So Israel is suing the New York Times. Not before time, if you ask me. Particularly since October 7 – the sexual depravities of which were revealed this week in a stomach-churning independent report – America’s paper of record has preoccupied itself with magnifying the most grotesque stories about the Jewish state, giving Hamas the incentive to persevere in their bloodthirsty propaganda strategy.
The liberal media is providing the oxygen for the very people it most affects to loathe
This week, it was a column by two-time Pulitzer prize winning journalist Nick Kristof, who in the distant past once retweeted a post describing a pro-Israel group as “pigs”. Headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians” – you see what they did there? – it relied upon the testimony of an NGO with well-documented links to Hamas, various anonymous sources and Sami al-Sai, a Gazan “freelance journalist” who appears to have shifted his story. In spite of these questionable sources, Kristof and the New York Times stand by the allegations.
Upon this foundation it wove a tissue of the obscenest allegations against Israel, culminating in a claim as ludicrous as it was lurid, that IDF (Israel Defense Forces) personnel managed to train dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners. (Few things have been more tragic recently than the sight of beleaguered Jews making zoological arguments about canine penises online. As the old saying goes, an antisemite only accuses a Jew of theft to watch him turn out his pockets.)
In the column, Kristof quoted former Israeli leader Ehud Olmert as confirming the allegations. After publication, however, Olmert accused the title of distorting his remarks. “I did not validate these claims,” he wrote in a statement. “I have no knowledge supporting these claims, as I said to Mr Kristof. Therefore, the positioning of my quote after pages of such allegations misrepresents my views.” So much for those Pulitzer prizes, huh.
The genius of the shtick is that at its heart there was a grain of credibility. There has indeed been some maltreatment of Palestinian detainees. As a real-life country under immense psychological pressure, Israel has behaved as any other real-life country would in wartime. Just look at our own history. Obviously, these people must face the full force of the law, but can’t the Jewish state be allowed to have its villains, like every other nation, without others leaping on Kristof’s piece to suggest Israel shouldn’t have the right to exist?
“We are a people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better than the rest,” wrote one of modern Israel’s founding fathers, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. “As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them.”
Yet as with antisemites of yore, the Israelophobes of the world desperately need Israel to be demonic to justify their hatred of it. A measure of detainee abuse is not enough: it must assume supernatural proportions. There follows, therefore, a campaign of exaggeration, hysteria and, taken to an extreme, downright fabrication that ends with Jews eating babies while preening their horns and tails.
Speaking of Pulitzer prizes, this month one was awarded to the Gazan photographer Saher Alghorra. He achieved fame – some might say notoriety – for his portrait of young Mohammed al-Mutawaq, who was emaciated due to cerebral palsy and hypoxemia. The picture was printed on the front page of the New York Times as ‘evidence’ of starvation in Gaza.
Other examples abound. On one occasion, the paper printed a montage of 64 Palestinian minors said to have been killed by Israel in the centre of its front page. “They Were Just Children,” ran the emotive headline, with the story itself informing us that “they had wanted to be doctors, artists and leaders”. It subsequently emerged that one of the pictures was a fake lifted from X, another was a terrorist representing the Al-Mujahedeen Brigades, and a third was the 15-year-old son of a Hamas commander who had been pictured in military fatigues brandishing a rifle. Moreover, there were suggestions that at least ten of the children may have been killed by misfiring Hamas rockets.
I’m not holding up these examples to make some political point. Rather, this article is intended as a lament to the degradation of truth in contemporary society, and a warning about where this is heading.
When I interviewed her on my podcast, The Brink, the American journalist Bari Weiss made the point with exceptional power. “We are not facing a crisis of trust in the mainstream media. We are facing a crisis of trustworthiness,” she said. “You should not trust something that’s unworthy of your trust.”
The complacency with which mainstream media outlets, from the New York Times to the BBC, are squandering their credibility in the pursuit of an information war on Israel is breathtaking. Of course, we all know that these people operate under the assumption that the leftwing worldview is equivalent to objective reality. But this?
The effect is to drive disillusioned audiences into the Wild West of the internet, where hucksters pose as experts, shock jocks launder outrage for clicks and conspiracy theory is big business for the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others. The liberal media, in other words, is providing the oxygen for the very people it most affects to loathe.
With the BBC’s ratings in freefall and the New York Times surviving on the strength of Wordle, sport and features, these journalists are so enraptured with their own ideological reflection that they don’t see the harm they are doing to truth. And when that is lost, what then?
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