RSS
Bias-as-a-Business-Strategy Won’t Rescue the New York Times
A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.
A long front-page article in the New York Times faults Israel for killing journalists in Gaza, claiming that has inhibited the world from seeing what is happening there. The article, though, fails to fault Hamas for its role in impeding journalism. And it also strangely omits the evidence that at least some of the Gazans portraying themselves as journalists are also members of terrorist organizations.
The Times article carries the online headline, “The War the World Can’t See.” A subheadline claims that because of the challenges faced by local journalists, “From outside Gaza, the scale of death and destruction is impossible to grasp.”
That claim of invisibility may seem like a stretch to Times readers who have been following the Times’s own endless coverage. The Times has featured satellite images of destroyed Gaza buildings, interviews with doctors describing Civil War-style carnage at the hospitals that shelter Hamas tunnels the doctors claim to be unaware of, interviews with United Nations officials describing thirst and hunger (while the same officials studiously downplay discussion of the involvement of UN workers in the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Somehow the protesters clogging Ivy League campuses and European cities have managed to get word of the Gazan suffering notwithstanding the Times’ worries about “communications blackouts.”
The Times goes on to cast blame for the supposed dearth of journalistic exploration of Gazan suffering. The culprit is—you guessed it—Israel. “At least 76 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas led an attack on Israel and Israel responded by launching an all-out war,” the Times says. “Nearly all the journalists who have died in Gaza since Oct. 7 were killed by Israeli airstrikes, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 38 of them at home, in their cars or alongside family members. That has led many Palestinians to accuse Israel of targeting journalists, though CPJ has not echoed that allegation.” Many Palestinians have all sorts of sinister and conspiratorial accusations against Israel; it’s the Times‘s job to debunk them or at least to fact-check them thoroughly, rather than just providing a megaphone to them.
The Times article quotes “Khawla al-Khalidi, 34, a Gazan TV journalist for Al Arabiya, a well-known regional Arabic-language TV channel,” who says, “Israel is afraid of the Palestinian narrative and of Palestinian journalists…They’re trying to silence us by cutting the networks.”
Not mentioned at all in the Times article is the news that, according to the Israel Defense Forces, two of the “journalists” listed as Gaza casualties, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuria, “were members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations.” The IDF said, “Documents found by our troops in Gaza revealed Thuria’s role as Squad Deputy Commander in Hamas’ Gaza City Brigade, as well as Al-Dahdouh’s roles in the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization’s electronic engineering unit and previously as a deputy commander in IJ’s Zeitun Battalion.”
The IDF said the two were targeted while operating a drone, “posing a threat to our soldiers.” That would seem like a relevant fact to include in a Times article that carries accusations of Israel trying to squelch the Palestinian narrative by killing journalists.
The Times article also entirely excludes the fact that Hamas restricts, with threat of violence, the activities of journalists in areas that it controls. The Times has let this slip at least once—”Hamas restricts journalists in Gaza,” the newspaper’s Jerusalem bureau chief, acknowledged back in November, but that concession is somehow missing from this latest Times article, which is all about restrictions on journalism in Gaza.
The Times article also carries, as one of three bylines, that of Abu Bakr Bashir. A web page for the “refugee journalism project” reports that Bashir “fled” Gaza in 2019 “when Hamas, the militant Islamic nationalist group that governs the territory, tried to control his reporting.”
Why does the Times article have such a slant? One might chalk it up to anti-Israel bias by the newspaper’s management, or to the particular editors and reporters who handled this piece. Certainly possible. But then what explains the willingness of the Times also to publish articles such as one about “How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” or others on the extensive nature of the Hamas tunnel network underneath Gaza?
One explanation that fits the pattern is a business-and-technology driven shift by the Times to emphasize headlines and stories that will be clicked on and shared socially by partisans of both sides in the Israel-Hamas war. Rather than trying to make each individual story balanced, the Times is publishing a variety of stories that it can claim together mount up to a nuanced and accurate portrayal of the reality. That seems to me like a dodge, because a lot of readers don’t read the full Times report, they just read a single story at a time when the story is shared socially.
It’s one thing to take such an approach on the opinion pages, where the Times offers Bret Stephens columns to be read and shared by Israel-lovers alongside Nicholas Kristof columns to be read and shared by Israel-haters. What’s new in the Israel-Gaza war is that the Times is taking a similar approach in the news articles, which, unlike the opinion columns, used to aspire, at least ostensibly, to a sort of above-the-fray balance.
