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New York Times Bares Anti-Israel Bias in Dispatch From Berlin
The New York Times newspaper. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
New York Times bias against Israel has spilled over to affect not only coverage of Washington, US college campuses, and the Middle East, but even the newspaper’s coverage from Germany.
A front-page Sunday New York Times news article from Berlin puts on display many of the tricks the Times uses to villainize Israel.
There’s a framing issue: rather than framing the story as Germany reverting to its egregious tradition of Jew-hating, the Times frames the story as faulting Israel for behaving so badly that even its friend Germany is recalibrating. (The Times re-upped the story and the framing again with a hyperlink and a mention in another news article on Wednesday, summarizing it with the claim that “the mounting death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza have led some German officials to ask whether that backing has gone too far.”)
There’s an “experts” issue, in which Times-approved “experts” are trotted out as a kind of Greek chorus to convey the Times reporter and editors’ opinion while maintaining the appearance of journalistic objectivity.
There’s a lack-of-context issue: the Times quotes Israel’s critics as if they are neutral observers, without noting that they lack credibility.
And there’s a personnel issue: the Times reporter from Germany has a background that may dispose her to sympathize with the anti-Israel side of the conflict, and Times editing doesn’t appear to have corrected for that.
Let’s take these four issues in sequence.
Start with the framing. The Times news article says, “Berlin’s hardening tone is partly a response to fears over Israel’s continued insistence that it must enter Rafah in order to pursue Hamas operatives it says are in the southern Gazan city.” This doesn’t seem like “insistence,” a loaded word; it seems like just plain fact. How is Israel going to defeat Hamas without going into Rafah? Alas, the hardened terrorist fighters don’t seem like they are about to surrender voluntarily.
What’s more, there’s no way to know for sure if those “fears” are genuinely what is motivating “Berlin’s hardening tone.” Perhaps there are other factors, such as domestic politics, economic ties to Israel’s enemies, the temptation to depict Israelis as aggressors as a way of assuaging German guilt over the Holocaust, or Germany’s large and sometimes restive population of Muslim immigrants. Those factors are downplayed in the Times article in favor of blaming Israel.
As for the “experts,” the Times article says, “Foreign-policy experts say that by hewing to its strong support of Israel, Germany has also undermined its ability to credibly criticize authoritarian governments like that of Russia’s Vladimir V. Putin for human rights violations.” Use of the term “expert” to describe professors and advocacy-group employees who are frequently incorrect is itself an inaccuracy in labeling. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Times or its “experts” that siding with Iran-backed Hamas doesn’t exactly buttress human-rights credibility. What is more “authoritarian” than Hamas and Iran, which murder their internal rivals and independent journalists?
Who is a Times “expert” on this topic? Here’s how the Times handled it:
The sense of diminishing credibility on human rights is particularly strong in the set of developing or underdeveloped countries sometimes referred to as the Global South, a point brought home during a visit to Berlin this month by Malaysia’s prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.
“We oppose colonialism, or apartheid, or ethnic cleansing, or dispossession of any country, be it in Ukraine, or in Gaza,” Mr. Anwar told journalists as he stood beside Mr. [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz. “Where have we thrown our humanity? Why this hypocrisy?”
This is where the lack of context comes in. Anwar Ibrahim didn’t condemn the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas. He and Malaysia have a long history of antisemitism and no diplomatic relations with Israel, according to a Jan. 10 article in The Diplomat. In Oct., Ibrahim reportedly called a Hamas leader to pledge Malaysia’s “unwavering support.” The Times shares none of that context with its readers, making it sound like Ibrahim is a paragon of humanity or some sort of neutral human-rights home-plate umpire.
As for the personnel issue, a Times memo announcing the hiring of Erika Solomon reports, “Erika earned a degree in history and literature from Harvard University in 2008. She then moved to Damascus on an Arabic fellowship before pivoting to journalism.” It says that “desperate to stay abroad, she took an internship with Reuters in the West Bank.” It’s certainly possible that up-close exposure to Syria and the Palestinian Authority might make a reporter more sympathetic to Israel, but, at least to judge by Solomon’s dispatch from Berlin, that doesn’t seem to be what happened. In fact, as an undergraduate, in an interview with a student publication, she talked about trying to be more sympathetic to Arabs:
Erika L. Solomon ’08 comes from a Jewish family — an ethnic tie to the Middle East that drew her to the study of Arabic culture. “A lot of Jewish people study the Middle East and Arabic as a kind of counterbalance to their ethnic identity,” she said. “They want to understand this culture they see themselves in conflict with.”
