Whitewashing Terror: 130 Years of Manipulation Inside The New York Times
The 1956 Sinai Campaign — “Israel as the Aggressor”
In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and blocked the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping—an act that under international law constitutes a clear casus belli (a justification for war). Furthermore, Fedayeen terrorists were launching continuous attacks on Israeli communities from Egyptian-controlled Gaza. In response, Israel entered into a secret alliance with Great Britain and France and launched a military campaign against Egypt.
How the NYT Covered It:
The U.S. administration under President Dwight D. Eisenhower was furious with the actions of its allies and demanded their immediate withdrawal. The New York Times instantly became Washington’s megaphone. The paper published scathing editorials condemning the invasion, framing Israel merely as a tool in the hands of fading colonial empires (Britain and France).
Meanwhile, the NYT almost completely ignored years of Egyptian cross-border terror and the illegal naval blockade that had forced Israel’s hand. It was during this 1956 crisis that the narrative linking Israel to “Western colonialism” began to take deep root in the paper’s pages—a narrative that would eventually become the primary ideological weapon used against the country.
The Punch Sulzberger Era (1963–1992)
Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, son of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, took the helm in 1963. Under his leadership, the newspaper became a publicly traded company in 1967. However, the family maintained absolute control over the publication through Class B voting shares and a family trust.
Linguistic Amnesty — The Munich Olympics (1972)
In September 1972, terrorists from the Palestinian group “Black September” (a faction of Fatah/PLO) took hostage and brutally murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. This was pure, unadulterated terrorism against defenseless civilians.
How did the newspaper label the killers?
The NYT went to great lengths to avoid using the word “terrorists.” Instead, the murderers were referred to as “Arab commandos” (a term usually reserved for elite units of regular armies) or “guerrillas” (freedom fighters combating regular military forces).
By framing the killers of athletes in military terms, the NYT legitimized their actions. The paper deliberately refused to call things by their proper names to avoid offending the Arab world and to sustain the romanticized image of Palestinians as noble insurgents.
The Ma’alot Massacre and the “Cycle of Violence” (1974)
In May 1974, PLO terrorists seized a school in the northern Israeli town of Ma’alot, taking more than 100 children hostage. The standoff ended in tragedy, leaving 22 children dead.
The coverage of this horrific act laid the foundation for a deeply flawed concept that the newspaper still employs today: false equivalency.
In NYT reports, the Ma’alot massacre was not framed as an isolated, barbaric crime by fanatics. Instead, it was presented as part of a generic “cycle of violence” in the Middle East. The paper immediately began publishing features on the plight of Palestinian refugees, effectively offering a moral justification for the terrorists. The victims (murdered children) and their killers were placed on the exact same moral scale.
Laundering Arafat and the PLO at the UN (1974)
Just six months after the slaughter of the school children in Ma’alot, the United Nations invited PLO leader Yasser Arafat to address the General Assembly. Arafat took the podium wearing a holster on his hip and delivered his famous line: “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
That same year, UN Resolution 3210 officially recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people—even though the group had no intention of scaling back its terrorist operations.
Instead of exposing this diplomatic farce—the legitimization of a terror leader with fresh blood on his hands—The New York Times treated Arafat with profound reverence. The paper covered his visit as the arrival of a legitimate statesman. Journalists admiringly analyzed his rhetoric while ignoring the gun on his hip and the fact that the PLO charter explicitly called for the destruction of Israel. The NYT played a pivotal role in transforming Arafat from a gang leader into a “respected resistance figure” for the Western intelligentsia.
Whitewashing the Khmer Rouge: Sydney Schanberg (1975)
This case serves as the bloody twin to Walter Duranty’s infamous coverage of the Soviet Union. In 1975, as the Khmer Rouge communists led by Pol Pot neared the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, NYT bureau chief Sydney Schanberg wrote reassuring dispatches.
In April 1975, just days before the city fell, he penned an article titled “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.” He openly mocked warnings from Western intelligence agencies about an impending bloodbath, dismissing them as paranoia.
As soon as the Khmer Rouge seized power, they initiated a genocide that wiped out approximately 2 million people — a quarter of the country’s population. Schanberg later acknowledged his catastrophic error, but the case remains a permanent stain in journalism history, illustrating how the NYT sought to find “good guys” among radical left-wing terrorists.
