s the nexus between the social media posts and the hate-filled agenda that filters through into the New York Times journalism….

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The More Unpopular He Gets, the More Radical Biden Becomes

He doesn’t work for the voters, he works for the Left.

The new New York Times poll is bad news for Biden and bad for America.

It’s not just the 33% approval rating that’s truly worrying. Biden has hit a new polling low, but he hits new polling lows every week. 70% of Democrats still claim to approve of Biden, much as they would a diseased cat, the propped up corpse of Osama bin Laden, or small piece of dried spaghetti as long as it was a Democrat. But only a quarter of the party wants Biden to run again.

Biden’s few remaining brain cells aren’t worried about the 2024 election. They’re worried about the Democrat primaries that he barely survived last time around. And isn’t likely to this time.

64% of Democrats want someone, anyone, other than Biden to run in 2024.

As Biden’s poll numbers have slid down the slopes faster than a falling skier, he hasn’t moved to the center, but to the fringes. Like most of his party, the primary threat comes from the Left. And the more unpopular Biden becomes, the harder he pivots leftward to protect his primary options.

Even if they’re mostly imaginary.

That’s why the poor poll numbers are nothing to celebrate. Biden pretended to run from the center, but never governed from the center. And his growing unpopularity has only made his administration more extreme. Biden doesn’t need America and doesn’t have it anyway.

He needs the Left.

Leftists and Americans wanted opposite things from the Biden administration. Americans wanted stability, sensible policies and an end to the chaos. Leftists wanted endless spending on their agendas, identity politics and a perpetual state of crisis. Biden took office in a locked down city with a heavily military presence, appointed an attorney general bitter at having a Supreme Court seat taken from him and tasked with pursuing partisan grievances. Gargantuan spending bills aggravated the already unstable economy and pushed the country to the brink.

Everything else followed from that.

Biden locked his administration into a leftist worldview that alienated most of the country. The more the rest of the country shuns him, the harder he clings to the “one that brought” him.

Barack Obama.

Biden isn’t popular, but he never was. He first got to the White House riding leftist coattails. He certainly wasn’t elected based on his own popularity, but because the Left waged a scorched earth campaign. The only reason someone so corrupt and inept ever ended up in the White House was as a beneficiary of the outpouring of rabid leftist hatred against conservatives.

The 2020 strategy of lying low and letting the Left rage got him in the White House. And Biden knows that his only shot of getting back in is once again letting the Left do its worst.

Biden’s national poll numbers don’t matter because he didn’t win a popularity contest.

It doesn’t matter if he’s at 41% or 33% or 6%. Biden’s gambit will be once again lying low and letting the Left shape the battlefield. Faced with the likelihood of being a one-termer, his staffers are leftists who aren’t in it for the money or the career development, but are true believers in the “cause”. And he needs leftist donors who aren’t invested in personalities, but in ideology.

Much like Xi, Biden understands that the ‘party’ matters and the public doesn’t. And ‘party’ doesn’t mean the official one with a donkey on the box, but the ideological leftist movement that cares about the things he’s vigorously promoting from critical race theory to gender identity to modern monetary theory and all the theories that in their sum add up to Marxist theory.

Joe Biden likely doesn’t believe any of it, but just as Hunter didn’t have to read Mao’s Little Red Book to cut business deals in China, Biden doesn’t have to understand what he’s promoting.

Biden came into office after outsourcing much of his administration’s policy apparatus to the Bernie and Warren people. The “Big Guy” doesn’t care much about policy. Biden has been anti and pro-abortion, pro and anti-terrorism, and pro and anti-racism depending on the moment.

What Biden cares about is having the big job and whatever benefits flow from it. An egomaniac who kept on lying about his college grades while running for president, he accidentally landed in a position commensurate with his inflated self-image. And one that offers plenty of rewards.

Much as Hillary, another compulsive liar, wrecked her own party and then the country while trying to cling to power no one thought she should have, Biden, even in his diminished state, is not going to let go. In that, Biden is no different than the rest of a gerontocratic oligarchy, men and women like Speaker Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders, claiming to speak for the youth.

After generations in power, none of them are eager to let go and accept the inevitable. Especially since the inevitable is no longer as inevitable as it once used to be.

It’s inevitable to most that Biden won’t run and won’t win if he does. And in the normal state of things, that would be true. But we are in a post-polling world in which public opinion is no longer just a reaction to events, but can be directly shaped by manufacturing a series of crises.

And if Biden works hard enough for the Left, perhaps the Left will work to keep him in office.

Some race riots, lockdowns, and crises yet to be unleashed can do wonders for changing people’s perspective. It likely won’t work and may not even be tried, but Biden doesn’t have any other cards to play. And he never did. Biden can’t win elections on his own. So he won’t try.

The more unpopular he becomes, the less likely he is to even bother going through the motions.

Biden may sit in the White House (when he’s not vacationing in Delaware), but he doesn’t work for the American people. He works for the Left. And he may not remember much of anything else, but that is the one thing he has never forgotten. It’s the only reason why he’s here.

AUTHOR

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden’s Speech At Ben Gurion Airport: Some Good Parts, and Some Statements That Called for Rewrite

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Propaganda Machine

Open letter to Dean Baquet
Executive Editor of The New York Times

Good day Deano,

I hope today finds you well at your desk, as the Executive Editor of the iconic New York Times.  It seems your tabloid itself has been very much in the news as of late. Those radical right wingers are at it again, questioning your tabloid’s veracity and dedication to journalistic integrity—the nerve Deano!  Well let’s put together some facts and let the public judge for themselves, shall we old sport?

Hunter’s Laptop

Well is seems Joey Robinette’s prodigal son, Hunter (former energy expert, now famous artist), is back in the news again.  When will these right wing lunatics stop their relentless assault on the Biden crime family, um, I mean Biden family?  I thought that we had solved the issue of Hunter’s laptop during the Presidential installation of 2020.

Remember Deano—when about a month before the installation, the New York Post reported that Hunter’s laptop was discovered in a Delaware repair shop, with some very incriminating emails on it.  This was verified, in part by interviewing recipients of emails, from said laptop.  Some of the evidence even pointed to the angelic, morally uncompromised, Joey Robinette (aka, the Big Guy, Mr. 10%).

