One horrible sentence, one lame correction, doesn’t help The New York Times’ long record of anti-Israel bias

On September 14, in an article in The New York Times about backlash to the documentary Naza, correspondent Isabel Kershner wrote that Israelis remained divided over the political and military failures preceding the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023. She went on to discount the criticism, writing, “But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.” The sentence appeared directly after the article had already stated the plain facts — roughly 1,200 people killed and about 250 taken hostage — which meant the newspaper had the truth on the page and chose, in its very next sentence, to frame that truth as a matter of Israeli self-perception rather than settled fact, implying that Israelis were not, in fact, the victims of a horrific mass terrorist attack by Palestinian Hamas. Tamar Sternthal, Israel director of the media watchdog CAMERA, caught the implication of Kershner’s line and said so publicly, without hedging. “Wait, what? That Israelis are victims of the Oct. 7 massacre is a matter of Israeli ‘perception’ and not simply fact?” she wrote. “If they’re not the victims, then what are they? The perpetrators?” CAMERA’s formal statement pressed further: “Implying Israelis falsely view themselves as victims while downplaying Oct. 7 ignores basic reality. Intelligence failures don’t negate civilian suffering. True journalistic integrity requires context and facts, not narrative spin.”

The Times did not defend the sentence. It deleted it. On September 16, the paper’s editors attached a formal note admitting the line had resulted from “an editing error” that “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.” The correction carried enough weight that the newspaper’s own communications account posted it publicly, an acknowledgment rarely extended to a single sentence within a longer story about a film controversy. The documentary that produced this controversy deserves scrutiny on its own terms. Naza is a Hebrew acronym for netzek agavi, meaning collateral damage, and its central claim is large enough to fill a headline: that the Israel Defense Forces ran a policy of mass civilian killing in Gaza, assisted by artificial intelligence and accepted in advance rather than treated as an accident.

The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a twenty-five-minute standing ovation, the longest in the festival’s history, and won the Special Jury Prize. The entire evidentiary foundation rests on interviews with twenty-four people presented as Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, filmed at night with their faces and voices digitally altered. Not one of them can be independently identified. The IDF has stated it has seen only promotional excerpts of the completed film, meaning the institution accused within it has not been permitted to answer the specific claims made against it. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir called the film “based on blood libels” and “deliberate distortion of reality,” ordering the Military Advocate General to examine legal action. “False, manipulative and unfounded vilification is not legitimate criticism,” Zamir said, “even if it receives sanctimonious applause.” The director’s own record raises serious, independently documented questions about his reliability as a narrator of events in Gaza. In 2020, Yuval Abraham produced a profile of a Hebrew-language school in Gaza run by a man he described as a former prisoner who had killed “a soldier his own age.” The truth, later confirmed by the outlet that produced the piece, was that his victim was Shimon Biran, a thirty-two-year-old Israeli civilian murdered on his way to work. The Israeli research organization Regavim has since documented that the same man defended Palestinian “resistance” carried out with “a stone, a knife or a gun,” and, after October 7, described civilians fleeing the Nova festival massacre as “settlers” fleeing “resistance.” Regavim’s conclusion was direct: “Turning a convicted terrorist into the sympathetic face of a ‘coexistence’ story while his victim becomes a ‘soldier’ is whitewashing, plain and simple.” Separately, investigative journalist Eitan Fischberger has documented that Abraham has maintained a close personal friendship for years with a man who serves as vice president of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an organization Israel designated a terrorist entity in 2015. Even taken entirely on its own terms, the film concedes the very distinction its central charge requires erasing. Genocide, as a legal matter, requires proof of specific intent to destroy a protected group. Collateral damage, the film’s own chosen title, is a legal term describing harm that occurs alongside a lawful target, precisely the opposite of intent. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar admitted in 2016 that the group had “decided to turn that which is most dear to us, the bodies of our women and children, into a dam blocking the collapse in Arab reality.” A film that dismisses the use of human shields as an “absurd” excuse never has to reckon with an enemy that has said, repeatedly and without embarrassment, that it counts on exactly that outcome.

The deleted sentence did not appear in isolation. Two days earlier, on September 14, Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management published a peer-reviewed study in the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, analyzing 1,559 Times articles mentioning both Israel and Gaza between October 2023 and June 2024. His findings, built on rigorous coding protocols with inter-rater reliability scores in the high 80s to high 90s percent, were stark. Ninety-one percent of the articles failed to mention any Israeli casualty occurring after October 7. Fifty percent never referenced the Israeli hostages Hamas was holding. The word “Israel” appeared 27,205 times across the dataset against just 8,499 mentions of “Hamas,” a ratio more than three to one. Personal stories of Palestinian suffering appeared on two out of every three days across the sample; comparable personal accounts of Israeli suffering appeared in fewer than one article in twenty. Pinker concluded that the resulting coverage “assigns near-exclusive agency and responsibility to Israel while diminishing Hamas’s role in initiating and sustaining the conflict.” Confronted with a rigorously reviewed academic study built on hard, reproducible data, the Times did not engage a single finding. It dismissed the study wholesale. “The advocates behind multiple studies on media bias cherry-pick data that supports their beliefs while ignoring any evidence to the contrary,” the paper said in a statement. “We remain open to good-faith disagreement, but we will not let critics or advocacy campaigns move us away from independent reporting.” Pinker’s study did not stand alone. A separate investigation into the BBC’s wartime coverage, led by British lawyer Trevor Asserson, found that the broadcaster associated Israel with the word “genocide” fourteen times more often than it did Hamas, and documented more than 1,500 breaches of the BBC’s own editorial guidelines in the war’s first four months alone. A third study, published in Middle East Quarterly by researchers Andrew Fox and Tatiana Glezer, examined casualty reporting across eight major outlets and found that Hamas-supplied casualty figures were cited in every publication sampled, while Israeli figures appeared in only four percent.

