The New York Times is lying about Israel (again).

One of America’s most influential newspapers continues to launder ideology through “opinion,” amplify unverified narratives, and disguise antisemitism as journalism.

photo: Rafael Hoyos Weht/Unsplash

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As a teenage journalism student at San Diego State University in 2007, I used to be in awe of the New York Times.

It seemed like the gold standard, the newspaper every professor held up as the model of integrity, accuracy, and fearless reporting. We were taught to revere its pages as if they were holy writ — the benchmark of what it meant to pursue truth in a world crowded with noise.

Back then, the dream for many of us wasn’t just to become a journalist; it was to become a New York Times journalist. Because if you made it there, it meant you had made it, period.

But over the years, I’ve learned that the New York Times is not textbook journalism. It was actually never a beacon of truth, but always a factory of narratives, intellectually disguised with the right branding, diction, and headlines — where opinion is dressed up as fact, and facts are selectively curated to reinforce a warped worldview.

The latest example? An op-ed published this week, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” It alleged “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

But that’s not all. The author claims that some “Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners.” You read that correctly: dogs being coached to rape prisoners.

The op-ed was written by Nicholas Kristof, a journalist and political commentator. One of his primary sources was the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, an organization headed by Ramy Abdu and Mazen Kahel. Both are alleged to have ties to Hamas.

As for Kristof, it makes little sense that a journalist — much less one who has won two Pulitzer Prizes — would write an opinion piece. Actual journalists do real reporting and write articles and investigative reports, not opinion pieces. If this piece was so well-sourced, if every side of the story was covered (which is how real journalism works), why was it published in the opinion section? It makes no sense.

But here’s where both the New York Times and Kristof reveal themselves: By writing under the banner of “opinion,” Kristof can effectively write whatever he wants (even if that means libeling Israelis) and the New York Times can claim innocence against said libel because, after all, it’s in the “opinion” section.

Never mind if Kristof’s piece is full of lies, exaggerations, and half-truths.

I’m reminded of another “opinion” piece published in the New York Times last year, titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” It was written by Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian and the Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

In this op-ed, Bartov accuses Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, cloaking his arguments in the moral authority of his academic title and the historical weight of the word “genocide.” The Times amplified his claim without hesitation, feeding the narrative that Israel, a nation born in the ashes of an actual genocide, is now guilty of the very crime that defined the Jewish condition in the 20th century.

This is not journalism; it is propaganda dressed as moral scholarship. And it is not new. The Times has a long and troubling record of shaping reality rather than reporting it.

Remember, this is the same New York Times that spent more than a year trying to convince us that Joe Biden — at 80-plus years old, visibly frail, prone to confusion, unable to finish sentences — was perfectly fit for reelection as U.S. president. They assured the American public that concerns about his age were overblown, the stuff of partisan hysteria. They told us to trust their reporting, their “sources,” their judgment. We all know how that story ended.

And this is the same New York Times which published an op-ed by Gaza City’s mayor, an appointee of Hamas. Never mind that it is against U.S. law to render material assistance to foreign terrorist organizations, of which Hamas is one.

These are just three of countless examples of the Times’ distorted views on reality, and it is not a recent trend. Let’s go back 80 years: During the Holocaust, when six million Jews were being exterminated in just six years, the Times buried the story day after day, month after month. Reports of the mass slaughter of Europe’s Jews were tucked deep inside the paper, hidden in small columns on the inside pages. Never front-page headlines. Never the urgency that the truth demanded. Certainly never with the prominence and saturation that the Times has devoted to this Gaza war.

By publishing these “opinion” pieces, the Times has plausible deniability for any wrongdoing, while many of its readers take everything it publishes as fact because “the Times said so.” That is not journalism; it is intellectual fraud.

James Bennet, a former editor at the Times, reminded us what has become painstakingly clear:

“Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics. The paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial — and this misleads them about their country’s center of political and cultural gravity.”¹

According to former Times editor Bari Weiss, “A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”²

Nicholas Kristof, Omer Bartov, and many others have turned themselves into some of these “enlightened few” — people who sit in ivory towers and pontificate and pander to each other, but are completely disconnected from reality. That Bartov is Israeli is but a matter of where he was born; that he works for Brown University, an “elite” institution, is of far more significance to him, and he needs to ensure that he is the “good Jew” among his colleagues, framing Israel as a genocider without having ever stepped foot in Gaza since October 7th, and having no real intelligence to back up his dubious “Gaza genocide” claims.

You know who has been in Gaza? Gadi Ezra, an IDF reservist. His words, exactly:

“None of us consider killing a hobby. This is a factual statement. Not just moral, not just legal, not just informative. This is the simple truth: Civilians are killed on the battlefield. This is part of the terrible phenomenon called war.”

“The permission for this, by the way, was not determined in Jerusalem. It was defined in the Geneva Conventions. In the polished legal language, it is called ‘collateral damage.’ And when it happens in front of you, it is tragic. It is difficult. It is horrifying. But it certainly does not provide pleasure.”³

That Kristof and Bartov seem to take pleasure in slandering Israel while leveraging lofty credentials is unacceptable, unless you ask the New York Times. And that’s all you need to know about the Times. It is morally obscene and journalistically illiterate.

“Opinion” is not a synonym for “this must be true.” But the New York Times doesn’t care about accuracy; they care about shaping the narrative. Just as this publication (and many others) spent months gaslighting Americans about Biden’s physical and mental fitness, they are now gaslighting the world about Israel’s legitimacy. They do it by laundering opinion through credential, by giving the illusion of truth through selective facts and loaded language.

The consequences of this aren’t academic; the New York Times knows exactly what it’s doing when it amplifies baseless accusations against Israel in a world already on fire with antisemitism. They know Jewish students on college campuses will pay the price. They know Jewish communities worldwide will feel the ripple effects in the form of threats, harassment, and violence. And yet, they press “publish” because it serves their ideological ends.

The truth is this: The New York Times has forfeited its role as a neutral arbiter of facts. It is not the paper of record; it is the paper of narratives. They lied to us about Biden. They’re lying to us about Israel. And they will keep lying to us, so long as the lies serve their agenda.

I know it when I see it.

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1. “When the New York Times lost its way.” The Economist.

2. “Resignation Letter.” bariweiss.com.

3. “אני במילואים בזמן מלחמה. תחביב זה לא.” Ynet News.