The New York Times to the Rescue

Thank goodness, a legitimate trustworthy news outlet such as The NY Times was able to squash this hyped-up propaganda immediately.  I believe the ‘go to’ battle cry at the time was, “Russian disinformation.”   Together with the aid of such other credible stalwart outlets like: CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post—as well as social media icons Twitter and Facebook, you were able to slam that door shut.  In addition, we had unbiased celebrities and talk show hosts; and of course with credible political powerhouses like Chardonnay Pelosi and Adam Schiff, we were able to silence this vile propaganda.   Of course, let’s not forget those 50 “intelligence officials,” who concurred wholeheartedly.  The FBI too, who has had said laptop in their possession for years now.  Calm down Conservatives, the Gestapo, I mean FBI have their hands full, you know, investigating Joey’s daughter’s diary.   These investigations take time unless of course……….. it involves the “insurrection”.  Then the FBI perform with lightning fast efficiency.  Conservatives see it a very different way Deano, let’s look at it from their viewpoint.

“The news that is fit to print”………..Sometimes!

Conservatives point out that you, Dean Baquet, recently ran an article in The Old Gray Lady in regards to this matter.  It seems now, 17 months after that original story ran, you are NOW corroborating this New York Post article.  Even in this article, you waited until the 24th paragraph to mention these facts (must have been an oversight by your editing department).  Have you taken leave of your senses, Deano old boy?  Have you drank the proverbial right wing Kool-Aid?  Why the admission of this evidence now?

Conservatives say that there is no reason to withhold the truth anymore.  No reason to omit, lie, or censor factual information— the mentally addled, corrupt puppet Joey Talibiden has been installed.  That it was a concerted effort by tabloids such as yours, that omitted or better yet, “fact-checked,” these incriminating emails.  They refer to you and your ilk as journalistic disgraces, who long ago sold your souls and integrity to become a political arm/hack of the Democratic/Progressive Party.  They add, this combined with your blatantly deceitful arrogance and hubris, has done irreparable harm to the core of honest, unbiased journalism. With your printing or omission of your vile, fictional tripe, I say bravo, Deano!

Mission Accomplished

So, I guess you ruffled a few Conservative feathers Deano.  I’m with you buddy, the end justifies the means, as far as I’m concerned.  The main objective of course, was to block elected President Trump from being legitimately re-elected; partly, by hiding any incriminating criminal evidence against the Houseplant-in-Chief, and his corrupt family. So what if some fraud had to be committed to secure the vote……no harm, no foul, right Deano?  So what if you had to run a little interference (many say, a lot), to get the job done.  It’s all good.  President Trump is a racist!

Is Joey Gonna have to Take a Dive?

I understand there is another train of thought here champ.  A few unnamed sources (WAPO trick I picked up), feel Joey Bidenflation has worn out his welcome with his puppet masters.  You know, those behind the scenes, who are hard at work destroying this great country while using the Vegetable-in-Chief as a mouthpiece – a very bad one at that, they add.  They are saying, he is in the process of being Cuomo’d.

From what I understand, these powers that be are not happy with little Joey’s, in-the-toilet poll numbers, and his never ending slew of screw-ups.  Sources say, Deano, your admission to the authenticity of Hunter’s (famous artist) laptop, is proof that Joey may be being set up to step down.  Of course, I know your honesty and professionalism are pure as the driven snow, but the timing does seem a bit peculiar champ, I mean 17 MONTHS?

Moral Compass Gone Astray Deano?

Unnamed source’s say Conservatives want to know how you push out this blatant partisan nonsense, day in and day out.  They are curious how people like you, or the Minister of Propaganda, Jen Goebbels Psaki do this everyday and then go home to your families?

They wonder if you guys teach the golden rule at home for you children: tell the truth, be responsible for your actions, own up to your mistakes, treat others the way you would like to be treated?  Do you then, turn that switch off in your heads once you get in the car and head out to work?  Or do you teach your kids to lie, deflect, and connive from the time they start to talk?   Do Peppermint Patti Psaki’s kids run to the door when Mom comes home and ask, “what lies did you tell today Mommy?”  It takes a certain type of person to pull that off……..you should be proud!  President Trump is a racist!

Andy’s Back!

I see Andy boy may be throwing his hat in the political ring again.  He shouldn’t let all those nursing home deaths and sexual harassment issues get in the way. As Andy said, “what can I say, I’m Italian.”  Word is he will be handing out cannoli’s at polling places. I see Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, reported that ole Andy severely under reported the number of nursing home deaths.  Funny though Deano, people were screaming for these numbers for months while Andy was still governor, and Tommy D. remained silent. Then Andy starts hinting he may venture back into politics and …………voila, Tommy had those numbers likkity split.  Remarkable!  Who says Tommy DiNapoli isn’t on the up and up!
Will The Times, as usual be endorsing ole Romeo Cuomo?

NATO Summit

It is good to see our fearless leader Joey Talibiden, heading overseas to meet with NATO leaders. I’m sure he will be setting policy and showing who is in charge over there. In the meantime, it is nice to see the other world leaders leading Joey around by the arm—pointing in the direction of the bathroom—wiping the spittle off his chin after his juice box and mac and cheese lunch, and waiting with him until “Dr.” Jill picks him up.

Reportedly, Heels Up Harris was originally supposed to be representing us over there in Brussels.  I was shocked that she was shelved, seeing as she did so well last time she was abroad.  When asked to comment on this Kalamity said, “we have to go, in order to go, I will go, to go where they go, we have to make sure we go, ultimately we will go, in order to go. Thank you, no more questions.”

That’s it for today Deano.  Keep up the great work at The Old Gray Lady.  With all the madness going around, we can always count on The Times…….for entertainment, if nothing else.  Remember this, when you get home to tell the family all the lies, I mean reporting you oversaw today as the Executive Editor of the New York Times.  Well done Dean Baquet, we’ll done.

Sincerely,

Chris Cirino

©Christopher Cirino

New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Wrong Again

Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the New York Times, who has a great deal of trouble getting his facts right about Israel and the Palestinians. He has had help from the rest of the resident staff, but that hasn’t rescued him from error. A report on the ineffable Kingsley is here: “How Many Helpers Does the New York Times Have to Hire for Error-Prone Jerusalem Bureau Chief?,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, February 14, 2022:

The New York Times’ error-prone Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, is at it again.

A full page of Sunday’s New York Times was devoted to a Kingsley dispatch from the West Bank, with reporting “contributed by Rami Nazzal and Hiba Yazbek from Burin, Myra Noveck from Yitzhar and Givat Ronen, Jonathan Shamir from Tel Aviv, and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad from Haifa.” What did this team of error-prone chief Kingsley and five helpers come up with?

More mistakes. Kingsley and Co. report:

Settlers injured at least 170 Palestinians last year and killed five, UN monitors reported. During the same period, Palestinians injured at least 110 settlers and killed two, UN records show. The Israeli Army said that Palestinians had injured 137 Israeli civilians in the West Bank last year.

But if the numbers are roughly comparable, the power dynamic is different … Settlers, unlike Palestinians, have the protection of the military and are rarely in danger of losing the land they live on.

