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New York Times Calls Israel ‘Aggressive,’ Explains Away Hamas Tunnels
A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.
Read the New York Times news coverage carefully enough, and the subtle language tricks that the paper’s reporters and editors use to excuse Hamas and demonize Israel start to seem less subtle, more blatant and outrageous.
Two recent articles provide examples of the Times’s techniques.
One Times dispatch, from a university in Brussels, is by the Times bureau chief there, Matina Stevis-Gridneff.
She offers this context about the conflict: “Jan Danckaert, the university’s rector, had started a listening tour of the campus soon after Hamas led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7. About 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 were taken hostage in those attacks, according to the Israeli authorities, setting off an aggressive Israeli military response that has killed more than 37,000 Gazans, according to health officials there.”
The Times sprinkles an adjective, “aggressive,” into its description of Israel’s response, but the Hamas-led attacks get no such pejorative label from the Times.
Elsewhere in the same dispatch, we hear that, “The three Jewish students disagreed on politics, expressing views ranging from mostly pro-Palestinian to largely siding with the Israeli government line.” Some editor should have edited out “line.” There’s an asymmetry between “pro-Palestinian” and “largely siding with the Israeli government line.” Why not just “pro-Israel,” or, if the Times insists on going down the road of accusing people of taking a party line, what about “siding with the Palestine Liberation Organization line”?
Another Times article, by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, is about a Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. That article explains in passing that, “Hamas has constructed a network of tunnels beneath Gaza to shield the group from Israeli surveillance and attack.”
That seems like an awfully benign, to the point of inaccurate, way of describing the reason Hamas built those tunnels. It might also be said that Hamas built the tunnels so they could pursue, under cover of secrecy, their mission of killing Jews and wiping Israel off the map. It could be said that the tunnels also advanced the Hamas purpose of hiding from the rest of the world the scale to which they were looting Gaza’s economy and diverting humanitarian aid resources for military use. The “shield…from Israeli attack” language the Times uses makes it sound like the tunnels are defensive, when in fact the tunnels were offensive, used to conceal preparations for attacks on Israel that were perpetrated by Hamas.
Mpoke Bigg’s LinkedIn profile says he hold a postgraduate diploma in journalism from City University, London, and an honors degree in American Studies from the University of East Anglia. The profile describes him as serving as a regional editor for Europe for the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees. “I joined UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, in 2019 and have since played several roles including: Europe Editor, Communications Officer and Acting Head of Events,” the LinkedIn profile says. The Times website omits the U.N. stint and says, “Before joining The Times, I worked for two decades for Reuters as a correspondent, bureau chief and editor. I was based in Kenya, Ivory Coast, the United States, Indonesia, Ghana and Britain.”
Stevis-Gridneff describes herself in her Times bio as having been “born and raised in Athens, Greece” and educated at Oxford and the London School of Economics.
Being educated and raised outside the U.S. may contribute to the anti-Israel tilt, though you can certainly acquire an anti-Israel tilt from inside plenty of American universities, too.
As the Times tries to grow by amassing an international readership, and also adds more international staff, it’ll face a choice between chasing anti-Israel readers in Europe and elsewhere, or serving readers based in America. Americans in general, if not necessarily the left-leaning Times audience, are more likely than many European elites are to sympathize with Israel. In other words, the Times can try to be the Guardian, or it can try to be the New York Times, but it’s perilous to try to be both at the same time. American readers will notice and will get annoyed by the bias.
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.
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Florida State University Shooting Suspect Expressed Interest in Hitler, Nazis, New Research Shows
According to the ADL, this image appears on an account belonging to Phoenix Ikner, the alleged perpetrator of a shooting attack on Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee. Photo: Screenshot
Phoenix Ikner, the alleged perpetrator of Thursday’s shooting attack on Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee which left two dead and six injured, expressed an interest in the Third Reich through his choice of names in his internet accounts, according to research from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an antisemitism watchdog group.
Describing Ikner as “an avid gamer and YouTuber,” the ADL said that its investigators found that “on various gaming accounts, the shooter used white supremacist imagery, including the Patriot Front logo and images of Hitler.”
An image provided by the ADL showed a simple cartoon of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s head with a word bubble saying “Nein!” — the German word for “no.”
1/ The ADL Center on Extremism has discovered that the alleged shooter at FSU yesterday was an avid gamer and YouTuber. During his various livestreams, he shared his screen revealing his various accounts, screen names, avatars, email inboxes and search history. Read on…
pic.twitter.com/7WPK6k85Yb
— ADL (@ADL) April 18, 2025
Through analyzing Ikner’s livestream broadcasts, the ADL reported that his email inbox “included emails from the Steam gaming platform support team, which referred to him as ‘Schutzstaffel,’ ‘phoenxcool,’ and ‘itsyourboyphoenix.’ Schutzstaffel, or SS, was the Nazi paramilitary group responsible for the Final Solution during the Holocaust.”
