The New York Times coverage of the latest crisis in occupied Palestine is so distorted, so biased, that it must have been deliberate — and not merely incompetence, or the unconscious persistence of bad habits. By contrast, even the Washington Post and National Public Radio did a better job, although you have to turn to other sources, like Mariam Barghouti at Mondoweiss or the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, for accurate accounts.
The Times is covering the story extensively, and here is its dishonest timeline of what happened:
The crisis started when Palestinians “barricaded themselves” overnight inside the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, starting earlier this week.
Israel police “cleared” the mosque in the middle of the night, to “protect Jewish worshippers” who are observing the Passover holiday. (Just how Jews were supposed to observe Passover inside a 1300-year-old mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, was left unexplained.)
Other Palestinians got angry at the Israeli police, and some of them in southern Lebanon launched rockets toward Israel.
In response, Israel attacked Gaza — even though no rockets were fired from there, and Hamas, the dominant political movement in the besieged territory, did not claim credit for the attack from Lebanon.
Here’s what really happened:
Jewish extremists tried to approach the Al-Aqsa mosque to slaughter a goat, allegedly for religious reasons, as they do every Passover. This year such an act is even more provocative, as Muslims are observing Ramadan, a month of fasting, prayer and reflection. Normally, Israeli security does try to deter the Jewish extremists.
This year, however, Benjamin Netanyahu is handing Israel’s security to his two far-right wing Jewish-supremacist ministers.
So Palestinians decided to stay overnight inside Al-Aqsa, to protect it. They know that certain Jewish extremists have long threatened to actually blow up the mosque, and replace it with the Third Jewish Temple, on the site where they say the first two were located. (The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. A good Israeli feature film, Time of Favor (2000), portrayed the extremist threat.)
Israeli police in riot gear invaded the mosque during the middle of the night, and there is plenty of video evidence showing them clubbing Palestinians.
Only then did the Palestinian group in southern Lebanon fire those rockets. Gaza had remained completely quiet until then, despite the Israeli provocations.
(Other U.S. media got the story at least partly right, including the Washington Post and even National Public Radio, which normally has poor coverage.)
Meanwhile, the Israeli daily Haaretz put the blame where it belonged, right in the headline, blaming “Jewish activists” and “Israel police.” The paper pointed out that Palestinians have feared settler provocations during Ramadan so mostly youths decided to stay in the mosque overnight. Haaretz reports that the Palestinians “claim that nothing would have happened had the youths been allowed to remain in the mosque until daybreak.” Instead, in the middle of the night Israeli police “breached the mosque with stun grenades and batons” and arrested 350 people.
Back to the New York Times. The sacrificial goat is almost entirely missing from their coverage. On Wednesday the paper did mention the provocation — but buried it down in paragraph 21, nearly at the end of the report.
And of course the Times, as always, left out the basic explanatory background paragraph that belongs in every news story:
Israel has occupied West Bank Palestine since 1967, (including the Al-Aqsa Mosque), and violates international law by moving hundreds of thousands of Jewish-only settler/colonists into the territory. In response, Palestinians . . .
Amnesty International writes about the situation at al-Aqsa, worth a read:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/04/israel-opt-second-night-of-horror-at-al-aqsa-mosque/
A second consecutive night-time attack on Palestinian worshippers at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque illustrates the sheer brutality of Israel’s apartheid, Amnesty International said today. Israeli security forces stormed the mosque compound at around 10.30 pm last night, shortly after evening prayers. They fired stun grenades and used rifle butts to beat Palestinians who had gathered at the mosque for Ramadan….Amnesty International spoke to several Palestinians about the violence they had faced at the hands of Israeli security forces. Shadi*, who is 17 years-old, described how Israeli police had beaten him as they dragged him out of the mosque on Wednesday morning:
“Twice I tried to raise my head and both times [the police] beat me with the butt of their guns on my head […] you are not allowed to raise your head. I was hurting all over my body from the beatings and the bruises,” Shadi said.
“you have to turn to other sources, like Mariam Barghouti at Mondoweiss or the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, for accurate accounts….” It’s interesting that Haaretz, a Hebrew-language newspaper published in Israel for Jewish Israelis, can offer critical coverage of Israeli behavior for which the ADL might very well berate and condemn any mainstream American news outlet if it carried anything even remotely similar.
Your link is to a story on Thursday. Today, Friday, NPR’s Morning Edition has a story that begins with Steve Inskeep saying “Israel’s military has carried out what it calls limited strikes on Palestinian militant targets in southern Lebanon and also in Gaza.”
How is it news that Israel’s military calls its strikes “limited“? As if there was a question that these strikes might have been unlimited?
I actually heard an NPR announcer later today begin a news summary with the lead story that Israel had launched “limited air strikes” without qualifying that that was just the Israeli military’s description of them. I checked the hourly summaries on the NPR website to confirm, but none of them began that way, so maybe it was the half-hour news summary that I heard.
And also, who knew that there are still Palestinian militant targets in southern Lebanon?
Anyway, back to the Morning Edition story, it begins with reporting Israeli air strikes but then says, “Israel is signaling that it would like to keep the situation from getting worse.” Isn’t a party that launches air strikes making the situation worse by that very action?
(By the way, NPR’s transcript has a lot of small errors in it; I’m quoting the words that were actually spoken.)
“The New York Times coverage of the latest crisis in occupied Palestine is so distorted, so biased, that it must have been deliberate — and not merely incompetence, or the unconscious persistence of bad habits”.
Of course NYT’s coverage “deliberately” distorts their coverage, NYT’s has been doing so for decades. Conscious “persistence of bad habits” The Israeli govt, military, NYT’s have creating distortions down to a science,
More and more people beginning to understand, that Israel is an apartheid state.
I think the last paragraph should go into every story like the author said.
The only problem is that if they start talking about the occupied West Bank, Palestine, then they’ll have to start talking about the occupied East Bank, Palestine as well.