It’s not accurate that Israeli settlers “are rarely in danger of losing the land they live on.”

Let’s look at the history.

In 586 BCE, when the first Temple was destroyed, the Jews were deported to Babylonia.

After 70 CE, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem and sacked the Second Temple, the Jews dispersed to various places. They were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and from Spain in 1492. Those who settled in central and eastern Europe had their property seized from them by the Nazis and the Communists.

Jews kept being expelled from one country after another in Western Europe, “losing the land” they lived on, as well as whatever other property they possessed: from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Spain in 1492, from Portugal in 1497. Those who lived in Central and Eastern Europe had centuries of persecutions an pogroms to contend with, losing their land and their lives during the Khmelnitsky Uprising in the Ukraine in the mid-17th century; Jews were again deprived of their land, and their lives, during the Nazi Holocaust; Jews again lost their property in Eastern Europe and Russia under the Communists.

In the land of Israel, Jews who lived in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and elsewhere in eastern Jerusalem had their property taken away by Jordan, which seized the territory in the war initiated by the Arabs in 1948 to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel.

Let’s also remember the 850,000 Jews who were either expelled or fled from Arab countries between 1948 and 1953. They lost their homes and land, their businesses, their property. That is why many Jews, including those in Israel, have internalized, as a kind of folk memory, the loss of their land over so many centuries, and in so many places.

Despite that history of Jews repeatedly having their land taken away from them, Patrick Kingsley insists that today’s Jewish settlers in Israel “are rarely in danger of losing the land they live on.” But that is not true, as the settlers well know.

Even the Israeli government has uprooted a series of settlements as part of a series of peace agreements.

In 1982, the Times itself reported that in turning over the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, Israel relinquished “16 civilian settlements.” The last of these was Yamit.

Tearfully but Forcefully, Israel Removes Gaza Settlers,” was the headline over another 2005 New York Times article. “By nightfall, the army said it had cleared the settlements of Morag, Bedolah, Kerem Atzmona, Ganei Tal, and Tel Katifa. Gadid, Peat Sadeh, Rafiah Yam, Shalev, Dugit and Nisanit were already empty or nearly so.”

Loss of land in Gaza, where 9,000 Jewish settlers were forcibly uprooted in 2005; loss of land, too, in the West Bank, where some settlements were also closed down by the IDF. And every single one of the half-million Israelis living in the West Bank has to worry about a “peace” that will establish a Palestinian state that will include all of the West Bank and Gaza – squeezing Israel back within the 1949 armistice lines. Of course they fear “losing the land they live on.”…

The Times’ formulation that “Violence has long been deployed by both Israelis and Palestinians” makes no distinction between illegal terrorist violence and lawful warfare.

Palestinian violence is deployed in terrorist attacks on Jewish men, women, and children. Israeli violence is deployed by the police and the IDF who track down, and arrest, or kill those same terrorists. These are not equivalent uses o violence. But Kingsley doesn’t appear to see the difference.

Kingsley needs to remember that Israel has faced both enemy states and terrorist groups; it has never been the aggressor. The day after Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the armies of five Arab states invaded to snuff out the young life of the Jewish state. Israel has had to fight three wars for its very survival, in 1948, 1967, and 1973. It has also had to fight eight other campaigns: in the Sinai in 1956, to stop the attacks on Israeli civilians in the Negev by Egyptian fedayin; a campaign to oust the terrorist PLO from Lebanon; two wars against the terrorist Hezbollah, and four campaigns against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. It is the Arabs who have constantly rejected a peace deal with Israel. They rejected the UN Partition Plan in 1947, and in response to Israel’s invitation to make peace with the Arabs after the Six-Day War, the Arabs answered with the “three Nos” of Khartoum:”No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel. Yasser Arafat walked away from a generous peace offer from Ehud Barak in 2000; Mahmoud Abbas walked away from an even more generous deal from Ehud Olmert in 2008. Since then Abbas has refused to deal unless Israel agrees that the “1967 borders” – that is, the 1949 armistice lines – will be the basis of negotiations.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians of Hamas, the PIJ, the PFLP, and those, too, who belong to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade of Fatah, carry on their terrorism against Israel. And the P.A. raises another generation to hate Israelis, and want to kill them, by continuing to use textbooks filled with antisemitic filth.. None of this Palestinian rejectionism, terrorism, and antisemitism, as Ira Stoll notes, makes it into Kingsley’s highly inaccurate reports. For him, it’s only the “occupation” and the “settler violence” that matters. There is scarcly a single report by Patrick Kingsley from Israel that has not had to be corrected. Given that record of bias and error, perhaps it’s time for the Times to replace him.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

POLL: Majorities Of Both Parties Say The Media Isn’t Trustworthy

Huge majorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents say the U.S. media is biased and its main goal is to advance its own agenda, according to a Thursday poll from the Trafalgar Group and Convention of States.

More than 76% of poll respondents stated that the media is primarily focused on advancing their own political opinions and agenda, with 62.7% of Democrats, 76.1% of Independents and 90.3% of Republicans agreeing.

The poll surveyed 1,084 likely general election voters between Dec. 4 and Dec. 7. and reported a 3% margin of error. Trafalgar employs a number of methods for conducting its polls, including live phone calls, automated calls, emails, text messages, and two other proprietary methods it does not share publicly.

“Thanks to the decentralization of the news through the internet and social media, the mainstream press outlets no longer have a monopoly on controlling the news,” Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States Action, said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller. “Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been slow to adjust to this reality and don’t seem to realize that the average American can now see in real time the difference between the actual facts of a story versus what the mainstream media says. People are realizing the open bias and partisanship of the press, and it is making them increasingly cynical.”

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE CHART ON MAINSTREAM MEDIA FOCUS BY THE TRAFALGER GROUP

The Trafalgar Group was one of only two polling firms that accurately predicted Trump’s victory in the presidential election of 2016. The firm was also among the few that predicted Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ win in 2018, as well as Republican victories in Virginia in November.

The poll is only the latest indicator of Americans’ loss of trust in the media. A June survey from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that the U.S. ranked the lowest in trust for the media among 46 nations with developed media industries.

“This is an extraordinary (though unsurprising) finding,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said after the report’s release. “Most amazing is that the corporate sector of the US media is failing in every respect: financially, culturally, collapsing trust.”

The poll also shows a dramatic drop from the “new low” for trust in the media established in January 2021, when just 46% of Americans stated the media was trustworthy. The Trafalgar poll now puts that number at 23.7%.

COLUMN BY

ANDERS HAGSTROM

White House correspondent.

