Faces of 60+ slain Palestinian children on NYT front page

New York Times front page features images of 65 children killed in recent attack on Gaza. Almost all are Palestinian.

JVL Introduction

In an extraordinary shift, the New York Times has finally acknowledged the human suffering caused by the Israel-Palestinian conflict, borne overwhelmingly by its Palestinian victims.

It did so, graphically, by publishing the faces of the children who died in the recent war on Gaza – 67 of them Palestinian, 2 Israeli.

For Abe Foxman, National Director Emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League in the US, showing the humanity of the Palestinians is all too much.

He accuses the New York Times of perpetrating an antisemitic “blood libel” for publishing these images…

Long may this shift of perspective flourish in the US media – and elsewhere.

This article was originally published by the New York Times on Fri 28 May 2021. Read the original here.

‘NYT’ puts faces of 60+ slain Palestinian children on front page, at last

We need to acknowledge what an extraordinary moment this is. Mainstream media are finally focused on Israeli attacks on Palestinian children.

The New York Times did the unprecedented, and devoted a huge portion of its front page to the images of 65 children, almost all of them Palestinian, killed during the recent onslaught. The accompanying report is almost impossible to look at, it is the face of innocence, beauty, hope, all defiled. Notes the Times:

Nearly all of the children killed were Palestinian.

In all 69 children were killed, two of them Israelis. Nothing like this took place in 2014 when Israel killed 526 children. While in 2018, the New York Times ran four columnists’ justifications of Israel’s slaughter of over 200 unarmed protesters on the Gaza border, as well as the maiming of thousands more.

From Jim Zogby:

Never thought I’d see the day when Palestinian victims were pictured, named, & their stories told. These children deserve to be known. Showing us the humanity of Palestinians is an important 1st step in forcing a recognition that #PalestiniansLivesMatter & insuring their rights

Ali Abunimah:

This makes me feel bitter. For decades @nytimes has been and remains one of the leading outlets for racist  Zionist propaganda dehumanizing Palestinians and justifying their murder. This does not wash their crimes away.

And notice the angry/unhinged response from Abe Foxman. The news is antisemitic; publishing such pictures is a “blood libel.”

I am cancelling my subscription to NYTimes. I grew up in America on the NYT… but no more. Today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough..

Also significant in the changing optics of the conflict in the United States was this stirring NBC Nightly News report by Andrea Mitchell from Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem two nights ago. The veteran international correspondent’s report was an insistent call on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to stop the evictions of Palestinians. It featured Dr. Ahmad Tibi, the Palestinian member of Knesset, telling Blinken to “intervene”– yes, Ahmad Tibi on NBC Nightly News. Mitchell:

Protests today in East Jerusalem where 700 more Palestinians are fighting evictions to make room for Jewish settlers. The first question I got when I got here is, What did Blinken say? What did Blinken say? They wanted to know, what did the U.S. Secretary of State say about the threat that they are going to be evicted from their homes?

Today they have new hope after Blinken said Israel should stop demolishing their homes.

The best part of the report was when Mitchell observed the brutal arrest of a child, and said so:

We don’t know how this started, but we saw a 15 year old boy getting beaten and carried off  by police. People say, ‘Leave him, he is a child, he is a child!’”

NBC Nightly News features photo of Palestinian boy beaten by Israeli police in occupied Sheikh Jarrah, May 26, 2021. Screenshot.

We can only hope that this emphasis will continue in the U.S. press, including a look at some of the 100s of thousands of young people in Gaza denied any hope of fulfilling their dreams.

Israel lobbyists are seeing what we are seeing and they’re panicked. CAMERA points to a string of pro-Palestinian op-eds in the New York Times op-ed page– “balanced” today by a religious Zionist offering from Rabbi David Wolpe about how Jews have been in that land since biblical days.

That string includes Diana Buttu’s fine piece on the “nakba, the ethnic cleaning of Palestine,” that details the destruction of her father’s village of Mujaydil and the creation on its lands of a Jewish-only town called Migdal Haemek.

