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After Review, New York Times Stands by Its Editorial on Pausing Aid to Israel
Israeli soldiers respond to an alert of an apparent security incident, in Ashkelon, southern Israel, Oct. 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen
An editorial in the New York Times — published online over the weekend as Iranian missiles and drones were about to head for Israel and in print the morning after the attack — called for US President Joe Biden to “consider pausing military transfers to Israel.”
“America cannot continue, as it has, to supply Israel with the arms it has been using in its war against Hamas,” the Times editorial board said.
In addition to being tastelessly timed, the editorial was rife with factual and logical errors.
One of the most glaring mistakes came in the third sentence of the editorial, which referred to “the US commitment to Israel — including $3.8 billion a year in military aid, the largest outlay of American foreign aid to any one country in the world.”
In fact, according to ForeignAssistance.gov, an official US government site, Ukraine got $16.7 billion in 2023 and $12.4 billion in 2022, while Israel got $3.3 billion in both 2022 and 2023.
Even if the Times‘s $3.8 billion figure, perhaps reflecting missile defense expenditures or a boost in post-Oct. 7 emergency assistance, was accurate for Israel, the Ukraine sums were still significantly larger.
I emailed the New York Times to ask whether it would correct that error. The Times opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, wrote back directly to tell The Algemeiner, “We have reviewed and stand by the piece as it stands. The reference is to the fact that Israel is cumulatively the largest recipient of American foreign aid, even as Ukraine has surpassed it on an annual basis in recent years.”
The editorial said, “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has ignored his obligations to provide food and medicine to the civilian population in the territory that Israel now controls. In fact, Israel has made it difficult for anyone else to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
It’s not accurate that Netanyahu has “ignored” that obligation; to the contrary, he’s devoted considerable resources to inspecting aid shipments going into Gaza and to reopening border crossings, even while knowing that a portion of the aid would be stolen by Hamas once it entered Gaza. The Israeli government has said that out of 5,893 aid trucks it inspected in the past month, it denied entry to only 29. Even the Times itself conceded that Hamas “bears a major share of responsibility for the suffering inflicted on the people in whose name it purports to act.”
Regarding US military aid, the editorial tried to draw a distinction, following the Biden administration, between “air defense systems and others used for strictly defensive purposes” and “offensive weapons.” Yet that was a false dichotomy. The “offensive” weapons have been used defensively by Israel to fight a terrorist group that the Times itself conceded was “an enemy sworn to its [Israel’s] destruction.”
The editorial claimed that Netanyahu “has, until recently, resisted diplomatic efforts for a cease-fire that might have led to a release of hostages still in the custody of Hamas.” That ignored the November 2023 humanitarian pause that led to the release of more than 100 hostages.
Nor did the Times explain the inconsistency between its backing of consideration of a pause in aid for Israel and its support of additional aid to Ukraine. In a recent editorial about Ukraine, the newspaper said, “Allowing Russia to impose its will on Ukraine would be a devastating blow to America’s credibility and leadership.” Wouldn’t allowing Iran-backed Hamas or Hezbollah to prevail against Israel have similar effects?
American Jewish leaders and pro-Israel politicians denounced the editorial.
“The New York Times continues to be egregiously biased against Israel — this weekend an editorial calling to condition aid to Israel,” said Abraham Foxman, national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League.
US Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, posted to social media a picture of the Times editorial headline, “Military Aid to Israel Cannot Be Unconditional,” with the comment, “No conditions.” Fetterman added an Israeli flag emoji for good measure.
Times online commenters, on the other hand, mostly applauded the editorial or complained that it hadn’t been issued sooner.
Most of the comments were posted on the Jewish sabbath, when traditionally religious Jews refrain from writing or using the internet. The Times let one commenter use only her first name to post that “there are no long [sic] any strategic excuses for abetting Netanyahu’s and Israel’s murderous criminality.” That comment was recommended by 1,048 Times readers as of this writing, offering a hint at the please-the-paying-online-readers dynamic that Kingsbury’s predecessor, James Bennet, has described as skewing the paper’s journalism for the worse.
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 After Review, New York Times Stands by Its Editorial on Pausing Aid to Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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