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Questions for the New York Times After Its Latest Blood Libel of Israel

The New York Times recently carried on its front page photographs of 67 children, Arab and Jewish, who died during the recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, over the caption “They Were Just Children.” Under each child’s photo, the Times had provided the name of the party responsible for the child’s death; for 64 of the photos, “Israel” was declared responsible. More on this atrocious story is here: “‘The New York Times’ Repackages a Classic Blood Libel,” by James Sinkinson, JNS.org, June 16, 2021:

Though most New York Times readers would not likely have realized it, the dramatic, front-page, full-color photo collage of children killed in the recent Hamas-Israel war was a crudely repackaged version of a classic blood libel against the Jewish people.

On May 28, after Israel ceased its defensive operations to stop Hamas rocket fire and ensure security for Israel’s citizens, The New York Time plastered on its front page a collage of 67 faces of children killed in the conflict, under the title, “They Were Only [sic] Children.”

A caption under each photo in the associated article described how each child died. The captions under 64 of the children perversely named Israel as the cause of death. The truth, of course, is quite the contrary.

Gaza’s terrorist-designated Hamas dictatorship, which started the fighting unprovoked by attacking Israeli citizens with thousands of rockets, determined the pace and intensity of the war, as well as the targets of Israeli retaliation.

While the Times insinuated that Israel chose to kill these children—and that Israel’s actions were unjustified at best and malicious at worst—in fact, every one of those 67 children died at Hamas’s hands.

Hamas was responsible for the deaths of Palestinian children whom the terror group deliberately put in harm’s way by placing its rockets, and launching them, from inside or near civilian structures – kindergartens, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and other places where children would naturally be found. Hamas wanted Palestinian children to die; they would then serve usefully for propaganda purposes – as they did when the photographs of dead Arab children appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Israel, of course, tries as hard as it can to avoid civilian casualties, including children, by telephoning, leafletting, emailing warnings about an impending attack on a target, practicing its “knock-on-the-roof” technique, all in order to get everyone in those buildings to flee. Israel has no desire to kill children or other civilians.

Ever since the Middle Ages, Jews and Jewish communities around the world have been regularly accused of killing innocent non-Jewish children, in bloodlust or in the service of fantastical religious services. Over hundreds of years, such false accusations of murder have come to be known as “blood libel.”…

Despite the Times’ almost daily criticism of the Jewish state—and its decades-long tradition of siding with Israel’s enemies—the front-page photo collage reinvigorated an antisemitic canard, and clearly crossed a line….

There is a straight line from the medieval blood libel of Jews killing Christian children to use their blood in making Passover wafers, and the New York Times blaming “Jews” (Zionists) for the presumably deliberate killing of more than 60 Palestinian children.

Fair-minded people need to ask why, of all the bloody conflicts raging around the world, only the operation involving self-defense for the national homeland of the Jewish people was singled out for this graphically disturbing treatment.

Hundreds of thousands of people die in violent conflict and war around the world every year — 19,444 died in Afghanistan and 19,044 in Yemen in 2020, to say nothing of tens of thousands more in Syria, Somalia and Iraq. Not one of these conflicts was deserving of a front-page photo collage in the Times.

There were many more children who were killed in the continuing wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and, Ethiopia than in the recent Hamas-Israel war. Why was it that the Times has never seen fit to print a similar front-page collage of the dead children in any of those conflicts? Were those children less important than the Palestinian Arab children? Or were the Palestinian Arab children worthy of heightened attention only because Israel could be, and was, blamed by the Times for their deaths?

Moreover, the Times collage project deceptively hid the context of the children’s deaths. It did not mention the [real] reason these children died.

According to HonestReporting, the context was buried: “Just minutes after the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, a 5-year-old boy named Baraa al-Gharabli was killed in Jabaliya, Gaza,” the opening sentence of “They Were Only Children” dramatically asserts. Only 20 paragraphs later do readers find out that al-Gharabli’s tragic death “may have been” caused by a Hamas rocket that fell short.

Israel Defense Forces’ radar images show that some 15 percent of all rockets launched by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fell inside Gaza, unquestionably killing and injuring many Palestinians. Initial research indicates that failed Palestinian rocket launches killed at least nine of the children pictured in the Times piece. Still, the Times absolves Hamas of the responsibility for their deaths.

The IDF had made public radar images that showed nearly 680 Hamas rockets that had been launched against Israel, but fell instead inside Gaza, where they injured and killed Palestinians, including children. It appears that at least nine of the children who died in Gaza had been hit by Hamas’ own rockets. There is no mention of this under their photos, which attributes their deaths to Israel alone. Nor did the Times mention in the body of its article that accompanied the photos that 680 Hamas rockets fell short in Gaza itself, injuring and killing children and other civilians. Why not? Who at the Times decided that information should be left out?

Furthermore, in an embarrassment to those who put the collage together, some of the photos were of children alive and well, while others were of those who Hamas claimed as members, even if they were only 17 years old. One of them, Khaled Qanou, was a member of the Mujahideen Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement. This vital information was not mentioned anywhere in the Times’ disingenuous diatribe.

Of the 67 Palestinian children who were reported as killed by Israel, we know of at least nine who die from Hamas rockets, not because Hamas admitted it, but because Israeli photos show where a Hamas rocket fell short in Gaza exactly where those children were then reported to have died. Other Palestinian “children” turn out to have been in their late teens, and members of terrorist groups, including the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement, and Hamas itself. But that information was kept from its readers by the New York Times; it would only muddy the tear-jerking message that “They Were Only Children.”

Finally, the images provide no clarification as to the remarkably low ratio of civilian deaths in Israel’s wars with Hamas. Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, notes that a United Nations study showed “that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza was by far the lowest in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare.”

Kemp states that this ratio was less than 1:1 and compared it favorably to the estimated ratios of NATO operations in Afghanistan (3:1), western campaigns in Iraq and Kosovo (believed to be 4:1), and the conflicts in Chechnya and Serbia (much higher than 4:1).

Kemp argues that the low ratio was achieved through unprecedented measures taken by the IDF to minimize civilian casualties, including warnings to the population via telephone calls, radio broadcasts and leaflets, as well as granting pilots the discretion to abort a strike if they perceived too great a risk of civilian casualties.

And as we know, Israel invented the “knock-on-the-roof” technique, the practice of dropping non-explosive or low-yield devices on the roofs of targeted civilian homes as a prior warning of imminent bombing attacks to give the inhabitants time to flee the attack. The practice was first employed by the Israelis in the 2008-2009 Gaza war, and along with telephoning, radio broadcasts, and leafletting, was used again in this latest war with Hamas. We have also learned of Israeli pilots aborting a mission when they detected the presence of children at a targeted site. Here is one example.

