An entire month has passed since the Trump administration started moving dangerously toward war with Iran — and Thomas Friedman, the leading foreign affairs columnist at the most influential newspaper in the world, has not published a single word about the crisis. Friedman, the star New York Times opinion writer, is demonstrating intellectual cowardice of the highest order. 

U.S. intelligence on alleged Iranian attacks is reminiscent of the faulty intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, and three mainstream sources have said that Israel is behind some of that questionable intelligence– the New York Times, Israel’s Channel 13, and Newsweek. But Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson’s influence on the president ought to be a scandal.

That ‘NYT’ cartoon showing Netanyahu as a dachshund leading blind Trump in a skullcap caused the Times to apologize again and again for bigotry. But two former ‘NYT’ reporters say the cartoon could have run in Israeli papers without uproar, apparently because it’s not so bad to criticize your own. And the Times has been indifferent to its anti-Palestinian racism.

Somehow the New York Times could find no Palestinians to quote on an article about the economic largesse to Palestine the Trump administration intends to unveil in Bahrain as part of its peace plan. The article includes quotes from five strong supporters of Israel: Aaron David Miller, Jared Kushner, Robert Satloff, Treasury’s Steve Mnuchin, and Brookings pundit Tamara Cofman Wittes. That’s racism in journalism, before your eyes.

Longtime pro-Israel journalist Ira Stoll follows up a lot of “whispered speculation” to unearth NYT editorial page editor James Bennet’s religious background, as “crucial context” for understanding the paper’s bias on Israel. It turns out that Bennet’s Jewish mother who survived the Holocaust was married in a church, and he was too. And BTW, she likens Israelis to Nazis.

Helena Cobban discusses the deep anti-Palestinian bias in the New York Times and Washington Post’s recent reporting, and what you can do about it.

The New York Times asserts that Gaza forces initiated the latest violence, and Israelis merely responded, leaving out earlier Israeli strikes. The Times characteristically leaves the reader with the impression that Hamas is simply a bloodthirsty, terrorist movement that attacks at every opportunity without provocation.

The New York Times parrots claims by Benjamin Netanyahu and Mike Pompeo that Israel owns the Golan Heights because it was taken in a “defensive war” in 1967, ignoring the historical record. Israel launched the war, the Arab states did not want war. “We chose to attack them,” former premier Menachem Begin said.

Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan died last week and the New York Times obituary mentioned suspicion that he had played a role in diverting enriched uranium from a US facility owned by Zionists in the 1960s so that Israel could get the bomb. When a pro-Israel group complained the Times removed the assertion though the evidence is overwhelming in the eyes of experts, Jefferson Morley reports.

A New York Times travel piece about Jaffa describing it as an “ancient neighborhood” of Tel Aviv now revived by Israeli chefs so erased Palestinian history that the paper had to issue a correction about its lapses. But the Debra Kamin article still says there are “accusations” that the city’s Palestinian history is being erased, an implicit denial of the Nakba.