Ikner sustained injuries during the attack which may result in significant time in the hospital.
“What we’re seeing — if in fact this individual has extremist views, and it seems at the very least he was exposed to extremism — is the continued crossover between extremism and the glorification of violence that eventually leads to violence,” said Carla Hill, a senior director of investigative research at the ADL’s Center on Extremism
FSU student Lucas Luzietti shared a 2023 class with Ikner where the two argued over the alleged shooter’s far-right ideology, racism, and conspiracism. According to USA Today, Ikner made racist statements about Black people ruining his neighborhood and believed that former US President Joe Biden won the 2020 election illegally. He also made clear to his classmates that he owned guns.
Another student who engaged in ideological exchanges with Ikner revealed that members of a political discussion group found the alleged shooter’s views so extreme they asked him to leave.
Reid Seybold, a former Tallahassee State College student, told NBC News that “basically our only rule was no Nazis — colloquially speaking — and he espoused so much white supremacist rhetoric, and far-right rhetoric as well, to the point where we had to exercise that rule.”
The ADL reported that the Patriot Front group referenced in Ikner’s online activity “distributed antisemitic propaganda on at least 431 occasions in 2023, making up 38 percent of the year’s antisemitic propaganda incidents. ”In most of these incidents, the propaganda included the phrase ‘No Zionists in government, we serve one Nation,’” the ADL explained. “Given the group’s neo-Nazi roots, there is no question that when Patriot Front mentions ‘Zionists’ in their propaganda, they mean Jews.”
Fascinations with Nazism or even an outright embrace of the ideology have shown up in previous school attacks over the last 30 years.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold — the shooters behind the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999 — selected Hitler’s birthday for the attack that left 13 dead and launched the modern school shooting phenomenon. Harris, the mass slaughter’s mastermind, wrote in his journal, “I love the Nazis … I f—king can’t get enough of the swastika, the SS, and the iron cross. Hitler and his head boys f—ked up a few times and it cost them the war, but I love their beliefs and who they were, what they did, and what they wanted.”
On March 21, 2005, 16-year-old Jeff Weise murdered nine people at Red Lake High School, in Red Lake, Minnesota before committing suicide. Weise posted on a Neo-Nazi website with the handle “NativeNazi.”
William Edward Atchison, a contributor to message boards on the Daily Stormer neo-Nazi site, attacked Aztec High School, in Aztec, New Mexico on Dec. 7, 2017, killing two before taking his own life.
Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 and injured 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida on Feb. 14, 2018. He had carved a swastika onto his gun’s magazine and also made online postings expressing racism, antisemitism, and anti-immigrant bigotry.
Recent months have seen two school shooters — Natallie Rupnow and Solomon Henderson — with confirmed neo-Nazi beliefs who attacked their classmates before committing suicide.
Rupnow killed two and injured six on Dec. 16, 2024, at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. Henderson’s attack at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee on Jan. 22 left one dead and one injured.
Both teenagers left “manifestos” explaining their actions. In Henderson’s he wrote, “Candace Owens has influenced me above all each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over the Jewish question.”
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Three Arrested at Protest in Scotland Against Israeli Athlete Competing in Bowls Tournament
Palestinian supporters protesting outside a Scotland vs. Israel match at the a UEFA Women’s European Qualifiers at Hampden Park, Glasgow, Scotland on May 31, 2024. Photo: Alex Todd/Sportpix/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Three protesters were arrested and charged after participating in an anti-Israel demonstration in Scotland on Sunday that targeted an Israeli bowl player competing in the World Bowls Indoor Championship taking place in the Scottish city of Aberdeen.
The protest was co-organized by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) and was largely held outside the Aberdeen Indoor Bowling Club, where Israeli athlete Boaz Markus was competing, according to the Scottish newspaper The National. The international tournament runs from April 20-25. A flyer for Sunday’s protest described Markus as “a representative of the illegal, apartheid Israeli state currently carrying out genocide.”
Protesters outside the arena chanted against Israel while holding Palestinian flags and placards calling for an end to Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip ahead of Markus’s match at 1 pm. Video shared on social media by the pro-Palestinian group Show Israeli Genocide the Red Card, which co-organized the protest, also showed two demonstrators inside the venue chanting “Free, free Palestine,” shouting that Markus was “not welcome in Scotland,” and making further accusations about Israel committing “war crimes” and “murdering babies.” The protesters were eventually escorted out of the venue by police. The mayhem caused Markus’ match to be delayed by two hours.