The astonishingly low ratio – 1:3 — of civilian-to-fighter casualties in Gaza is based on figures from the IDF, which believes it killed 225 Hamas fighters, with about 75 civilians killed. That is an amazing figure; in modern warfare the ratio of civilians-to-fighters killed is ordinarily at least 3:1. But because of the enormous efforts Israel makes to warn civilians away from its targets, sometimes giving them as much as two hours warning to flee, civilian casualties were kept very low, despite Hamas’ deliberate efforts to increase them. That two-hours warning was what Israel provided to the residents of the media tower, the Al-Jalaa Building, that received so much attention because the AP offices were located there, along with the actual target of the IAF, Hamas weapons development and intelligence facilities.

He [Colonel Richard Kemp] also states that the civilian casualties that did occur could be seen in light of Hamas’s tactical use of Gazan civilians “as human shields, to hide behind, to stand between Israeli forces and their own fighters,” and strategic exploitation of their deaths in the media….

Questions for the Grey Lady:

Why have you never published a front-page collage, or even one on an inside page, of children killed in any of two dozen recent conflicts, such continuing wars as those in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Ethiopia?

Why, in your coverage of the children who died in the latest Gaza war, did you make no mention of Hamas’ deliberate use of human shields, including children, by hiding its rockets in, and launching them from, civilian buildings such as kindergartens, schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings?

Why, in your coverage of the children who died in the Gaza war, did you make no mention of the fact that some were known to have been killed by the 680 Hamas rockets aimed at Israel but fell short, and struck people inside Gaza?

Why, in your coverage of the children killed in Gaza, did you not subsequently let your readers know that several of those “children” whose photographs appeared were in their late teens, and were members of Hamas and the Palestinian Muhajideen Movement?

Why did The New York Times publish in its “They Were Only Children” collage a 2015 stock photo of a young girl, claiming Israeli forces killed her during the May 2021 war with Hamas? Why did it never apologize for that error?

Why did you not make any mention in the text that accompanies the photos of 67 dead children that Israeli pilots aborted missions when they detected children too close to the target?

Why do you nowhere mention, in the text accompanying the collage of photos of children killed in the war, Israel’s various methods to minimize civilian casualties? These include warning the inhabitants of impending targets through phone calls, leafletting, emails, and the “knock-on-the-roof technique,” giving them time – sometimes as much as two hours — to flee. Wasn’t all that worth mentioning?

Why do you trust the figures released by Hamas of “67 children” killed when, from the three previous Hamas-Israel wars, the numbers put out by Hamas proved, upon further investigation, to have been grossly inflated? Given that history, shouldn’t we be skeptical of Hamas this time?

Do we have any reason, on the other hand, to think that the figures about casualties provided by the IDF are to be trusted? Doesn’t the IDF have a long track record of putting out reliable figures?

That’s enough questions for now. I’m sure your continued skewed coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict will prompt still others.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

New York Times Details Horrors of Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban,’ Ignores Victims of Jihad Attacks

The New York Times story opens with a scene of unmitigated horror: “On May 30, 2019, Mohamed Abdulrahman Ahmed should have been in class preparing for exams. Instead, neighbors found the gifted high school senior hanging lifeless from a beam in his home in the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. He had taken his own life.” Since this is the New York Times, it comes as no surprise that the ultimate culprit is none other than Donald J. Trump, and his nefarious “Muslim Ban” that his wise successor’s handlers have now consigned to the dustbin of history.

Times author Ty McCormick does his best to tug at our heartstrings as he describes Dadaab, “a sea of sand and thorn scrub and makeshift tarpaulin dwellings” that is “home to more than 200,000 people — a city the size of Richmond, Va., or Spokane, Wash., except without electricity or running water.”

It’s a place absolutely mired in despair, but “over the years, refugees in Dadaab have clung to one hope: resettlement overseas, sometimes in Europe or Canada but mostly in the United States. Tens of thousands of Dadaab’s residents have come to the United States; in 2015, for instance, more than 3,000 people from the camp were resettled there.”

But then came the reign of the Evil One: “Those hopes of a better life were dashed on Jan. 27, 2017, when on his eighth day as president, Donald Trump suspended all refugee admissions and banned entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, including Somalia. (Restrictions were eventually applied to 13 countries in all.)”

It’s a predictable sob story about how hard the residents of Dadaab have had it since they have been unable to come to America. One is moved to tears, but when one begins to consider the issue rationally, other considerations inevitably intrude: there are people who are having hard times all over the world. In fact, there are even people who are having hard times in the United States of America. There are people who are suffering economically, like the people in Dadaab. There are people who are suffering physically, emotionally, mentally, and in other ways. All over the world, there is suffering and pain. Why, then, is it the moral responsibility of the United States of America to alleviate the suffering of the people of Dadaab? No one in Kenya or Somalia or France or China or Australia or anywhere else is doing a thing to alleviate the sufferings of Americans; why is it up to Americans, all of whom are suffering in various ways themselves, to alleviate the suffering of everyone else?

Meanwhile, what about the suffering of those whose lives were destroyed by Somali migrants who came into the country before Trump’s travel ban came into effect? Can we get a New York Times article on them? Somali Muslim migrant Mohammad Barry in February 2016 stabbed multiple patrons at a restaurant owned by an Israeli Arab Christian. When is the New York Times going to interview the people whom Barry stabbed, and publish a piece about how they have suffered, and how their lives forever changed that day? When is the New York Times going to write a piece about the other people who were in the restaurant that day, and explore their trauma, their horror, their terror, and the nightmares and anxiety they have experienced since then?

When does the New York Times plan to profile the victims of Dahir Adan, another Somali Muslim migrant, who in October 2016 stabbed mall shoppers in St. Cloud while screaming “Allahu akbar”? Do Adan’s victims get a New York Times article about their injuries, their healing processes, any operations they may have had to undergo, and their own ongoing trauma and fear?

How about the victims of Abdul Razak Artan, yet another Somali Muslim migrant, who in November 2016 injured nine people with car and knife attacks at Ohio State University? Does the New York Times plan to explain to us how the victims whom Artan tried to run down with his car (in an instance of the common phenomenon of vehicular jihad) now find their hearts racing at the prospect of having to cross the street?

Of course, the New York Times is not going to publish even a single line about the suffering of those people and others like them, or even consider the possibility that Trump’s travel bans did anything but harm. Only the suffering of the people of Dadaab and others like them, not the suffering of victims of jihad attacks, matters to the Times. The suffering of the people of Dadaab is very real, and should be addressed, but is the only solution, or the best solution, really the resettlement in the United States of large numbers of people among whom is an unknowable number of jihad terrorists, who will enter undetected since any vetting to try to discover them will be deemed “Islamophobic”?