None of this was new. A 2022 analysis by Israeli journalist Lilac Sigan, published in Ma’ariv, found that during the first half of that year, Israel received 832 mentions in Times reporting while Hamas and Hezbollah, both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, received a combined fifty-nine. Of the newspaper’s Israel-related coverage that period, fifty-three percent portrayed Israel negatively and only thirteen percent positively.

The pattern reached its most serious point in May 2026, when columnist Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed alleging that Israel operates a systematic program of sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners, including the claim that Israeli guards use specially trained dogs to rape detainees. The column relied heavily on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, whose founder was named by Israeli intelligence in 2013 as a Hamas operative in Europe. The watchdog HonestReporting found that one of Kristof’s named sources had, one day after Hamas murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, publicly praised the “heroic fighters” flying “the green flag” over “the camps of the occupier.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, quoted in the piece in a way that appeared to validate its claims, said afterward: “I did not validate these claims. I have no knowledge supporting these claims, as I said to Mr. Kristof.” Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the column “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press,” and Prime Minister Netanyahu announced Israel would pursue legal action. The Times did not retract the column. Notably, it ran on the same morning an Israeli commission released its own findings, built on 430 interviews, documenting Hamas’s systematic sexual violence against Israeli women and children on October 7.

Set against this record, the deleted “victims” sentence stops looking like an isolated editing error and starts looking like the moment a pattern finally became visible in a single line of text. A single voice can be dismissed as bias. A second, arriving independently and pointing at the same wound, becomes far harder to wave off. A third and a fourth, stretching back across years, stop being coincidence and start being a record. This month, one sentence made that record impossible to deny for even the newspaper that wrote it. The next test is whether The New York Times is willing to listen before the correction becomes necessary, rather than only after enough witnesses have made denial impossible. I agree with President Trump's demand that the International sea lanes be kept open, and that Iran NOT be able to blackmail the rest of the world with Nuclear Weapons and charging tolls.

Benyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to speak at the UN at about 2:00 pm tomorrow. Here is how much aid we give Israel by a MOU issued by the US in 2019: Total U.S. Aid to Israel

Baseline Annual Aid: Under a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) running from 2019 to 2028, Israel receives $3.8 billion annually in security assistance. This is broken down into:

$3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF).

$500 million dedicated to regional missile defense programs (such as the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow systems).

Wartime Supplemental Aid: Since the outbreak of the regional conflict in late 2023, total U.S. spending has increased dramatically. Additional emergency supplemental packages and expedited military sales have added tens of billions of dollars, pushing total U.S. military support past $21 billion for the early years of the conflict alone.

How Much Is Spent on American Weapons?

The vast majority—virtually 100% of the Foreign Military Financing (FMF)—is spent on American-made weapons.

So, almost all of the aid we give Israel is spent on American Weapons and systems, including research for future weapons. Contrary to some who think it is a bad investment, Israel has been the one reliable ally in the Middle East and has contributed to the free flow of oil through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Some on this forum don't like it, but keeping the free flow of oil is absolutely essential to our economy, even though we don't receive much from it. It sets the price for the rest of the world. Europe has stayed on the sidelines and pursued 'green energy', at the cost of their economies, and have decided to let the US take care of their problems, like they have for the last 80 years.

You can criticize Great Britain without being a Limey-hater, you can criticize France without being a Frog-hater, you can criticize Germany without being a Kraut-hater, you can criticize America without being a Yank-hater, you can criticize Australia without being a Kiwi-hater, you can criticize Belgium without being a Waffle-hater, you can criticize Canada without being a Hoser-hater, but if you criticize Israel you are an antisemitic Nazi.

There are several morons here that are not aware that many of the weapons are Israeli innovations that we developed with them, including the iron dome system , which knocks drones down a hell of a lot cheaper, the iron beam laser weapons which knock down missiles and drones foe about 20 bucks, etc. We are now in the “Drone Wars” of asymmetric warfare, and I am not sure we could survive without these new weapons. The Iranian plan was always to control the worldwide flow of oil and gas, and thus, control the economies of the world and extort whatever the hell they wanted. That is why Trump’s plan is so brilliant. But there are so many in this country and around the world that are too stupid to realize the stakes involved. I served during the Vietnam War and saw how the Media caused so many casualties and led to our loss.

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