Saturday, August 06, 2022

The ‘NYTimes’ hides why Israel is attacking Gaza — Prime Minister Lapid is running for re-election

The 'NYTimes' bias is clear as it attempts to blame Palestinians for Israel's latest deadly unprovoked attack on Gaza .
AUGUST 6, 2022 
ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER YAIR LAPID MAKING A PUBLIC STATEMENT REGARDING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA, ON AUGUST 5, 2022. (PHOTO BY GPO VIA APA IMAGES)


Belal Aldabbour is a Palestinian physician who lives in Gaza. He tweets from there as @Belalmd12. He’s an indispensable eyewitness to Israel’s latest attack on the besieged territory. But even more, he — and others on the internet — are demolishing the latest biased and dishonest reports in the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets.

Yesterday he tweeted, “Israel is generously (and provokingly) sharing graphic videos of the latest strikes in #Gaza, showing the very last seconds in the lives of the victims. One was lying down. Another was having a phone call.” And he then added, “Israel is going the extra mile to provoke factions in #Gaza. Something reeks here.”

That “something” is the widespread view that Prime Minister Yair Lapid is instigating the conflict to improve his chances in the upcoming November Israeli elections. Another experienced observer, the writer Ben Ehrenreich, tweeted, “Imprisoning two million people and then bombing them every time you have an election coming up is a profoundly sick political ritual.” The connection between an Israeli election and increased violence against Palestinians is nothing new. This site explained it back in November 2019.

But the report in today’s New York Times made no mention of the election angle. Neither did the Washington Post. (So far, there’s no on-air report on National Public Radio.)

In fairness, you would have to administer truth serum to Lapid and other Israeli politicians to be absolutely certain about what motivates their brutal provocative attack. But it is certainly news that large numbers of people, including Israeli Jews, believe that the assault is a pre-election maneuver. A recent poll shows Benjamin Netanyahu edging ahead of Lapid, and there’s no doubt Netanyahu will say during the campaign that he would have attacked the Palestinians even more viciously.

Instead of offering this essential context, the New York Times had to once again blame the Palestinians. This time, the challenge is even greater than usual. The paper couldn’t justify Israel’s air attack on Gaza by saying the Palestinians had first fired rockets at Israel from there — because they hadn’t. The Associated Press reporter in Gaza, Fares Akram, made this point clearly: “There was no fire from Gaza before & during the 1st two hours into the Israeli operation.”

So the Times had to create a distorted timeline of events, designed to blame the Palestinians. The paper’s dishonest tale couldn’t start in Gaza, so it moved to the West Bank to scrounge up the original provocation: “Since March, Palestinian attackers have killed at least 19 Israelis and foreigners in the West Bank and Israel. . . In response, Israel. . .”

Extraordinary. If you want to find original cause, this version would be far more accurate:

Israel has militarily occupied the Palestinian West Bank since 1967, and continues to violate international law by moving hundreds of thousands of settler/colonists into the territory. In response, Palestinians have. . .

The Times bias was even more stark in the actual newspaper. The single photo showed “Palestinian rockets heading toward Israel,” but there was no room for photos of the destruction in Gaza City. The Times has a correspondent in Gaza, Fady Hanona, but they didn’t let him quote any Palestinians, such as family members of Alaa Qadoom, the 5-year-old girl who was among the estimated 15 people killed so far by Israeli warplanes. Instead, the only Palestinian who was allowed to speak was a Hamas leader, who gave the aggressive statement the Times needed for its twisted narrative.

In fairness, the Washington Post report was no better, although it at least hinted at the Israeli political angle by saying that Prime Minister Lapid “faces a new election in November and has been under pressure to take a strong hand with militants in Gaza.”

Back to the Times article. Here is arguably its single most dishonest paragraph:

Several civilians were caught in that West Bank violence, including Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American broadcaster shot dead while covering an Israeli raid in May.

This is astonishing, implying that the “shot” came out of nowhere and accidentally “caught” the respected journalist. In fact, a number of investigations prove that Israeli soldiers killed her, and the only questions are: Did they deliberately murder her? Who ordered it? Who is involved in the coverup?

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