On Sunday, police said two people had been arrested and that “enquiries are ongoing,” but then released an update on Monday explaining that another person had been arrested and charged in relation to the protest, The National reported.
“On Sunday, April 20, 2025, officers attended a pre-planned demonstration on Summerhill Road in Aberdeen,” said a police spokesperson. “Two women aged 57 and 63, and a 56-year-old man were arrested and charged. A report will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal [public prosecutor].”
Maggie Chapman, Green Member of the Scottish Parliament, also participated in the anti-Israel rally on Sunday.
“Sport is meant to be for everyone, but Israel is a racist apartheid state, built on denying even the most basic human rights to people under occupation,” she said. “I was proud to join today’s protest against Israel’s systematic repression of Palestinians and the normalization of war crimes. Sporting and cultural boycotts were an important act of solidarity against the apartheid regime in South Africa and are an important act way of standing with the people of Gaza.”
Chapman criticized the police response to the demonstration, calling it “totally disproportionate.”
“Protest is not a crime, but genocide is, and we all have a responsibility to stand against it,” she stated.
Earlier this month, SPSC tried to pressure World Bowls, which is the international federation for the sport of bowls, to disinvite Markus from the World Bowls Indoor Championship. The anti-Israel group accused World Bowls and the Aberdeen Indoor Bowling Club of “sportswashing Israeli genocide.” Show Israeli Genocide the Red Card sponsored an open letter that called on the Scottish government to intervene if World Bowls failed to rescind Markus’ invitation to the tournament.
World Bowls CEO Neil Dalrymple responded, saying at the time that the federation will not rescind Markus’ invitation. He also asked protesters not to disrupt the competition. “World Bowls is very pleased to be staging the World Bowls Indoor Championship in Aberdeen,” he told the Scottish Sun.
“World Bowls has 60 member countries from across the world including Israel and all of our members continue to be welcome and eligible to participate in all World Bowls staged events,” he added. “Our view is that sport and politics should not be intertwined. We will be allowing the representative of Israel to play in this World Bowls event, and we hope that all players and officials will enjoy their visit to Aberdeen. We respect the right for people to protest whilst we hope that they will respect the right for World Bowls to stage this competition without disruption inside the venue.”
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Molotov Cocktail Thrown at Ukrainian Synagogue in Antisemitic Attack Hours After Passover
In an antisemitic attack, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a synagogue in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. Photo: Screenshot
A Molotov cocktail was thrown at a synagogue in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine, on Saturday night, as the local Jewish community continues to experience an increasing wave of antisemitic incidents.
Just hours after the Jewish holiday of Passover ended, Chabad emissary and city Rabbi Liron Edri was alerted by the synagogue’s security system — funded by Chabad World Assistance (CWA) and supported by the Jewish Agency’s Security Fund — that several Molotov cocktails had been thrown at the building.
Edri explained that the security system — which includes shatter-resistant windows, surveillance cameras, and a rapid-response alarm network — prevented a major disaster by stopping the Molotov cocktails from breaching the building and causing serious damage.
“Thanks to the window reinforcement installed in recent months, a large fire was prevented,” the city’s rabbi said.
He also warned that the attack followed a disturbing pattern, similar to a recent antisemitic incident in Mykolaiv, a city near the Black Sea in southern Ukraine, where Molotov cocktails were also thrown at a local synagogue.
“We fear this is a planned trend against Jewish communities,” Edri said. “There seems to be a growing pattern of coordinated attempts to intimidate and harm Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.”
As local authorities initiated an investigation into the attack, Edri praised their swift and effective response.
“We will not let fear stop us,” the rabbi said. “Light will dispel darkness, and I thank the police and government who immediately came to the synagogue and promised to conduct an investigation and arrest the perpetrators.”
Ukraine has experienced an increasing wave of antisemitic incidents, as Russia’s ongoing war has fueled political instability, amplified nationalist rhetoric, and sparked a rise in antisemitic discourse across certain regions.
Last week, a vehicle displaying Jewish symbols was vandalized, with its tires slashed, community emblems defaced, and paint splattered across the car’s body.
Edri condemned the antisemitic act, describing it as part of a growing wave of targeted assaults against the local Jewish community intended to harm and intimidate them.
“The vandalism was clearly targeted,” he said. “There was nothing random about it. This was an act aimed at harming us as a Jewish community.”
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