Solomon believes that such an opposition-oriented interest in the Middle East can be extremely limiting. “I sometimes worry that they go to these great lengths to study Arabic and the Middle East without making the effort to change their built-in perceptions,” she says of Jewish students at Harvard. “It’s the kind of thing that Arabic students talk about — there are the people who study Arabic because they want to be in the CIA, and there are the people who study it because they feel sympathetic.”
That article referred to “Solomon, who identifies herself as Latin American and German.”
It’s not Solomon’s fault that she “comes from a Jewish family” or “identifies herself as Latin American and German.” It might not even be relevant or worth mentioning if the Times article itself weren’t so egregious that readers are left scratching their head at how that could have happened. Sadly, at the Times, the “comes from a Jewish family” issue isn’t limited to a single reporter but reaches all the way to the top.
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 New York Times Bares Anti-Israel Bias in Dispatch From Berlin first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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In Gaza, Hamas Is Medea
Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
In Greek mythology, Medea does the unthinkable. Pursued by her father, Aeetes, and his fleet, she turns on the person closest to her — her own brother, Absyrtus. She drives a sword into his side, then tears apart a body “made of her own flesh.” She places his head and hands in sight of her father’s ship; the rest she scatters across the shore. Aeetes, shattered by grief, must stop to gather the remains while Medea escapes.
The Romanian writer Vintila Horia, in his novel God Was Born in Exile, lingers on this moment. Medea, he writes, was “a plaything of the gods, who drive men to commit these hateful acts so that they can then punish them more effectively.”
Myths survive because they illuminate universal human behaviors. They are metaphors dressed as stories — allegories of devices we see repeated again and again. And in this case, the echoes are uncomfortably clear.
Today, Palestinian leaders, whether from Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, or the PFLP, play Medea’s role. They sacrifice their own people for survival, for wealth, for ideology. Absyrtus is the Palestinian people themselves: torn apart, scattered, turned into propaganda fragments. And the West becomes Aeetes, chasing after the wreckage, desperate to collect the consequences, always behind.
The “gods” are not divine. They are the powers who exploit Palestinians as pawns: Syria, Iran, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others. Wrapped in the cloak of a politicized Palestinian identity that seems to grant immunity, leaders and patrons have stolen aid, enriched themselves, and justified repression: homophobia, misogyny, fanaticism, antisemitism, corruption, and endless violence. The cloak also serves to extract concessions abroad — political, diplomatic, and economic.
Meanwhile, Aeetes, the West, pursues the trail. Responsibilities, negotiations, and concessions pile up. Security and rights recede. Appeasement, apologies, and money flow in, offered up as if tolerance alone could undo the crime.
Medea, in this story, is embodied by the Palestinian leaders and their minions. They are directly responsible for the theft, for the indoctrination, and for the tactic Khaled Meshal himself described: sacrificing their own people to wound, however briefly, the image of the Jewish State. Each “martyrdom,” each “jihad,” is sold as a step toward eliminating Israel.
Absyrtus is the people — trapped in a machinery of violence, indoctrination, victimization, and offering, for which UNRWA bears immense responsibility. Reduced to faces on campaign posters, to slogans shouted in Paris, Madrid, or American universities, their deaths are paraded before the world as bait. The West does not insist that Hamas be removed from power — so that the war will end; hospitals, schools, and mosques won’t be turned into fighting locations; and Palestinian civilians won’t be used by their government as human shields. Instead, the West, like Aeetes, dutifully chases after the violent repercussions of Hamas’ tactics, convinced that appeasement, tolerance, and aid can somehow reassemble what their leaders have destroyed.
This ritual has a lineage. From the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna, down to Hamas today, the line runs long and unbroken. Death and hostage releases become theater, staged to desensitize their own people and foreign spectators alike.
Above all, Palestinians are sacrificed for a radical Islamist project of religious totalitarianism that seeks to advance westward, unopposed and unquestioned. This is what Hamas represents, and that is the true tragedy: not simply that people die, but that their deaths are wielded as weapons, as theater, and as excuses for hatred.
So long as the West keeps gathering the carnage that has been left behind, it will remain trapped in the tragedy. The only way out is to name the crime and hold the true Medeas to account.
Marcelo Wio is a Senior Analyst at CAMERA’s Spanish Department.
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Exposed: AP Freelancer in Gaza Praised Palestinian Terrorist Who Killed 37 Jews
Students at the Dalal Mughrabi Elementary Mixed School, which was built with funds from the Belgian government. (Photo: Facebook)
If the Associated Press (AP), one of the world’s largest news agencies, had done its due diligence before hiring Palestinian photojournalist Ismael Abu Dayyah, it would have seen him praising terrorists and posting anti-Israel content online.
