Posted on 09/14/2026 5:34:08 AM PDT by Eli Kopter
Walt Kelly’s Pogo once declared, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” For the Jewish people, that enemy has too often worn the face of institutional power held by their own. No institution better illustrates this tragic dynamic than The New York Times — America’s self-styled “newspaper of record.” For over a century, the Times has exhibited a consistent pattern of minimizing Jewish suffering, sanitizing threats, and framing Jewish self-defense in ways that echo classic antisemitic tropes. The betrayal cuts deeper precisely because so many of its architects have been Jews seeking acceptance in elite circles. Sometimes the worst antisemites are not the Nazis or radical Islamists, but those who come from the ranks of our own people.
This is not a crude conspiracy but a documented institutional failure. First driven by assimilationist dread of seeming “too Jewish,” later by progressive ideology that casts Jews and Israel as oppressors, the Times has repeatedly chosen social and ideological comfort over moral clarity.
On November 21, 1922, the Times published its first major article on Adolf Hitler. Correspondent Cyril Brown acknowledged the Nazi leader’s “violent anti-Semitism” but immediately downplayed it: reliable sources assured him it was “not so genuine or violent as it sounded” — merely “bait to catch masses of followers.” Once in power, Brown suggested, Hitler would moderate. Existential hatred was reduced to cynical politics.
As Nazi persecution hardened into state law in the 1930s, the Times’ Berlin bureau routinely pulled its punches. This editorial cowardice came directly from the top. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, a Reform Jew of German descent, was a fierce anti-Zionist obsessed with the fear that the Times would be perceived as a “Jewish newspaper” pleading for Jewish causes. As documented by historian Deborah Lipstadt in Beyond Belief, the Times went out of its way to universalize specifically anti-Jewish atrocities. Under Sulzberger’s directive, stories of state-sanctioned violence against Jews were systematically buried on inside pages or stripped of their identity, vaguely framed as general “persecutions” of political dissidents or “minorities.”
The wartime coverage of the Times remains one of the most egregious institutional failures in the history of journalism. In her definitive 2005 exposé, Buried by the Times, journalism professor Laurel Leff meticulously lays bare the statistics of this silence. Between 1939 and 1945, the Times published nearly 1,200 stories detailing the slaughter of Europe’s Jews. Yet, out of roughly 24,000 front-page articles published during the war, only 26 ever made the front page, and only six explicitly identified Jews as the primary victims in the headline.
The horror was actively hidden in plain sight. In July 1942, a report confirming Germany had already slaughtered 700,000 Jews in Poland was squeezed into a tiny, single-column note on page 5. In December 1942, when the Allies issued a solemn declaration condemning the cold-blooded extermination of two million Jews, the Times relegated the story to page 10. Even the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a historic stand of Jewish resistance, was treated as a minor, passing skirmish, denied any editorial prominence.
Historian David S. Wyman, in The Abandonment of the Jews, shows how the Times’ influence on American elites helped mute public outrage and enabled the Roosevelt administration’s restrictive refugee policies. Even after the war, Sulzberger clung to the view that Zionism posed a greater danger than the plight of survivors. Former executive editor A.M. Rosenthal later called this silence an indelible stain.
Skepticism of Jewish sovereignty persisted after 1948. Coverage of Israel often portrayed it as a destabilizing force rather than a necessary refuge for a shattered people. By the 1970s and 1980s, legitimate policy critique sometimes slid into rhetoric about excessive Jewish power and dual loyalty. The 1982 Lebanon War drew sharp criticism from media monitors for systematic imbalance.
The pattern reached new intensity after the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacres. Linguistic disparities became glaring: Israeli civilian deaths described clinically, Palestinian casualties (often sourced uncritically from Hamas channels) rendered with visceral outrage. Context on human shields and Hamas strategy frequently vanished.
This reached a crescendo on May 11, 2026, with Nicholas Kristof’s column “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” Kristof alleged widespread, near-systemic sexual violence by Israeli soldiers, settlers, guards, and interrogators — including extreme claims like dogs trained for assault. He leaned heavily on sources with documented Hamas links while creating a false moral equivalence to the October 7 atrocities. Israel denounced it as a modern blood libel; Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry announced plans for a defamation lawsuit. In an age of instant global dissemination through podcasts, social media, and the internet, such an irresponsible and inflammatory article does not merely distort the record — it actively incentivizes more attacks against Jews by reinforcing the ancient image of the Jew as uniquely sadistic and depraved.
The tragedy is compounded when Jews themselves staff the machinery. “Jewish self-hatred” — the internalization and redirection of antisemitic tropes for acceptance — fractures Ahavat Yisrael, the sacred bond of mutual responsibility that sustained the Jewish people through centuries of exile. When Jewish journalists and editors provide intellectual cover for narratives that demonize the Jewish state or minimize Jewish trauma, they do more damage than any external critic. They legitimize hostility and erode the communal covenant of defense.