It’s not clear the new Times strategy is a business success. The company’s stock price is down more than 8 percent year to date as of February 8, and plunged this week when the company released its fourth quarter results. The overall stock market, meanwhile, is up. But the Times management compares itself to places such as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Sports Illustrated, which appear to be doing even worse, business-wise. So keep an eye out for more of the “bias-as-a-business strategy” approach.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
The post Bias-as-a-Business-Strategy Won’t Rescue the New York Times first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Israeli Military Says It Arrested Hamas Members in Syria
An Israeli military vehicle is seen near the border between the Golan Heights and Syria, May 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Shir Torem
Israeli troops entered southwestern Syria in the early hours of Thursday and arrested several people who the Israeli military said were members of Palestinian terrorist group Hamas but which Syria‘s interior ministry said were civilians.
The arrests in the town of Beit Jinn, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the capital Damascus, are part of a resurgence in Israeli military operations in southern Syria after weeks of relative quiet.
The Israeli military said its nighttime operation in Beit Jinn was “based on intelligence gathered in recent weeks” and led to the arrest of “several Hamas terrorists” planning “multiple terror plots” against Israeli civilians and Israeli troops in Syria.
The military‘s statement said it had confiscated firearms and ammunition, and transferred the detainees into Israel for further interrogation.
There was no immediate comment from Hamas. A spokesperson for Syria‘s interior ministry told Reuters seven people were arrested in the Beit Jinn raid but denied they were from Hamas, saying they were civilians from the area. The spokesperson said one person was killed by Israeli fire.
Asked whether anyone was killed in its raid, the Israeli military told Reuters that when one of the suspected members attempted to flee, shots were fired and “a hit was identified.”
Israel has been deeply suspicious of the Islamist-led government running Syria since former leader Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December, claiming it could support an attack similar to the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, invasion into southern Israel.
In the early months of Syria‘s new administration, Israel sent troops into southern Syria and carried out widespread strikes – but then began direct talks with Syrian officials to prevent conflict in the border region.
Tensions ticked up again in early June, however, after projectiles were fired from Syria towards Israel. Israel retaliated with its first strikes in nearly a month. On June 8, Israel carried out a strike on the outskirts of Beit Jinn on what it described as a Hamas member.
The post Israeli Military Says It Arrested Hamas Members in Syria first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
More Attacks Like the Embassy Murders and CO Firebombing Are Coming Unless We Change Our Anti-Terror Strategy
Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim who were shot and killed as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum, pose for a picture at an unknown location, in this handout image released by Embassy of Israel to the US on May 22, 2025. Photo: Embassy of Israel to the USA via X/Handout via REUTERS
On May 21, 2025, Elias Rodriguez approached two Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and murdered them in cold blood. Just hours earlier, he had posted a 900-word manifesto online that justified violent political “escalation” in the name of Gaza, framed the impending attack as legitimate protest, and called for more “armed demonstrations.”
Less than two weeks later, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national living illegally in the US, set several pro-Israel demonstrators on fire near a mall in Boulder, CO. Twelve people were injured, including several elderly participants and a Holocaust survivor. Soliman later admitted to targeting “Zionist people” and claimed that he had planned the attack for over a year.
While these incidents differed in method (one attacker used a gun, the other a flamethrower) and in communication strategy (one published a manifesto, the other did not), both represent not just failures of intelligence, but failures of imagination. These attacks expose outdated methods for tracking threats, systems that fail to account for the role of radicalized language in the digital age, and social media platforms’ reluctance to share critical data necessary to detect and address these risks.
For decades, counterterrorism has focused almost exclusively on tracking networks: chatter between suspects, coordinated plots, and ties to extremist groups. These threats are real, but today’s most urgent danger comes from individuals radicalized in isolation, often online. They don’t need a group or a leader. They don’t signal affiliation or send encrypted messages. Instead, they broadcast their ideology openly.
Rodriguez and Soliman fit this pattern. Neither was a member of a known extremist group, nor did they use ciphers or communicate surreptitiously on back-channel applications. Rodriguez’s manifesto was a clear, public statement of intent to carry out an attack, while Soliman’s attack was driven by over a year of ideological hatred. Both follow a pattern seen in other lone-actor attacks like Pittsburgh (2018), Christchurch (2019), and Halle (2019). In each of these tragedies, the manifesto or incitement was discovered only after the killings. Each time, we promised to learn — but each time, we missed the same signals.