The Microscope and Obsession Era (1980s–Present)
1. The First Lebanon War and Fabricating Numbers (1982)
When Israel entered Lebanon in 1982 to root out PLO terrorists—who had been shelling northern Israel for years — the NYT began publishing fantastic, unverified civilian casualty figures. The paper uncritically reprinted data from the Palestinian Red Crescent, an organization headed by Yasser Arafat’s own brother.
Front-page headlines blared about “600,000 homeless Lebanese” in the south of the country, despite the fact that the entire population of that region at the time did not exceed 400,000. When the fabrication was exposed, the numbers were quietly corrected on the back pages, but the image of Israel as a ruthless destroyer was already permanently seared into the minds of readers.
Today, They Are Doing the Exact Same Thing, Relying on the Same Sources (2024)
“More than 600,000 people of Lebanon’s 5.4 million have been displaced within the country, threatening to overwhelm shelters, U.N. officials warned, and 300,000 others have fled abroad. Half of Lebanon’s public schools have been turned into shelters, the aid group Save the Children said on Wednesday.”
2. The Microscopic Double Standard
Beginning in the 1980s (with Thomas Friedman’s dispatches from Lebanon) and peaking in the early 2000s (during the Second Intifada), the NYT’s fixation on Israel morphed into a full-blown obsession.
The Outsized Bureau: The newspaper maintains one of its largest foreign bureaus in Israel—a tiny country roughly the size of New Jersey. A minor incident at a West Bank checkpoint receives more front-page real estate than mass slaughters in Syria, Yemen, or Sudan.
The Double Standard: Israel’s actions are examined under a microscope, searching for the slightest flaw and demanding an unattainable standard of warfare. Meanwhile, the actions of its adversaries (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran) are viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Edges are softened, terrorists are rebranded as “militants,” and the blame for their radicalism is routinely shifted back onto Israel itself.
In 1992, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. took over as publisher (1992–2017), representing the fourth generation of the family dynasty.
The Oslo Accords (1993) and Editorial Blindness
In 1993, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, signing the Oslo Accords. The New York Times fell into a state of absolute euphoria. It declared Oslo a historic diplomatic triumph and completely turned off its journalistic skepticism.
Immediately after signing the accords, Arafat began giving speeches in Arabic (such as his infamous 1994 speech in Johannesburg) comparing Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah—a temporary truce signed by the Prophet Muhammad, meant to be broken once his forces gained enough strength. He openly called on Arabs to continue the jihad.
Israeli intelligence and right-wing politicians sounded the alarm, providing English translations of Arafat’s speeches.
The NYT response? The paper systematically withheld these speeches and Arafat’s double-dealing from its readers. On the rare occasions when the PLO’s militant rhetoric was mentioned, it was accompanied by editorial commentary dismissing it as “merely words for internal consumption” and insisting that Arafat “sincerely wanted peace.” In doing so, the NYT lulled both the West and Israel into a false sense of security.
Silencing the Bus Bombings (1994–1996)
When Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched a horrific campaign of suicide bombings targeting Israeli buses, cafes, and markets post-Oslo, the NYT found itself trapped by its own narrative.
The paper bent over backward to argue that Arafat had no control over Hamas and bore no responsibility for the attacks — even as Israeli intelligence proved that the Palestinian Authority frequently turned a blind eye to, or directly funded, the terror.
Following bloody bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, NYT articles regularly insinuated that the blame lay with the Israeli government (especially after Benjamin Netanyahu was elected in 1996), claiming it was “stalling the peace process” and thereby “provoking extremists.”
The Campaign Against Benjamin Netanyahu (1996–1999)
When Israelis elected Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 1996 on a platform of demanding strict reciprocity from Arafat amidst the relentless wave of bus bombings, the NYT declared war on him.
Netanyahu was routinely depicted in the paper’s pages as the primary obstacle to peace, an stubborn radical, and the destroyer of Oslo. Conversely, Arafat—whose apparatus was secretly smuggling weapons and financing terror at that very moment—was portrayed as a pragmatic partner with whom it was “difficult but necessary to work.” The paper openly interfered in internal Israeli politics, attempting to marginalize anyone who questioned the sanctity of the Oslo narrative.
