RUTHFULLY YOURS

Once again, the New York Times is acting to make it impossible for Jews to defend themselves against those who have announced their intention to exterminate the Jewish people.  The first time this happened was back in the ’30s and ’40s when the New York Times had knowledge of the impending plans for the Holocaust, as well as knowledge of the shipping of Jews to concentration camps in Europe.  For years it buried the story.  This is now well known.

Had the Times exposed the news that its correspondents had uncovered, many Jews could have been saved, and Jews and governments could have planned a defense against the perpetrators.  There would have been more Jewish resistance and partisans.  Instead, the New York Times buried these stories.

Now the New York Times is once again doing what it can to demonize and prohibit the State of Israel from defending itself against those, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Abbas’s PLO, who daily announce their intention to destroy the State of Israel and the Jewish community.  In a front-page photo-job, conceived to mis-portray Israel as an aggressor hell-bent on killing children, the Times flashed a photo of Gazan children’s faces with a headline, “They Were Just Children.”

The New York Times definitely knows that many of these youngsters were killed by Hamas rockets, not Israeli return fire.  They know that Hamas and other Palestinian Arab groups deliberately place their children in and near army installations.  They know that Israel never targets civilians per se and warns civilians beforehand of upcoming bombings.

They know that it is Hamas that deliberately aims rockets toward population centers and kindergartens.  And they certainly know there was no need for Hamas to rain 4,000 missiles on Israel from Gaza and start a war.

Why would Hamas put its children in harm’s way over a landlord/tenant rent dispute…one that isn’t even taking place in their country?  Israel, in the most humane way possible, defended itself from relentless rockets being fired from hospitals controlled by Hamas in the Gaza area.

Yet the New York Times is intent on making sure that Israel cannot defend itself, that Israel must sit there and have its children killed by Hamas and its citizens permanently maimed by Islamic Jihad rather than defend its own women and children.  This was and remains the purpose of the New York Times incendiary photo.  Once again, the New York Times is averse to Jewish people defending themselves from enemies hell-bent on destroying the Jewish community, be it this generation or my parents’ and grandparents’ generation.

It is not a coincidence that the Times blasted this photo across the globe when the world was beginning to empathize with innocent Jews being physically attacked by Islamic groups here in America.  Many Americans were appalled by Jews being attacked in their synagogues, in restaurants, and on their neighborhood streets.  So as to deflect this sympathy for the Jewish community, the Times decided to cast the Jewish people as unsympathetic characters.  In effect, the New York Times has given a green light to attack Jews as “baby-killers.”

The silence of the New York Times during the Holocaust was thought to be its way of hiding the Jewish genealogy of its publisher.  No doubt their being simpatico with left-wing causes, their promotion of “woke” Black Lives Matter/Antifa-type themes, and their need for left-wing virtue-signaling play a major role today in their anti-Israel outlook.  The Times is an ugly example of “radical chic.”

Beyond question, the New York Times, while not against secular Jewishness, is definitely upset with those things particularly and identifiably and uniquely Jewish, such as the Jewish State of Israel and Orthodox Judaism.  No longer should the New York Times be seen as a voice for the “higher idealism” by which it likes to be defined, but rather a venue that has harsh enmity for Israel, things “too Jewish,” and things too distinctively American.  Its editorial board is arrogant, and its writers are smugsters who revel in iconoclastic destruction of America, Israel, and people of biblical faith, assured that they as the ruling class are impervious to the destructive forces they have encouraged and unleashed.

Rabbi Aryeh Spero is the author of Push Back and president of the Conference of Jewish Affairs.  (212) 252-6861.

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