Sulzberger’s assimilationist anxiety has evolved into today’s progressive binary: Jews as “white-adjacent” successes and Israel as a powerful state automatically fit the “oppressor” category. Jewish ownership, far from correcting bias, now serves as a convenient shield against accusations of antisemitism.
From Cyril Brown’s 1922 dismissal of Hitler’s hatred as tactical, to the buried Holocaust reports, to Kristof’s 2026 blood libel redux, the Times reveals a century-long institutional tilt. It is not cartoon villainy but something more insidious: the quiet prioritization of elite approval and ideological fashion over Jewish security and truth.
The historical record — painstakingly assembled by Leff, Wyman, Lipstadt, and others — demands honest reckoning. Until The New York Times confronts this mirror without deflection, it will continue failing both journalism and the Jewish people at their moments of greatest need.
They sure aren’t. But they DO have the most far reaching and egregious record of anti-semitism and outright lying that reaches back nearly a century now.
I’m disturbed by the level of antisemitism we see ramping up today. Since October 2023.
And its coming from almost every direction and from places I have never seen it before or would ever expect to see it from.
If Dog Squeeze could write it would be for the NY Times.
Analysis: The Democrats have decided they don’t need the Jews to win.
And they know Jews will still vote for them 75-25% no matter what
If only Trump and the Republicans would understand that
I think of it as ‘self loathing Jew syndrome’. SLJS. Not sure if there is a fix.
Walt was so prescient . The Schulzbergers attitude towards the Christian host nation they unprecedentedly prospered in is disgusting as is their attitude at times to Jewish conservatives and Israel not to mention their love of the USSR and ignoring Jewish refugees in WWII
if someone had a target list if the war for the idea of the founders America and western civilization goes hot they should be near the top of the list
I rarely pay attention anymore but they along with CNN and talk show guys like Colbert and Oliver and Stewart and Kimmel and WashPo are where leftists get “informed”. They don’t have the body of podcasts we rely on because they don’t need it plus google front loads everything they want to hear anyhow to fit their victim/virtue signaling mindset personalities particularly for women
The owners and editorial gatekeepers of the New York Times are indeed a tier one enemy to anyone on this forum
In private NYT reporter and Purlitzer Prize winner, Walter Duranty estimated 10 million dead due to famine. He did not report this because The New York Times, according to Duranty, had an agreement with the Soviet government that his dispatches always reflect the opinion of the Soviet government. https://holodomorct.org/holodomor-information-links/holodomor-primary-sources
And Christian conservatives often fail to grasp this
I try hard to thread this needle
Right now the Fellowship of Christian and Jews is planting Israel flags everywhere they can which I support but not for my Christian reasons
Israel took the land they have a right to fight to keep it doesn’t matter who was first after the journey from Ur
But rarely do Christian righties acknowledge or even know just how determined leftist Jews oppose most of what they stand for and have for generations
And it’s not without some justification honestly they fear the host wherever Jews live distinctly
They are often persecuted but it always becomes a dog chasing its tail
Sad to say in Eastern Europe many did embrace anarchy and later Bolshevism and why …. Their govts and monarchies were often ugly to them is why along with other nuance inherent to secular Jewish identity
Like I said thread the needle between my own hostility towards those trying to alter or destroy what my ancestors built and acknowledging legit concerns and more importantly the 25-30% many of whom are friends and associates and allies
Yep Duranty was just awful
I remember my grandfather detested him
Yep Duranty was just awful
I remember my grandfather detested him
I consider myself a “Truth Seeker”. I have lived in Israel and I study with Chabad, even though I am not Jewish. It disgusts me to see what the Media is doing to Jews in this country as well as their treatment of Israel, but it is all prophesied in Tanach and the Christian Testament.
They knew about the Holocaus and buried the coverage (to the extent that they covered it at all) deep inside the paper t avoid looking “too Jewish.” Meanwhile, they smuggled the Ochs-Sulzberger family out of Europe.
They knew Walter Duranty ws lying about the Ukrainian famine but printed his accounts anyway.
They knew about the persecution of Soviet Jewry and minimized it.
And there is so much more.
I was a big fan of Pogo and the denizens of the Okefenokee Swamp.
IIRC, Walt Kelly was referring to pollution when he had Pogo say “we have met the enemy and he is us”, although it’s applicable to all sorts of subjects.
Kelly wrote it for the original Earth Day back in 1970. Earth Day being one of the many gifts to greater Liberal culture by the always misguided and clueless Republican Establishment.
There are more muzzies than Jewish voters.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.