American Pravda: War Crimes and Atrocity-Hoaxes in the Israel/Gaza Conflict

by Ron Unz

www.unz.com

November 06, 2023

Perhaps more out of habit than anything else, I still read the print edition of the New York Times every morning, something I’ve done for well over forty years, though given its sharp decline in quality that may not long continue. But while it does, the editorial selection of the front-page stories provides some important insight into the thinking of the individuals who shape the coverage of America’s national newspaper of record.

Last Thursday, most of the world was still reeling from the televised devastation in Gaza, as a densely-populated portion of one of its largest refugee camps was demolished by multiple 2,000-pound Israeli bombs, apparently killing hundreds of helpless Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.

Soon afterward on CNN, pro-Israel former AIPAC staffer Wolf Blitzer questioned an Israeli military spokesman about the horrific loss of human life and was told that the massive attack had been completely justified because the Israelis believed that a Hamas commander was in the vicinity.

These are blatant war crimes, probably the worst ever televised in the history of the world, or at least I can’t recall anything comparable. Admittedly there have been far larger modern massacres, such as in 1994 Rwanda where according to Wikipedia the Hutus butchered many hundreds of thousands of their Tutsi neighbors with machetes; but both the Hutu killers and their Tutsi victims were mostly primitive African villagers, so none of those dark deeds were ever broadcast live on global television.

In sharp contrast, the grim events of the last four weeks have been widely watched around the world on electronic and social media. In just one month some 10,000 civilians have been killed in Gaza, a total larger than the combined losses on both sides in the past twenty months of the Ukraine war. Despite the fulminations of Western media outlets, since early 2022 only about 550 children have been killed in Ukraine, while after just a few weeks the total in Gaza has passed 4,000. Moreover, while the Ukraine war was fought between powerful, well-equipped modern armies on both sides, the defenseless civilians of Gaza are being relentlessly pounded by one of the world’s most lavishly-armed military forces.

This is merely the tiniest sliver of the horrifying Gaza video footage being constantly broadcast all around the world but only very rarely shown on American television.

Yet despite all this terrible carnage, the front page of Thursday’s Times instead chose to focus upon a somewhat-related but rather different topic, running an article describing the “climate of fear” now gripping the Jews of Europe:

• For Europe’s Jews, a World of Fear
  The Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel and a surge in acts of antisemitism have awakened a repressed horror in Jewish populations across the continent.
  Roger Cohen et al. • The New York Times • October 31, 2023 • 1,700 Words

Apparently, the enormous ongoing massacre of innocent men, women, and children by the Jews of Israel has led to a sharp rise in hostility and public anger directed toward the Jews of Europe, especially those among them who are enthusiastic supporters of Israel and its current policies. The lead author was Pulitzer Prize-winner Roger Cohen, a longtime European correspondent of the Times, and his effort was backed by the work of nine additional Times staffers, underscoring the tremendous importance assigned to that project. According to these writers, numerous top European political leaders regarded this sudden rise of anti-Semitism as a huge social crisis, which they promised to stamp out by all possible means.

Given the alarmist title and opening of that long article produced by ten Times journalists, I naturally expected to find numerous examples of European Jews having recently been killed or severely injured in violent assaults, but no such cases were mentioned. Indeed, after carefully reading the piece twice, I couldn’t find a single instance of a physical attack against Jews anywhere in the entire continent of Europe. Nonetheless, the upsurge of anti-Semitism was characterized as massive and rampant—with total recorded incidents numbering in the many hundreds. But all of these apparently involved merely verbal abuse or threats, graffiti, and petty vandalism, with many of these narrowly focused on the Jewish State and its supporters.

For example, publications in Britain have been horrified that British Muslims have torn down or defaced pro-Israel propaganda posters. The Jewish President of the French National Assembly, that country’s parliament, said she was terrified by the hostility she had encountered in her own country; perhaps as a consequence, fourteen French senators have proposed new legislation criminalizing “anti-Zionist” activity, which would now be explicitly considered “anti-Semitic,” including five-year prison sentences for inciting hatred of Israel.

In all fairness, the Times has also run articles on the massive ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza, deeds being committed by Israeli Jews. But there seems a strangely suspicious even-handedness between the extreme concern of the Times and various European government over verbal insults towards Jews and Israelis as against the brutal killing of so many thousands of defenseless Palestinian women and children.

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