That piece was accompanied by this excellent graphic on the loss of land under assigned Palestinian control since 1948. The graphic is similar to one featured in Palestinian solidarity postcards and posters.

New York Times graphic accompanying Diana Buttu piece on the nakba. May 2021.

The Times response to the criticism is laughable, saying that the image is an “artwork’ that is not meant to convey historical information!

Map of disappearing Palestinian territory, from a Palestinian solidarity group.

P.S. Weiss notes: In 2014, Brooke Gladstone hosted me on the NPR show “On the Media” to talk about the 526 Palestinian children then being killed in Gaza. Gladstone got a lot of pushback from pro-Israel folks at the time; which may explain why “On the Media” hasn’t touched the issue since, that I’m aware of. (Please tell me I’m wrong Brooke).

Comments (4)

  • DJ says:

    The graphic in this piece demonstrates the predatory nature of Israeli settler colonialism. Palestine has been consumed by an ongoing nakba. We need to get back to the original meaning of the slogan, “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free”. This means a one state solution. It doesn’t have to mean replacing Jewish supremacy with Jewish subjugation or expulsion as the Zionists would have us all believe. Palestinians are not intrinsically anti semitic. It is possible to create a democratic and secular state which treats of all of its citizens as equal no matter what their religion in the Middle East.

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  • Tim says:

    This is all very well but I can’t get the stench of fickle opportunism out of my nostrils. Where was the MSM standing on Palestine up until about 5 mins ago?

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  • Stephen Coombes says:

    N.Y.T, Brave, Laudable, and much much to Late. Rest in Pieces Palestine.

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  • George Wilmers says:

    None other than Abe Foxman considers the New York Times to be antisemitic for publishing photos of all 67 children killed in the latest violence, presumably because 65 of them were Gazans. I wonder if Keir Starmer supports Abe Foxman or the NYT in this.

    This suggests an idea for something harmlessly to occupy the time of the anonymous inquisitors of the Legal and Governance unit of the Labour Party. I suggest writing to them with the following type of request:

    “Dear Anonymice of the Legal and Governance Unit,

    I am considering posting on social media the following [article/cartoon/video from a mainstream US source e.g. NYT] which certain prominent zionists consider to be antisemitic. However since I do not wish to be subjected to a notice of investigation for possible antisemitism, I would be grateful if you would vet this material now in advance, and communicate to me your judgement as to whether or not the material is in your opinion acceptable or not.

    I hope that you will not consider this request burdensome; if you do, then please allow me to point out that it is probably less burdensome for you than the alternative, which would be that I post the material, an anonymous complaint is made against me, and you are then obliged to go through the formalities of a full investigation. Moreover if such vetting were to be encouraged and adopted systematically by you, it would have the following advantages:

    (1). The number of presumed antisemites in the Labour Party would be dramatically reduced to the relief of all concerned.

    (2) A voluminous body of Labour Party Governance ‘hypothetical case law judgements’ on the subject of antisemitism could be built up and published for the edification (and deterrence) of well meaning potential antisemites, and for use by the Anonymice themselves in case of ideological difficulty, with the tremendous advantage that the potential miscreants would not be required actually to risk offending in order to generate the ‘case law’.

    (3). In cases where what is antisemitic or not reveals itself as subject to sudden and unexpected change over a short period of time, the Legal and Governance unit could issue a proclamation concerning the official change of party line, thus further reducing the possibility that loyal party members might accidentally generate needless and time consuming inquisitions for possible breaches of the generally unfathomable Labour Party rule 8.1.2 on permitted expressions of opinion. New Labour Party rules will of course have to be introduced to deal with the formal problems generated by such unexpected changes in the intrinsic meaning of antisemitism, such as the status of previous convictions. However this should be of no greater difficulty than that encountered by the British state in dealing with e.g. previous convictions for homosexuality, and adopting the precautionary procedure of waiting until any persons who may have been wrongfully convicted have been dead for a number of years before granting them a posthumous pardon, would seem to be an eminently practical way of dealing with such anomalies.

    Yours etc. “

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