These attacks were also a byproduct of obsolete detection methods. While enormous resources go into tracking invisible networks, far too little attention is paid to what is being said online and in person — the words and sentences that reflect dangerous ideologies. Violent extremists often use dehumanizing language to justify murder, but their rhetoric is often dismissed as mere speech (and protected speech, at that).
Rodriguez’s manifesto was ignored until after the violence occurred. Soliman’s attack, while not preceded by a written screed, was the result of sustained ideological incitement. Still, each case demonstrates why we cannot continue to treat incitement as just noise. Dangerous fantasies of “resistance” and glorified violence circulate online every day, often unchecked and without consequence.
Further complicating the matter are online platforms that continue to restrict access to the very data that researchers, civil society, and policymakers rely on to monitor and prevent these threats. Under the guise of protecting privacy or free speech, they enable opacity. People are getting hurt — and dying — as a result.
Make no mistake: free speech and privacy are essential to any democracy. However, these ideals become untenable when they shield violent content, allowing it to spread unchecked. The belief that all speech is equal and non-predictive is naive. History has shown us that hate speech often precedes violence. From the Holocaust to Rwanda, we know that such rhetoric prepares the ground for action.
In a world where lone-actor violence is escalating, and incitement to violence is more openly visible than ever, the solution is multifaceted. We must change the way we listen by investing in systems and disciplines that can analyze not just slurs or buzzwords, but ideological narratives, dehumanizing metaphors, and escalating rhetoric. This includes AI capable of detecting patterns, and fields like psycholinguistics and discourse analysis, which examine radicalization as a communicative process, not just a network-based phenomenon.
We can achieve this while striking the right balance between free speech and public safety. By prioritizing the content of speech over the identity of the speaker, we can monitor threats while upholding the same legal standard we apply offline, where speech is protected until it becomes a credible, imminent threat. At that point, the state not only has the right — but the obligation — to act.
Rodriguez told us what he was going to do. His words were public, unencrypted, and visible for all to see. Soliman’s attack, though not preceded by a manifesto, was the result of ideological incitement. In each case, we failed to act.
If we continue relying on antiquated tracking methods, treating hate speech as background noise, and looking the other way as platforms restrict the very data we need to track incitement, we will remain blind to the threats emerging right in front of us. We need to listen differently, adapt our methods, and invest in the right tools before the next manifesto becomes another obituary.
Matthias J. Becker is a visiting fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute and leads Decoding Antisemitism at the University of Cambridge.
The post More Attacks Like the Embassy Murders and CO Firebombing Are Coming Unless We Change Our Anti-Terror Strategy first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Israel Set to Deport Eight Activists, Including French MEP, Over Gaza Boat
Gaza-bound British-flagged yacht “Madleen” is docked in Ashdod port following a takeover by the Israeli army, in Ashdod, Israel, June 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nir Elias
Eight pro-Palestinian activists including a French member of the European Parliament will soon be deported from Israel, three days after the Israeli navy prevented them from sailing into Gaza in an effort to break a longstanding naval blockade of the enclave, their legal advisers said on Thursday.
Four other members of the 12-strong crew aboard the charity vessel, including Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg, agreed to leave Israel voluntarily on Tuesday, hours after the navy had brought them ashore.
The other eight crew refused to leave, accusing Israel of acting illegally, and have been held in a detention center while an Israeli court reviewed their legal status.
However, Israeli rights group Adalah, which has provided the activists with legal assistance, said the group had lost their battle against repatriation.
French MEP Rima Hassan and five other activists have been taken to Tel Aviv airport and will be flown out of the country in the next 24 hours, Adalah said in a statement. The remaining two crew members will be expelled on Friday afternoon.
“Their continued detention and forced deportation are unlawful and a part of Israel‘s ongoing violations of international law,” Adalah said in a statement.
There was no immediate confirmation from Israel which earlier this week dismissed the Gaza-bound sea mission as a pro-Hamas publicity stunt.
“Greta and her friends brought in a tiny amount of aid on their celebrity yacht. It did not help the people of Gaza. This was nothing but a ridiculous gimmick,” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters on Tuesday.
Israel has imposed a naval blockade on Gaza since Hamas took control of the coastal enclave in 2007. It tightened its grip significantly after Hamas-led terrorists rampaged through southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
The post Israel Set to Deport Eight Activists, Including French MEP, Over Gaza Boat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login