Instead, Abu Dayyah was employed to report on the war in Gaza for the AP in 2024, and the agency still sells his images.
His social media activity, however, casts a shadow over his objectivity and the AP’s hiring practices, which comes at a time when global media outlets are promoting an ongoing campaign on behalf of Gazan journalists.
Abu Dayyah used the social media platform X to glorify Palestinian terrorist Dalal al Mughrabi, who was responsible for the deadliest attack against Israeli Jews before the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre.
Abu Dayyah also praised the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a proscribed terror group responsible for dozens of attacks against Israelis over the decades, including suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings, and in 2014, the barbaric murder of five Jewish worshippers in a synagogue in Jerusalem. He also celebrated its member Laila Khaled, who hijacked an airplane en route to Tel Aviv in 1969.
Abu Dayyah also posted content showing his profile picture on a map of Israel with a caption calling for the liberation of Jerusalem. Other posts by him called Hamas hostages “prisoners,” and labeled the establishment of a Jewish state as “Zionist Colonialism.”
Praise for Terrorists
In a post from March 2021, Abu Dayyah wrote:
And “Dalal Mughrabi” remains the bride of Palestine who chose resistance as her path and the homeland as her beloved, the legend who surpassed all military ranks. – Anniversary of martyrdom 11_March_1978.
Dalal Al Mughrabi was a Fatah terrorist responsible for the horrific 1978 massacre of 37 Jews, among them 12 children, in what was the deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history — until Hamas’ October 7 massacre.
Al Mughrabi led the “Coastal Road Massacre,” as it became known, when she and a group of terrorists infiltrated Israel from Lebanon, hijacked a passenger bus, and detonated it with explosives near Tel Aviv.
But for the AP’s Abu Dayyah, she is an icon. And he has been consistent in celebrating the anniversary of her “heroic” death not only in 2021, but also in previous years.
In 2022, Abu Dayyah also posted praise for Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled and the PFLP:
Leila Khaled, who is still a PFLP member and regularly calls for violence against Israel, took part in the 1969 hijacking of a TWA flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. A year later, she was part of a two-person team that attempted to hijack an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York City.
By celebrating her “achievements” online, Abu Dayyah actively promoted and supported terrorism. He also included hashtags delegitimizing a Jewish presence in Israel, such as “Jerusalem is Arab” and “our land wants freedom.”
Abu Dayyah has a documented history of praising, supporting, and promoting violent terrorism, and should therefore have no place in any Western media outlets, where his photos — that only show destruction and casualties in Gaza but not terrorists — promote Hamas’ narrative and serve as an outlet for his bias.
Anti-Israeli Bias
How can Abu Dayyah be expected to cover the Israel-Palestinian conflict professionally and objectively if he is also posting images that express his deep anti-Israeli bias?
In 2021, for example, as Hamas launched rockets at Israel from Gaza, he posted a picture of himself covering Israel’s map, and called for the liberation of Jerusalem.
Another propaganda post Abu Dayyah published that week showed a masked Palestinian youth protecting Jerusalem’s al Aqsa compound — located on Judaism’s holiest site — from Israeli soldiers.
And last February, Al Dayyah called Israeli hostages who were held and tortured by Hamas “prisoners” — a bias so deeply ingrained that it unsurprisingly aligns with his view that the establishment of the Jewish state was “Zionist colonialism.”
Media Hypocrisy
The AP cannot feign ignorance. HonestReporting had already exposed numerous Gaza journalists for their anti-Israel bias, at best, or Hamas membership, at worst, by the time the AP hired Abu Dayyah in 2024.
At the outset of the Israel-Hamas war, we even exposed the antisemitic social media history of the agency’s Gaza correspondent — which led to his dismissal.
So why did the AP not bother checking Abu Dayyah’s background before he was hired? Do AP bosses not believe in due diligence — which should be a given in any respectable organization?
And what do the AP and other media outlets have to say about Abu Dayyah in light of their loud campaign on behalf of Gaza journalists — many of whom share his views or work side by side with Hamas?
“When will AP acknowledge a consistent and serious problem with too many of Gaza’s media workers?” said HonestReporting’s editorial director, Simon Plosker. “Ismael Abu Dayyah didn’t even attempt to hide his extremism from his employers, and it’s clear they didn’t even bother looking. Instead of launching campaigns that ignore journalists’ links to or sympathies for Hamas, it’s high time the media addressed the elephant in the room. Neither AP nor any credible Western media should employ Abu Dayyah again, and we call on AP to publicly state that the news agency will sever ties with him.”