There will soon be new victims of Biden’s handlers’ marvelous, multicultural discarding of the “Muslim Ban.” The New York Times will ignore them, while congratulating themselves on how they helped install a president who strikes back against “racism” and “xenophobia.”

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden is Wrong: US Didn’t Have Good Relationship With Hitler — But the New York Times Did

Did the United States really have a good relationship with Adolf Hitler before he started World War II? Joe Biden made this bizarre claim during Thursday’s debate with President Trump. Trump said of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un: “North Korea, we’re not in a war. We have a good relationship. People don’t understand. Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.”

Biden shot back: “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded Europe, the rest of Europe. Come on.”

Come on, Joe! The U.S. didn’t have a good relationship with Hitler before he “invaded Europe. The German dictator was, however, beloved in certain quarters, including the editorial offices of the New York Times.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t attack Hitler directly before the war began, but relations between the U.S. and Nazi Germany were by no means good. In September 1938, Roosevelt sent a telegram to Hitler lecturing him about the importance of keeping the peace and stating: “The conscience and the impelling desire of the people of my country demand that the voice of their government be raised again and yet again to avert and to avoid war.” Implying that Hitler was a warmonger was hardly a hallmark of cordial relations between the two countries.

Failing to get a satisfactory response from Hitler, on October 11, 1938, Roosevelt announced that he was increasing national defense spending by $300 million (over $5 billion in today’s dollars). No one thought that money was going to build up our defenses against Britain and France.

Some in America, however, loved the Führer.

The historian Rafael Medoff recently noted that on July 9, 1933, just over five months after he became Chancellor of Germany and years after his virulent anti-Semitism and propensity for violence had become notorious worldwide, the New York Times published a fawning puff piece on Hitler that rivals even today’s media adulation of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi in its one-sidedness, myopia, and disdain for essential facts.

Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she was an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, as in the presence of this man whose name has become justly synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed: “At first sight,” McCormick gushed, “the dictator of Germany seems a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller. His sun-browned face is full and is the mobile face of an orator.”

As if that weren’t enough, she continues with a description of the Führer as outlandish and adulatory as likening the supremely zaftig Stacy Abrams to a supermodel: “His eyes are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid. He appears untired and unworried. His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit.”

McCormick labored to portray Hitler as more modest than his public persona might suggest: “In the country he has plastered with banners and insignia he wears only a small gold eagle in his buttonhole. No flag or swastika is in sight.” He is also, she signaled to her readers, reasonable and genuine: “He begins to speak slowly and solemnly but when he smiles — and he smiled frequently in the course of the interview — and especially when he loses himself and forgets his listener in a flood of speech, it is easy to see how he sways multitudes. Then he talks like a man possessed, indubitably sincere.” What’s more, “Herr Hitler has the sensitive hand of the artist.

The intrepid New York Times reporter doesn’t seem to have asked Hitler if he had a significant other, but no one would have been surprised after reading all this if the two of them had become an item.

However, McCormick’s interview was not all about Hitler’s sun-browned face and blue larkspur eyes. In the 29th paragraph of a 41-paragraph article, she recounts that she asked him: “How about the Jews? At this stage how do you measure the gains and losses of your anti-Semetic [sic] policies?” Hitler answered, she said, with “extraordinary fluency,” and she records his answer – a tissue of victim-blaming and excuse-making – at considerable length.

Then, McCormick recounts, “seeing the second part of the question was not going to be answered, your correspondent referred to the position of women.” Ah, yes: when the interviewee doesn’t want to answer the tough question, go on to something easier. The Times and its allies today always keep this in mind when interviewing Democrats. This surrender mollified Hitler as well: “Herr Hitler’s tension relaxed. He smiled his disarming smile.”

Little did Anne O’Hare McCormick realize, as Hitler’s blue larkspur eyes twinkled in her direction and his disarming smile made her heart flutter, that all these years later, the New York Times would still be publishing puff pieces about authoritarian thugs. And old Joe Biden, as he contemplates the approaching end of the presidential race from his Delaware basement, can rest secure in the certainty that no matter what outrageously false or crazy thing he says, that same New York Times will cover for him, too.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Nice White Parents’ Responsible for Failing Public Schools, New York Times Says

Why does the public education system continue to fail America’s children? Policy experts have pondered this question for decades.

Most say the answer is complicated, requiring a nuanced, collaborative approach.

But not The New York Times. It found the problem, and it’s simple: white parents.

The solution? “Try, whenever possible, to suppress the power of white parents.”


How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>


That quote comes from the Times’ podcast “Nice White Parents,” which chronicles the history of a single public school in New York. Specifically, the host, Chana Joffe-Walt, decides to look into the racial history of this school.

Her first finding: Many parents who advocated for the integration of public schools, specifically this public school, did not end up enrolling their children. Instead, they chose to send their children to established schools with a history of success. This choice—made predominantly by white families—is why the school has struggled, Joffe-Walt says.

She contacts several of these parents to scold them for not sending their children to a worse school to serve the larger cause of public education. Some parents note that although they believed in advancing school integration, they perceived this particular school to struggle academically, noting that many students could not read at grade level.

Joffe-Walt chalks up these criticisms to racism, rather than a genuine observation that the school would be a step backward academically for a student functioning at grade level.

Does she offer concrete policy solutions to fix the underlying academic issues plaguing the school? Of course not. Instead, she perpetuates the myth that parents choosing to exit the public school system leads to underfunded schools.

In reality, schools are not underfunded. Not even close. In fact, since the creation of the Department of Education in 1979, education spending has gone only in one direction: up. Test scores, by contrast, have remained entirely stagnant.

New York spends almost $23,000 per student per year in the public school system—a close second to Washington, D.C., for the highest per-pupil expenditure in the country. That figure also is significantly higher than most private school tuitions. So why are so many schools still failing?

One reason: The public school system is drowning in bureaucracy. And bureaucrats get paid before teachers—and before students get new textbooks.

Ben Scafidi at Kennesaw State University has studied the concept of administrative bloat in the K-12 public education system extensively. He found that between 1950 and 2015, the student population at public schools had grown roughly 100%. During that same time period, teaching staff had grown 243%.

Although that disproportionate growth in the number of teachers compared to the growth in student population is shocking enough, that is hardly his biggest finding. During that same time period, “administrators and other staff” in the public school system grew 709%.

An increase in administrative staff exceeding 700% compared to just a 100% increase in students seems to be a far more likely answer to why heavily funded public schools appear to lack resources than the choices of some parents to seek out the best education options available for their children.

Throughout “Nice White Parents,” Joffe-Walt details examples of parents’ getting involved in the day-to-day operation of the school, and paints this involvement as affront to public schooling.

