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By: Gilead Ini
The extremism is a pattern. So is the New York Times’ commitment to concealing it.
This week in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., anti-Israel activists wished for Hitler’s return; chanted for the murder of “Zionists”; assaulted, threatened to kill, and slurred a rabbi; threatened a Jewish family by painting a symbol of Hamas violence on their home; held banners supporting the terror group behind the Oct. 7 massacre; donned the headbands of the terrorists; waved their flags; glorified their “resistance” broadly; justified the murders at the music festival specifically; smashed and bloodied the face of a security guard; and downplayed the Holocaust.
The New York Times covered each of the “protests” where the ugly episodes occurred. But it hid each one of incidents, as well as other examples of the demonstrators’ extremism.
At a June 8 demonstration in Washington, D.C., a group of demonstrators, faces covered with keffiyehs, held a large banner aligning themselves with “al Qassam,” a reference to Hamas’s gunmen who led the Oct. 7 attack. They called for murder: “Hezbollah make us proud, kill another Zionist now!”
A man holding a “Stand with Hamas” sign defended the October 7 slaughter as “brilliant” while decrying what “the Jews—yeah, the Jews” are doing to the Palestinians. Another sign justified “resistance.”
The Times, whose article on the demonstration cast them as little more than a “call for an immediate cease-fire,” said nothing about the celebration of terrorist groups, the explicit calls for “killing,” or the defense of Oct. 7.
Statues in D.C.’s Lafayette Square were vandalized with pro-violence and eliminationist graffiti. “Glory 2 the resistance.” “Long live Hamas.” “Intifada.” “From the river to the sea.” “Death to Amerikkka.” And plenty of upside-down red triangles, the symbol used in Hamas propaganda videos to mark targets for violent attack.
The New York Times referred only to “handwritten scribbles” that read “free Palestine.”
Men wearing the headbands of Hamas and PFLP, designated terrorist groups known for their suicide bombing attacks on Jewish civilians, shouted, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution!”
The newspaper disingenuously steered readers to believe the calls were more or less innocuous:
Many of the protesters on Saturday chanted slogans that some groups have said incite violence against Jews, such as “There is only one solution: intifada, revolution,” as well as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
But according to one protester, such slogans were not a call for violence against Jewish people, but for a broader resistance against the status quo.
The gathering was co-organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, a group that responded to the Oct. 7 attacks, on the day of the attacks, with celebratory “long live the resistance” calls, and which had previously called for “resistance and intifada until victory.” (The group has made clear that victory, to them, means the elimination of Israel.)
The New York Times absurdly characterized it as a “left-leaning” group.
Although video from the demonstrations showed demonstrators throwing objects at a park ranger and punching park police, the story had failed to mention this, even while noting in the first paragraph that police used pepper spray on a protester.
(Two days after the piece was published, the paper did add a statement from the National Park Service noting “an assault of a park ranger” and “injuries to two U.S. Park Police officers.” According to the reporters, the statement described empty water bottles being thrown at the park ranger. Fuller versions of what appeared to be the same statement, published elsewhere, made no reference to empty bottles.
On June 10, the extremist group Within Our Lifetime, which supports the Oct. 7 massacre, organized a demonstration in Manhattan.
At Union Square a man told counter-protesters, “I wish Hitler was still here, he would’ve wiped all you out.” Other demonstrators unfurled a large banner reading, “Long live October 7th.”
After a mass subway ride, during which demonstrators insisted “Zionists” identify themselves and insinuated harm would come to them if they didn’t leave the train, demonstrators converged on Wall Street, where they waved the flag of the group behind the Oct. 7 massacre and that of another terrorist organization.
