The New York Times has noticed. To a degree.
On April 6, 2022, the paper wrote about a Jewish man killed when he was hit by a train, now being investigated as a hate crime, as video emerged of him fleeing a beating by a mob. His white kippah was found at the scene.
The Times wrote about the anger in the French Jewish community about the media and police not properly identifying, investigating and prosecuting hate crimes against Jews such as this.
"But the case also echoed long-standing frustration in the French Jewish community that antisemitism and attacks against Jews are often minimized or mishandled by France's media and authorities."
It’s an amazing statement – not for being true (sometimes an oddity for the Times) – but that the Times did the exact thing which angered French Jewry, in minimizing antisemitism in the same article!
Six paragraphs after calling out French media, the Times wrote about the 2017 murder of an elderly French Jew, Sarah Halimi. It wrote that she “was thrown out of her window by a man who had smoked cannabis. But it took until 2021 for France’s highest court to rule that the man couldn’t stand trial for her death because it determined he was in a state of acute mental delirium brought by his consumption, prompting widespread outrage.” Such a retelling of the story is a travesty on many fronts as it portrays the Jewish community as frustrated by the slow wheels of justice. The Times opted to not share some very important facts about the murder in an article about antisemitism and attacks against Jews:
- The killer, Kobili Traore, was a 27-old Muslim of Mali descent
- Traore crushed Halimi’s skull with repeated blows – likely with a telephone – and then dragged her blood-soaked unconscious body to the balcony where he flung her to the street
- He then yelled from the balcony “I killed the sheitan! (devil in Arabic)”
- The neighbors also heard him repeated yell “Allahu Akbar!”
- This was the eleventh murder of a Jew by a Muslim man in France since 2006
None of this was covered – not the antisemitic chant, not that the murderer was Muslim and part of a terrible trend of radical Islamists attacking Jews.
Attacks against Jews are often minimized and mishandled by France’s media
THE NEW YORK TIMES POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK
The Times similarly minimized antisemitism in Jersey City, NJ where Black residents were angered by Orthodox Jews moving into the neighborhood. In August 2017, the Times wrote that the Jews were receiving an “uneasy welcome” because – as the Times would characterize the story – the Jews were “pushy.” The paper omitted writing about the vile online petition in the town of Mahwah, NJ going on at the time as well as the police investigation about the destruction of the Jewish eruv, in a series of New Jersey antisemitic activities. Just two years later, Blacks in Jersey City killed Jews in a kosher supermarket, not because they were anti-Semites but because they didn’t want pushy people moving into the neighborhood. See the difference?
When multiple antisemitic riots were raging across Europe in the summer of 2014, three articles by different Times writers described the mayhem as having an “anti-Semitic tinge,” in a disgusting attempt to minimize the blatant Jew-hatred.
The New York Times is the disgusting standard-bearer of media minimizing and mishandling attacks against Jews. Perhaps that makes it well qualified to discuss the French media engaging in their favorite activity.
{Reposted from the author’s blog}