In Episode 1, for example, she describes how when “white parents” came into the school, many wanted their children to learn French, yet no French classes were offered. The parents formed a committee, held fundraisers, collaborated with administrators, and got their French program.

This is problematic, according to “Nice White Parents,” because a French program strays from the cultural needs of the majority-minority population of the school.

This scenario is exactly why every family needs school choice. There never will be a one-size-fits-all public school system that will offer the foreign language needs and wants of every family, nor other such demands.

The New York Times and the makers of “Nice White Parents” argue that the solution to the different wants and needs of families is to ignore the wishes of parents altogether and let education bureaucrats decide what is best for their children.

School choice proponents, by contrast, believe that every family in America should be empowered to choose an education option that is custom fit for their child’s needs. Through programs such as vouchers or education savings accounts, every family would be financially empowered to make that decision. Students do better when their parents are actively engaged in their education.

A podcast attacking parental autonomy is bad enough. But the fact that The New York Times attacks parents of a particular race for executing their autonomy is worse. “Nice White Parents” isn’t just troubling, it’s wrong, and an affront to American ideals.

Ultimately, this hurts all children because “Nice White Parents” racializes the failure of the public schools, hurting the students who are trapped there and don’t have the resources to flee the public system.

There has got to be some accountability for the failure of the public system. The New York Times’ use of a racist canard to avoid systemic culpability for failing these kids isn’t going to cut it.

COMMENTARY BY

Mary Clare Amselem is a policy analyst in education policy at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: .


A Note for our Readers:

Democratic Socialists say, “America should be more like socialist countries such as Sweden and Denmark.” And millions of young people believe them…

For years, “Democratic Socialists” have been growing a crop of followers that include students and young professionals. America’s future will be in their hands.

How are socialists deluding a whole generation? One of their most effective arguments is that “democratic socialism” is working in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway. They claim these countries are “proof” that socialism will work for America. But they’re wrong. And it’s easy to explain why.

Our friends at The Heritage Foundation just published a new guide that provides three irrefutable facts that debunks these myths. For a limited time, they’re offering it to readers of The Daily Signal for free.

Get your free copy of “Why Democratic Socialists Can’t Legitimately Claim Sweden and Denmark as Success Stories” today and equip yourself with the facts you need to debunk these myths once and for all.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: When the New York Times covered up one of communism’s worst atrocities

A drama about the Holodomor, the 1930s genocide in Ukraine, is also a warning about fake news.


One of the great, universal truths is that everybody lies. From tiny white lies to great big whoppers, everyone does it, even babies. Don’t believe me?

“Sorry I’m late, traffic was terrible.”

“It’s so great to see you!”

“Doing well, thanks for asking!”

“I have read and agree to the above terms and conditions.”

These are just a handful of the easy, casual lies that we all offer up on an everyday basis. And much of the time, these kinds of lies are fairly harmless. These tiny deceptions are baked into most of our social interactions and, in many ways, grease the wheels of polite society. After all, how awkward and uncomfortable would our conversations be if we actually told the truth every time someone asked how we’re doing?

These are the lies we expect to be told and are expected to tell. And while I would personally like to see more honesty in everyone’s day-to-day interactions, I understand the purpose of these kinds of deceptions.

That said, the truth always matters. We may expect some level of insincerity in certain situations, but in others, honesty is more than simply suggested—it’s required.

When it comes to reporting news, telling the truth is vitally important.

The term “fake news” has been abused to the point of uselessness, but false reporting does exist and has for a long time. The information we receive through various media outlets and platforms is frequently critical for how we plan our days and how we plan our lives. When that information is false, intentionally or not, it can cause us very real problems.

Sometimes, the consequences are as simple and relatively benign as getting caught in the rain without an umbrella. Sometimes, though—and especially with intentionally misleading or false information—the results can be devastating to livelihoods and lives.

One of the most egregious examples of this was the coordinated cover-up of the Holodomor—a famine in the Ukraine deliberately created by the Soviet Union in 1932 and ’33.

In the span of a year, decreased output due to the forced collectivization of farms and the confiscation of foodstuffs by the Soviet army led to the deaths of between seven and ten million people, mostly ethnic Ukrainians. It was, in short, a genocide by means of starvation.

Freelance reporter Gareth Jones broke the story. He did what he was supposed to do as a journalist. He told the truth.

Unfortunately, Jones’s reporting shined an incredibly unflattering light on the fact that the news reports coming out of Moscow regarding the impressive successes of Soviet agriculture were false. Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times, and the rest of the foreign press corps in Moscow promptly launched a coordinated campaign to discredit Jones’s reporting, despite the fact they all knew Jones was telling the truth.

Eugene Lyons, who was the Moscow correspondent for United Press at the time, even wrote in his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia:

Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials. … There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take, under the effulgence of [Foreign Press Corps Soviet Official Konstantin] Umansky’s gilded smile, before a formal denial was worked out. We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in roundabout phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski.

It should be noted that both Duranty and Lyons were true believers in the communist cause and didn’t hesitate to use their positions as arbiters of truth to deceive the western world regarding the actual situation in the Soviet Union. As a result, around ten million people were starved to death during the Holodomor, and yet the Soviet Union continued to be propped up by Western governments and their investments. Furthermore, in total, approximately 100 million people have been killed by communist states since the Bolshevik Revolution which was allowed, in part, by the deceptions of professional “truth-tellers.”

This is not to say that bias, in and of itself, is to blame. Another great, universal truth is that everyone has some kind of bias. No matter how hard we try to be objective and relate only the facts, at least a little bit of that bias is going to show through. But there isn’t anything inherently wrong with having a bias, especially when it’s acknowledged.

The problems come when the bias in people we rely on to report the actual facts internally absolves them of telling outright lies to further their ideological goals.

This is not a problem of the past, either. Whether it’s an incident of claiming to have COVID-19 when they don’t or building an entire career out of fabricated “news” articles, the long and sordid story of falsified reports continues to this day.

This kind of “reporting” isn’t limited to simply lying, either. Blithely passing along uninvestigated press releases or unconfirmed allegations as fact also damages our trust in news media. Given how common such reporting is, it’s no wonder trust in news media in the US is only about 29 percent.

And then we wonder why so few people comply with suggestions and warnings given by the news media.

A commonly-offered solution to this problem with news media trust is fact-checking by a small handful of officially approved arbiters. However, the reason that Duranty and the New York Times, Lyons and the United Press, and the other members of the foreign press corps in Moscow were able to cover up the horrors of the Holodomor is precisely because only a handful of media outlets were considered legitimate.

Policies, regardless of who institute them, that centralize the distribution and judgment of truth would end up doing the opposite of what they intend. We would be right back to the bad old days of journalism where media monopolies could spread misinformation largely unchallenged.