Prepping the Ground for Camp David (2000)
The climax of this era came during the Camp David Summit in the summer of 2000. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat virtually everything: an independent state on 97% of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Arafat rejected the offer outright, offered no counter-proposals, and left to launch the Second Intifada.
Even when U.S. President Bill Clinton publicly placed 100% of the blame for the summit’s failure on Arafat, The New York Times tried to soften the blow. They began running columns and op-eds by Robert Malley arguing that Barak’s offers “were not generous enough” or that Arafat “could not make concessions due to pressure from the Arab world”—anything to avoid admitting the stark reality: their chosen messiah (Arafat) had never intended to recognize a Jewish state.
Do you remember who Robert Malley is?
Robert Malley, who had compared Jews to Nazis and whose father was a friend of Yasser Arafat. President Joe Biden appointed Malley as the U.S. Special Envoy for Iran. He was tasked with ensuring U.S. and Iranian compliance with the JCPOA, after former President Donald Trump had exited the deal. In late 2023, reports surfaced that Malley was loyal to Tehran rather than Washington, based on a joint Iran International and Semafor report on a trove of emails from Iranian diplomats (2003–2021). In 2023, Malley’s security clearance was revoked, and he was placed on paid, then unpaid leave pending an investigation into mishandling classified information. The case was later referred to the FBI.
Covering Up Intra-Palestinian Terror
During the First Intifada, Palestinians killed nearly 1,000 of their fellow Palestinians (estimates range from 822 to 942 individuals). They were labeled “collaborators” with Israel. In reality, Fatah and emerging Hamas militants used the chaos to settle personal scores: executing business competitors, eliminating political rivals, and murdering women for “immoral behavior.” Victims were brutally tortured, shot in the streets, or beaten to death. Approximately one in five people killed during the early stages of the Intifada died at the hands of their fellow Arabs.
How the NYT Covered It: Shifting the Focus to Excuse the Killers
According to content-analysis data from CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis), The New York Times dedicated over 80% of its conflict coverage to the actions of the IDF, leaving only a tiny fraction for Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence.
When the paper was forced to report on the lynchings of “collaborators,” NYT reporters deployed a specific framework: they avoided blaming Palestinian leadership (like Arafat or Hamas) who ordered the executions. Instead, the paper spun the narrative to suggest that Israel was to blame because its system of informants “forced” Palestinians to resort to vigilantism.
The paper required a pristine “oppressed vs. oppressor” dynamic. The mass internal slaughter within Palestinian society shattered the image of noble freedom fighters, so the NYT simply buried the carnage on its back pages.
Creating the “David and Goliath” Myth
During the First Intifada, there were over 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks and hundreds of assaults involving grenades and firearms, resulting in the deaths of over 100 Israeli civilians. The stones thrown by Palestinians were not harmless pebbles; they were heavy boulders and cinderblocks dropped from rooftops or hurled at oncoming cars, fracturing skulls (including those of infants) and causing fatal car crashes.
How the NYT Processed the Imagery:
The Language: NYT journalists (and later star columnists like Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, who would later write a fake story about Israeli military dogs raping Palestinians) systematically began calling rock-throwing a form of “nonviolent resistance.” They seriously compared Palestinian teenagers to followers of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.
The Photo Desk: NYT photo editors meticulously curated the visual narrative. The world was flooded with images of slender boys wielding slingshots against massive Israeli tanks. The newspaper intentionally withheld photographs showing the mangled cars and crushed bodies left in the wake of those “stones.”
The photo showed an Israeli policeman with a baton standing next to a bloodied boy. The caption read:
“An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian youth on the Temple Mount.”
The visual message was clear — the Israeli as aggressor, the boy as victim.
Reality: the boy was Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish-American student whom the policeman was protecting from a lynch mob of Palestinians.
The photo was taken at a gas station, not on the Temple Mount.
Fact: there are no gas stations on the Temple Mount (Google Earth, 2000). The photo was cropped to hide the gas station sign — a classic propaganda technique.
To protect the myth of the Palestinian “David” and the Israeli “Goliath,” the newspaper effectively decriminalized attempted murder—rebranding lethal rock-throwing as mere “protest”—and censored internal Palestinian violence because it interfered with selling the Western public a fairy tale of a noble national liberation movement.
You have read Part 3. To be continued.
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