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What Nicholas Kristof Is Hiding From His New York Times Readers
US Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) speaks to media during a Senate vote, at the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, May 2, 2024. Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
As part of the New York Times‘ regular ongoing series of Sunday opinion section logorrheic attacks on Israel, Nicholas Kristof recently weighed in with a super-long article that added precisely nothing to what everyone already knew about the events in the Middle East and Kristof’s view of them.
To fill out an article as long as Kristof’s without any original thought required a lot of reporting, and Kristof was determined to demonstrate that he did that, padding the piece with quotations from an endless parade of people who he described as experts.
Yet many the people Kristof quoted were longtime critics of Israel and its elected government, or just people who agreed with Kristof.
Kristof quoted US Sen. Chris Van Hollen, identifying him only as “a Maryland Democrat and foreign policy expert.” Yet since the Hamas terror group’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, Van Hollen has gone off the deep end. A Baltimore Jewish Times editorial recently reported, “Van Hollen’s relentless attacks against Israel have been so offensive that they recently prompted an unprecedented public letter of reprimand from nearly 80 Maryland rabbis from across the state and denominational affiliations expressing deep concern about Van Hollen and his pronouncements. In the rabbis’ words, they are ‘aghast’ at Van Hollen’s anti-Israel rhetoric.”
The editorial derided Van Hollen’s “self-righteous spewing of anti-Israel accusations and positions.” It concluded, “We face the uncomfortable reality that Chris Van Hollen is not our friend.” Kristof didn’t mention any of that.
Kristof also quoted “Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat,” without letting readers in on the context that Merkley was widely lambasted for alleged antisemitism in publishing a social media post on Easter that said, “On this Easter, let’s ponder [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, which has killed more than 20,000 women and children, and his restriction of humanitarian aid, which has pushed Palestinians to the brink of famine.” Kristof quit his Times column in 2021 to attempt to run for governor of Oregon as a Democrat, and Merkley was a senior figure in the Oregon Democratic Party.
Kristof also mentioned “Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland.” Yet Telhami was urging sanctions threats against “apartheid” Israel back in May 2023, long before the Hamas-Israel war. Kristof didn’t mention that context to readers, either.
Kristof quoted Menachem Rosensaft, identifying him only as “a Cornell law professor and general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress.” Rosensaft has a distinguished record of service to the Jewish people, but it’s also worth noting that he met with Yasser Arafat in 1988 and was criticized at the time; the New York Times reported back then, “The Americans meeting with Mr. Arafat have been criticized by some Jewish organizations and the Israeli government as unrepresentative of all Jews and for being exploited by Mr. Arafat in his effort to fashion a moderate image for the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization].”
Kristof quoted both Martin Indyk and Aaron David Miller, but not their fellow peace-processor Dennis Ross, who has a similar background of government service but who tends to be less publicly critical of Israel and of its wartime allies.
In short, Kristof’s sources and his descriptions of them were flawed.
Just as misleading was Kristof’s basic analytical framework. The column was headlined “What Happened to the Joe Biden I Knew?” It asked why Biden was “against the Darfur genocide and humanitarian crisis two decades ago” yet has demonstrated “complicity in the cataclysm of Gaza.”
What Kristof entirely omitted was the humanitarian crisis that unfolded in Syria during the Obama-Biden administration. It would be hard to chalk the US inaction then up to Biden’s supposed pro-Israel bent. Yet Kristof ignored that case entirely. Maybe what happened to Biden was that he was against humanitarian crises when they could be conveniently blamed on Republican administrations, or when he was not in the White House as president or vice president.
Or maybe the truth isn’t quite so partisan. Perhaps Biden truly understands somehow, correctly, that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is mainly the fault of Iran-backed Hamas, not Israel or the US. If so, then he’s more perceptive than Nicholas Kristof, who for all his Pulitzer Prizes and Harvard and Oxford degrees, has a vision of the US-Israel relationship that is as predictable, skewed, and self-righteous as too many of his sources.
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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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.
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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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