It’s not hard to find some pretty spectacular fact-checking failures, and this is beside the fact that people tend to reject fact-checks that contradict their core beliefs regardless.

We in the US enjoy fairly robust legal protections for free speech and a free press, which, to be clear, is good thing. But what can we do when reporters don’t do their jobs correctly?

The solution is not to curb or restrict speech that doesn’t meet certain criteria. And it’s certainly not to limit the sources of various kinds of information. The only way to improve speech is to encourage more speech. We need an actual marketplace of ideas where consumers of information are able to judge for themselves what sources of that information meet their quality requirements and which do not.

The solution isn’t a single, official voice of truth. It’s billions of voices. It’s the competition of different ideas and their purveyors. It’s individuals thinking for themselves and accepting the responsibility that comes with that.

The reason the true believers of the Moscow foreign press corps faked their stories was that they feared the truth would hinder the cause they’d placed their faith in. But if a cause can be crushed by the simple telling of truth, it’s not much of a cause at all.

The truth matters and the truth will out, even in our world of “fake news” and clickbait.

But only if we let it and only if we demand it.

This article is republished from The Foundation for Economic Freedom under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jen Maffessanti

Jen Maffessanti is a Senior Writer at FEE and mother of two. When she’s not advocating for liberty or chasing kids, she can usually be found cooking or maybe racing cars. Check out her website

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

NYT Publishes Radical Economic Manifesto Calling for Reparations

The New York Times devoted its entire “Sunday Review” section last weekend to an economic manifesto calling for banks to apologize for “structural racism,” for an Amendment enshrining “voter equality,” and for wealthy Americans to “give up your privilege.”

The manifesto, “The Economy We Need,” focuses on redressing economic inequality — not growth or job creation — as America’s main economic challenge. Toward that end, the lead editorial calls for the Federal Reserve to target black unemployment instead of overall unemployment, and for banks to pay reparations. It also demands banks “apologize for their culpability for and complicity in structural racism” and “commit to serving black people as they do whites.”

Other demands: cancel consumer debt and eliminate banking fees for black customers, and give interest-free mortgages to black homebuyers and interest-free loans to black-owned businesses.

The New York Times is now a propaganda megaphone for the Black Lives Matter racial extortion racket.


New York Times (NYT)

88 Known Connections

A staff writer at The New York Times Magazine wrote on June 5th that Black Lives Matter is “America’s current incarnation of a civil rights movement.” The author, Jenna Wortham, rhapsodized, “This is the biggest collective demonstration of civil unrest around state violence in our generation’s memory. The unifying theme, for the first time in America’s history, is at last: Black Lives Matter.” Her article was entitled “A ‘Glorious Poetic Rage.’”  This was the phrase an activist involved with Black Lives Matter in Minnesota used to describe how the third day of protests in that city felt “when a police station house was lit on fire.”

To learn more about the New York Times, click here for the profile link.

©All rights reserved.

New York Times Editor Quits Over Newspaper’s Internal ‘Orthodoxy’

The New York Times hired Bari Weiss as an opinion editor to help readers gain a wider perspective after President Donald Trump’s surprise election in 2016.

Now, Weiss has resigned her position as an op-ed editor and writer. In a lengthy letter to the Times’ publisher, posted on her personal website, she says she was bullied and run out of her job because of her personal views.

Weiss is a self-described centrist—hardly a conservative or Trump supporter—but she has drawn the ire of the hard left and seemingly a vocal portion of the Times’ readership and staff over her breaks from progressive orthodoxy.

In her resignation letter Tuesday to Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Weiss writes that since hiring her, the Times has become more ruthlessly ideological.


Two regimes are fighting an ideological war in America today. But what side are you on? And how can you sharpen up on how to defend your position? Learn more now >>


“[A] new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else,” Weiss writes in the letter dated July 14.

Weiss then explains how radicals now drive The New York Times’ editorial decisions. Specifically, radicals on the social media site Twitter:

As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

It’s clear that was the case after a controversy at the Times just a few weeks ago, when staffers publicly revolted after the newspaper printed an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

Cotton defended the potential use of the National Guard to quell riots, a position held by just over half of Americans, according to polls.

The Times backed down to the mob and attached a ridiculous, 317-word editor’s note atop Cotton’s June 3 op-ed, explaining how the published piece didn’t meet its standards.

Two editors were forced to resign over the decision to publish the op-ed by Cotton, a former Army Ranger who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s clear that the real standard that was violated was the judgment of angry, left-wing opinionators.

In her resignation letter, Weiss writes:

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its ‘diversity’; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history include the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

On top of that, Weiss writes, the Times became a hostile work environment.

She says she had become a target of hate from co-workers behind the scenes and that “other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.”

Weiss then offers a warning, and advice for young people who want a career in journalism:

Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.

Weiss’ resignation letter highlights the problems consuming not just The New York Times—which has slid deep into the camp of promoting activism over journalism in the past few years—but the media landscape as a whole.

Social justice warriors have taken over newsrooms.

The Times, for anyone paying attention, has been biased for generations. It’s a newspaper of record, as Weiss notes, and an incredibly powerful one. It also has been quite liberal and certainly has showed its bias in the past.

And it’s published its share of fake news.

The dispatches of Walter Duranty, who lied about the Soviet-created Ukrainian famine that killed millions in the 1930s, is perhaps one of the worst “fake news” scandals in modern history.

Nevertheless, The New York Times has had its share of high-quality journalism and accurate reporting, and has attempted to inject at least some ideas in its opinion section that aren’t left wing.

We are now entering a new era. The mask of objectivity is slipping off.

It’s clear that those running America’s premier journalistic institutions are dropping  any pretense of searching for the truth in favor of declaring they know the “truth.”

Just look at The New York Times’ deeply flawed and highly criticized 1619 Project, which, despite noted and half-heartedly acknowledged inaccuracies, won the Pulitzer Prize and is now being force-fed to students in schools around the country.

The slide of the Times mirrors the abandonment of the culture of free speech, debate, and inquiry in Western society. In its place is the elevation of “lived experience,” militant political correctness, and cancel culture—ideas once confined to academia that the left has poured into the mainstream.

Genuine debate is becoming difficult in America.

Conservatives and centrist or right-leaning Americans are canceled and siloed off from the mainstream; liberals who deviate even moderately from left-wing consensus are subjected to “struggle sessions.”

Weiss’ entire letter is well worth a read, if only because it demonstrates where our cultural revolution is going. And how the left increasingly tolerates no dissent whatsoever.

COMMENTARY BY

Jarrett Stepman is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast. Send an email to Jarrett. He is also the author of the new book, “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Twitter: .

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Resignation letter to the New York Times of Bari Weiss


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