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New York Times Deplores Israeli Rhetoric While Denouncing Israeli Settlers as a ‘Cancer’
A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.
It’s a classic antisemitic double standard. When Israelis use heated rhetoric about Hamas, the New York Times raises alarm bells. But when American “progressives” call Jews “cancer,” the Times either ignores it or itself is among the perpetrators.
A “guest essay” in the Times by Omer Bartov, a professor of “Holocaust and genocide studies” at Brown University, denounced what he called “deeply alarming language,” statements that he said “indicate a genocidal intent.”
Bartov writes, “On Oct. 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said, ‘We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,’ a statement indicating dehumanization, which has genocidal echoes. The next day, the head of the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: ‘Human animals must be treated as such.’”
Leave aside whether calling someone a “human animal,” rather than merely an animal or an inhuman animal, really does indicate “dehumanization.” And leave aside, too, that Alian is an Israeli Druze, which the Times doesn’t mention, perhaps because it complicates the narrative the newspaper is pushing of Jewish racism.
In addition to the “guest essay,” the Times mobilized its London bureau chief, Mark Landler, to catch up to the opinion piece by manufacturing an entire news article about what a headline called “Inflammatory Rhetoric From Israeli Leaders.”
Landler’s first example is that same “human animals” quote from Gallant that is mentioned in Bartov’s op-ed. Landler also faults a former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett, for declaring, “We’re fighting Nazis.” Landler doesn’t mention that Israelis in Gaza discovered an Arabic-language copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a children’s room in a civilian home in Gaza that was used as a Hamas headquarters. Landler also doesn’t mention that Hamas’ covenant aspires to kill all the Jews (“there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”)
The Times has also been quite assertive recently about denouncing Donald Trump’s rhetoric. One Times news article was about Donald Trump’s promise to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” That article reported, “The former president’s remarks drew criticism from some liberals and historians who pointed to echoes of dehumanizing rhetoric wielded by fascist dictators like Hitler and Benito Mussolini.” The Times followed up with a second news article, on the front page, reporting, “Mr. Trump used language that echoed authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Germany and Italy in the 1930s, degrading his political adversaries as ‘vermin’ who needed to be ‘rooted out.’”
Where does the double standard come in?
A Democratic congressman from Wisconsin, Mark Pocan, denounced a largely Jewish pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as “cancerous to democracy” and as “a cancerous presence on our democracy and politics in general.” The Times hasn’t reported on it. Instead, the Times quoted Pocan about AIPAC without mentioning his use of the cancer slur.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who left the paper for a while in an attempt to run for governor of Oregon as a Democrat, recently called Israeli settlements and “violent settlers” a “cancer on the region.” (“It’s imperative that Israel freeze settlements and rein in violent settlers, for they are a cancer on the region,” was the precise sentence, which mixes the metaphor, because one reins in a horse, not a cancer.)
So long as the Times is on high-alert for “dehumanizing rhetoric” with “genocidal echoes,” why give a pass to language that compares Jews to cancer? Such language has a long and unfortunate history. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collections include an “antisemitic propaganda flyer” acquired by a Jewish child in France between 1942 and 1945. It compares Jews to tuberculosis, syphilis, and cancer. A “fact sheet on the elements of antisemitic discourse,” prepared by Kenneth Marcus of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, notes that “in Nazi Germany, Jewishness was often compared to a cancer.”
Susan Sontag, in her 1978 book Illness as Metaphor, writes, “Modern totalitarian movements, whether of the right or of the left, have been peculiarly — and revealingly — inclined to use disease imagery … European Jewry was repeatedly analogized to syphilis, and to a cancer that must be excised.” Sontag writes that using cancer as a metaphor “amount to saying, first of all, that the event or situation is unqualifiedly and unredeemably wicked. It enormously ups the ante.”
Sontag writes: “To describe a phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence … It could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal.”
Sontag notes that “the standard metaphor of Arab polemics — heard by Israelis on the radio every day for the last twenty years — is that Israel is ‘a cancer in the heart of the Arab world’ or ‘the cancer of the Middle East.’”
And Sontag adds, “The cancer metaphor is particularly crass. It is invariably an encouragement to simplify what is complex and an invitation to self-righteousness, if not to fanaticism.”
It’s sad to see coming from Kristof, who was identified in 2011 by the former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, as “truly an enemy of Israel.” If the Times is going to get into the business of raising alarms about Israeli rhetoric or about language with echoes of authoritarianism, it might want to be a little more careful about its own and about that of its allies on the left. Otherwise, the Times‘ concerns just look like unprincipled partisanship or Israel-bashing.
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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Iranian Media Claims Obtaining ‘Sensitive’ Israeli Intelligence Materials
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
i24 News – Iranian and Iran-affiliated media claimed on Saturday that the Islamic Republic had obtained a trove of “strategic and sensitive” Israeli intelligence materials related to Israel’s nuclear facilities and defense plans.
“Iran’s intelligence apparatus has obtained a vast quantity of strategic and sensitive information and documents belonging to the Zionist regime,” Iran’s state broadcaster said, referring to Israel in the manner accepted in those Muslim or Arab states that don’t recognize its legitimacy. The statement was also relayed by the Lebanese site Al-Mayadeen, affiliated with the Iran-backed jihadists of Hezbollah.
