Death to the New York Times!

By Roger L Simon

Had enough of “Death to America!” “Death to Israel!”?

We’ve been hearing it ad infinitum ad nausea for years.

Why not learn from the Ayatollah for once and put our mouths to where it’s truly deserved.

The real entity that needs DEATH chanted to it is The New York Times.

At least since the 14 years (1922-1936). and likely before, when Walter Duranty was their Moscow correspondent, the New York Times has been lying to the world to ill effect. It was Duranty who famously downplayed Stalin’s starvation of the Ukrainians (“You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet”) that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 3.5 million people in the Holodomor.

Mr. Duranty won a Pulitzer for his reporting. Sound familiar?

Of course, it does, because as we all know the NYT and Washington Post reporters, a whole gang of them, won 2018 Pulitzers for misreporting the “Russiagate” scandal.

Just how drastic we are only now beginning to learn, thanks to the courage of Tulsi Gabbard. It adds up to covering for treason, yet the NYT persists in keeping its Pulitzer winners, including Duranty, on a wall of honor in their offices. No apologies from the paper so far.

In between the Moscow correspondents and Russiagate are many other what we could call awkward moments though they are far worse than that, including the deliberate downplaying of the Holocaust (from a Jewish-owned paper), correspondent Herb Matthews giving worldwide positive publicity to “conquering hero” Fidel Castro, and, more recently (2003) the series of multiple front page stories by black journalist Jayson Blair that were both plagiarized and fabricated.

There’s plenty more but let’s cut to the proverbial chase. Just the other day, the New York Times reached new, actually spectacular, heights of anti-Israel antisemitism by publishing a photo, in full color, dominating their front page, of what they purported to be a starving Gazan child (presumably due to the actions of those horrible Israelis).

As many know by now, it wasn’t that at all. The child was from birth a victim of cerebral palsy with additional genetic disorders. This photo, whose fraudulence was first exposed by independent journalist David Collier, was no more than the most execrable propaganda, the kind of ugly bilge you might have found used to attack Jews in the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer.

Faced with considerable criticism, the Times retracted the photo but in a tepid manner, as if this were just another accidental error in the daily maelstrom. To date there has not been an apology or anything close to it. The damage was done in the tradition of Churchill’s lie going round the world before the truth gets its pants on.

What’s more interesting, and perhaps more despicable, if that’s possible, is how they could possibly have believed this photo in the first place, if they did. It would be interesting to know the internal editing process and if anyone objected. The photo has multiple red flags, the most obvious of which is it looks like a Madonna and child with the mother somehow healthy and fed while her son is frail and starving. Some mother. Moreover, photos of the sick child’s brother—who is perfectly healthy—were readily available.

On top of all that, the history of Palestinian photographic fabrications is well known, starting in September 2000 when France 2 television recorded the supposed shooting of a twelve-year old Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Durrah, by Israeli forces. This would up on postage stamps around the world.

Since then, so-called Pallywood, now Gazawood, productions have proliferated, most of them almost laughably transparent. This front page photo in the NYTimes was especially laughably transparent.

So what’s going on at the paper? Why did they miss this, if they really missed it?

The most obvious answer is that bias blinds you to the truth and the more extreme the bias the more extreme the blindness. (Trump Derangement Syndrome plays a part in that, of course.) But beyond that are secondary questions. Why are they so particularly blind when it comes to Jews and Israel? Why would they do something like this that could only help the cause of Hamas that wants nothing more than. to sow dissension in the West to prolong reign of terror?

And why no real apology when the newspaper is so wildly and destructively wrong?

Since 1896, when Adolph Ochs purchased The New York Times for $75,000, the paper has been a largely Jewish-owned publication through Ochs and his heirs the Sulzbergers. They are reform Jews of the upper classes. Why does this matter? Israeli-American writer Benjamin Kerstein expresses it well on his Substack:

“As I’ve written many times before, the Jewish community is, for the most part, in denial of the fact that it has a class system. But like all communities, it does. Class systems are inescapable, and the Jews have one just like everybody else.

[snip]

“This denial, however, is somewhat unique to America. In Israel, France, and other countries, the class system is openly acknowledged, though often defined according to the Ashkenazi-Sephardi and right-left divides.

“Nonetheless, these divides are often fundamentally economic in origin, and this is reflected in politics, culture, and social life. Only in America are they denied in their entirety.

“This denial may be, in some ways, a result of American Jews’ ambivalent relationship with Zionism—especially that of the upper classes—because a class analysis of the Jewish community was a major part of the movement and drove much of its initial political activity.”

The New York Times is clearly the newspaper that reflects those upper class American Jews with “ambivalent relationship[s] with Zionism.” In other words it is for wealthy professionals and business people who are basically Jewish Presbyterians (no offense to Presbyterians, making a point) and wish to remain so. Like most of those we have come to call by the misnomer “elites,” they tilt left and virtue signal by instinct to preserve their positions.

The last thing they want is to be identified with those rowdy Israelis, especially when those same Israelis are defending themselves at war with all the messiness that naturally entails. When they’re inventing the latest high tech breakthrough, maybe it’s okay.

This leads to a whole bunch of, to put it bluntly, phony liberalism. It also leads to the promulgation of such excrescences as that photograph—and to lying about many things, both to themselves and to others.

The media at large, filled with people who are lazy and not particularly brilliant, still look to the Times as their reliable source. No matter to what degree the paper is shown to prevaricate, they still go along and prevaricate with it. They do not want to lose their supposedly reliable source because then they would have to find a new one, not an easy task, and no one is likely to be better than old reliable itself, the NYT. It still has its reputation, faute de mieux. People still refer to it as the truthful source, ludicrous as that has become.

Why?

Maybe because, deep down, almost everyone needs what they feel is such as that truthful source to rely on emotionally. Especially on our coasts and most big cities, God is largely a formality, if He (or She or It) exists at all.. So there has to be something. Like a kid in the schoolyard the NYT was tagged as “it” long ago, and has been “it” ever since. No replacements seem available.

The NYT is imbued in our culture to a degree that boggles the mind. It is like a battle ship or aircraft carrier that leads a whole flotilla that includes everything from the networks to the smallest radio station in out lying states. Even so-called alternative media follow along, criticizing but still dependent.

This is a malign system and must end. The hideous lie of that photograph should be a clarion call. No more.

That is why I say: “Death to The New York Times! Death to The New York Times!”

Even though I wrote for it long ago.

And, no. there should no replacement. We don’t need one. (God’s still there, even if we have forgotten about Him.)

 

First published in American Refugees