If a global news organization has no problem relying on biased journalists who praise the murderers of Jews, it cannot simultaneously decry their “professional” plight.
HonestReporting is a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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French Dishonor in New York: A Palestinian State as a Reward for Oct. 7
French President Emmanuel Macron is seen at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Photo: Reuters/Martial Trezzini
In late September 1938, faced with yet one more territorial demand from Adolf Hitler and gripped with fear at the prospect of another European war just after the end of the Great War, British and French leaders decided to meet with Hitler in Munich,
Although wary of Hitler and his repeated threats, Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and Edouard Daladier, Prime Minister of France, chose to agree to Hitler’s demand to integrate part of newly-formed Czechoslovakia — known as the Sudetenland — into his Third Reich. The Czechs had no choice but to agree to the partition, which was being imposed on them by outsiders.
Chamberlain seemed persuaded that by giving in to Hitler’s demands and having the Nazi Chancellor sign a treaty whereby he announced that he had no further territorial demands, he had brought the risk of war to an end. He would even announce that this capitulation meant, as he put it, “Peace in our time.”
Daladier had no such illusion. Although he agreed to the treaty with Hitler, he was profoundly ashamed of the concessions he and Chamberlain had made. In fact, he was so ashamed of his behavior at Munich, that he was afraid to return to Paris. As his plane prepared to land at Le Bourget just outside of Paris, Daladier could see a very large crowd waiting for him. Fearful that the crowd might cause him harm in light of the Munich agreement, he ordered the pilot to circle the airfield and defer landing. Finally, he had no choice but to land, and he prepared to face the crowd’s hostility.
To his amazement, as he exited his plane, he was greeted by shouts of approval. He could barely believe his eyes and ears. He had feared being attacked and, instead, he was being acclaimed. His reaction was to mutter, “Ah, the fools [using a profanity]. If they only understood.” Daladier, the seasoned politician and intelligent student of history, knew very well that signing a treaty with a murderous thug like Hitler was an exercise in futility, or worse.
The experience of Prime Minister Daladier is well worth remembering as we witness the humiliating groveling of French President Emmanuel Macron in New York, as Macron — seemingly seeking to pacify a segment of France’s population — announces France’s recognition of a non-existent Palestinian State. That Macron has chosen to do this in the wake of the brutal massacre perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, a massacre committed in the name of and with the seeming approval of many Palestinians, as well as at a time when Israeli hostages remain imprisoned in the tunnels of Gaza, is truly galling.
If Macron believes that by recognizing a Palestinian state at this time he is promoting peace in the Middle East, he needs to reread the history of the Munich conference.
Just as it was obvious that Hitler was lying when he promised that, if he was given the Sudetenland he would not have any further territorial demands, so Palestinian leaders are obviously lying as they suggest that recognition of a Palestinian state might bring an end to their desire to destroy Israel.
It is very likely that, having recognized Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, Macron will be given a hero’s welcome in Paris. But that welcome will be a hollow welcome. Just as Daladier was cheered on his return from Munich, Macron will be cheered by fools. The motley crew of fools will be made up of unassimilated immigrants, radical leftists, and indoctrinated students.
Sadly, Macron, the brilliant and articulate young man who seemed so promising when he first assumed office — quite unlike Daladier, the experienced and cynical politician — may not even be able to appreciate the error of his ways. In spite of his intelligence, Macron appears unable to understand that recognition of a Palestinian state now can only appear as a reward to Hamas for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
That is especially the case since Hamas terrorists continue their intransigence in holding hostages and refusing to lay down their arms, in spite of their evident military defeat. Macron, through his appeasement of terrorists, will simply have prolonged the agony of the very people of the region he purports to be helping and he will have made ultimate peace in the Middle East even more elusive.
Just as Chamberlain’s and Daladier’s negotiation with Hitler merely postponed the inevitable and assuredly encouraged Hitler to believe that intransigence could work, Macron’s false encouragement to the Palestinians will certainly prompt yet more violence and cost yet more lives. It will make France seem naïve and cynical.
Instead of adding luster to the history of France, Macron will have added another disappointing chapter to the roller coaster ride that is French history. In this case, as in 1938, there are plenty of fools, but potentially the greatest fool of them all may be the shameless and feckless French president himself.
Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of a national law firm. He is the author of Lobbying for Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution, published by HUC Press.