The reports did not include any details on the documents or how Iran had obtained them.
The intelligence reportedly included “thousands of documents related to that regime’s nuclear plans and facilities,” it added.
According to the reports, “the data haul was extracted during a covert operation and included a vast volume of materials including documents, images, and videos.”
The report comes amid high tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, over which it is in talks with the US administration of President Donald Trump.
Iranian-Israeli tensions reached an all-time high since the October 7 massacre and the subsequent Gaza war, including Iranian rocket fire on Israel and Israeli aerial raids in Iran that devastated much of the regime’s air defenses.
Israel, which regards the prospect of the antisemitic mullah regime obtaining a nuclear weapon as an existential threat, has indicated it could resort to a military strike against Iran’s installations should talks fail to curb uranium enrichment.
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Israel Retrieves Body of Thai Hostage from Gaza
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz looks on, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, in Jerusalem, Nov. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
The Israeli military has retrieved the body of a Thai hostage who had been held in Gaza since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday.
Nattapong Pinta’s body was held by a Palestinian terrorist group called the Mujahedeen Brigades, and was recovered from the area of Rafah in southern Gaza, Katz said. His family in Thailand has been notified.
Pinta, an agricultural worker, was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz, a small Israeli community near the Gaza border where a quarter of the population was killed or taken hostage during the Hamas attack that triggered the devastating war in Gaza.
Israel’s military said Pinta had been abducted alive and killed by his captors, who had also killed and taken to Gaza the bodies of two more Israeli-American hostages that were retrieved earlier this week.
There was no immediate comment from the Mujahedeen Brigades, who have previously denied killing their captives, or from Hamas. The Israeli military said the Brigades were still holding the body of another foreign national. Only 20 of the 55 remaining hostages are believed to still be alive.
The Mujahedeen Brigades also held and killed Israeli hostage Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, according to Israeli authorities. Their bodies were returned during a two-month ceasefire, which collapsed in March after the two sides could not agree on terms for extending it to a second phase.
Israel has since expanded its offensive across the Gaza Strip as US, Qatari and Egyptian-led efforts to secure another ceasefire have faltered.
US-BACKED AID GROUP HALTS DISTRIBUTIONS
The United Nations has warned that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli blockade of the enclave, with the rate of young children suffering from acute malnutrition nearly tripling.
Aid distribution was halted on Friday after the US-and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said overcrowding had made it unsafe to continue operations. It was unclear whether aid had resumed on Saturday.
The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza at the end of May, overseeing a new model of aid distribution which the United Nations says is neither impartial nor neutral. It says it has provided around 9 million meals so far.
The Israeli military said on Saturday that 350 trucks of humanitarian aid belonging to U.N. and other international relief groups were transferred this week via the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The war erupted after Hamas-led terrorists took 251 hostages and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in the October 7, 2023 attack, Israel’s single deadliest day.
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US Mulls Giving Millions to Controversial Gaza Aid Foundation, Sources Say
Palestinians carry aid supplies which they received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo
The State Department is weighing giving $500 million to the new foundation providing aid to war-shattered Gaza, according to two knowledgeable sources and two former US officials, a move that would involve the US more deeply in a controversial aid effort that has been beset by violence and chaos.
The sources and former US officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that money for Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would come from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is being folded into the US State Department.
The plan has met resistance from some US officials concerned with the deadly shootings of Palestinians near aid distribution sites and the competence of the GHF, the two sources said.
The GHF, which has been fiercely criticized by humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations, for an alleged lack of neutrality, began distributing aid last week amid warnings that most of Gaza’s 2.3 million population is at risk of famine after an 11-week Israeli aid blockade, which was lifted on May 19 when limited deliveries were allowed to resume.
The foundation has seen senior personnel quit and had to pause handouts twice this week after crowds overwhelmed its distribution hubs.
The State Department and GHF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Reuters has been unable to establish who is currently funding the GHF operations, which began in Gaza last week. The GHF uses private US security and logistics companies to transport aid into Gaza for distribution at so-called secure distribution sites.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, has an “economic interest” in the for-profit US contractor overseeing the logistics and security of GHF’s aid distribution hubs in the enclave.
While US President Donald Trump’s administration and Israel say they don’t finance the GHF operation, both have been pressing the United Nations and international aid groups to work with it.
The US and Israel argue that aid distributed by a long-established U.N. aid network was diverted to Hamas. Hamas has denied that.
USAID has been all but dismantled. Some 80 percent of its programs have been canceled and its staff face termination as part of President Donald Trump’s drive to align US foreign policy with his “America First” agenda.
One source with knowledge of the matter and one former senior official said the proposal to give the $500 million to GHF has been championed by acting deputy USAID Administrator Ken Jackson, who has helped oversee the agency’s dismemberment.
The source said that Israel requested the funds to underwrite GHF’s operations for 180 days.
The Israeli government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two sources said that some US officials have concerns with the plan because of the overcrowding that has affected the aid distribution hubs run by GHF’s contractor, and violence nearby.
Those officials also want well-established non-governmental organizations experienced in running aid operations in Gaza and elsewhere to be involved in the operation if the State Department approves the funds for GHF, a position that Israel likely will oppose, the sources said.
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