The New York Times is lying to you about genocide.
Now they found their man — an Israeli! a Jew! — to give Times readers exactly what they want to hear: that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, no matter how remotely untrue and unverified this is.
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As a teenage journalism student at San Diego State University, 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 last week, 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 Jews 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 — as in the world-renowned terrorist group. 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 two 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 6 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.
And now they found their man — an Israeli! a Jew! — to give Times readers exactly what they want to hear: that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, no matter how remotely untrue and unverified this is.
By publishing Omer Bartov’s piece under the headline “I Know It When I See It,” the Times is implying that this accusation is not merely an opinion, but an objective truth delivered from on high by a man whose credentials supposedly place him beyond reproach. And that’s precisely the trick: Hide ideological bias behind the façade of expertise, and call it fact.1
“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,” according to James Bennet, a former editor at the Times. “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.”
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
Omer Bartov has turned himself into one of these “enlightened few” — people who sit in ivory towers and pontificate and cajole 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 never 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 Bartov seems to take pleasure in slandering Israel while leveraging academic credentials that include “the Holocaust” is sickening beyond measure. It is a grotesque betrayal of history. A man entrusted with teaching the horrors of the Holocaust — a crime that left one-third of global Jewry dead — now weaponizes that very history to smear the Jewish state because less than 100,000 Gazans have died in this war, many of which are members of, affiliated with, and/or used as human shields by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is not just intellectually dishonest; it is a complete perversion of the term genocide, genocide studies, and the Holocaust.
Frankly, this man should be fired for gross incompetence.
Now, let’s talk about what is happening in Gaza: a horrific war. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been evacuated from their homes, living in tent cities, eating food out of humanitarian boxes, constantly hearing the sounds of bullets and explosions.
But here’s the other side of this coin: Israel didn’t start this war. Hamas did. A terrorist group that proudly proclaims Israel’s destruction as its mission unleashed unimaginable barbarity on October 7, 2023. Israel rightfully and legally responded, and it is not Israel’s responsibility to safeguard the well-being of those governed by its enemy; that duty belongs to Hamas.
If Hamas refuses to protect and look after its own people during a war that Hamas started, then here’s a crazy-but-actually-not-crazy-at-all idea: Hamas should be uprooted entirely from Gaza, for the sake of those very civilians it exploits and for the security of the nation it savagely attacked. I believe that’s what they call a “win-win.”
But you don’t see The New York Times publishing articles by “scholars” imploring the removal of Hamas from Gaza, perhaps with the headline: “I’m a jihadist scholar. I know it when I see it.”
You don’t see the Times commissioning op-eds about how Hamas has spent nearly two decades syphoning billions of dollars from so-called “humanitarian aid” to turn Gaza into a jihadist mega-fortress — a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the streets and people’s homes, as well as terrorist infrastructure hidden inside schools, mosques, hospitals, and even UN offices — all while everyday Gazans live in utter poverty and oppression.
Of all stories and scoops, this should be the scandal of the decade (of the century?), reported first and foremost by The New York Times!
But no, the Times wants you to believe that the devastation in Gaza is some arbitrary act of Israeli malice, not the direct consequence of Israel targeting Hamas’ military infrastructure — infrastructure deliberately embedded within civilian life for one cynical purpose: to ensure that when Israel fights back, it can be branded as a “genocider.”
And that’s all you need to know about The New York Times and what it publishes. It is morally obscene and journalistically illiterate.
Genocide is not a synonym for “a war I don’t like.” Genocide is not “civilian casualties in an urban battlefield against a terrorist group deliberately hiding in hospitals and schools.” Genocide is the systematic annihilation of a people with the intent to erase them from existence. That’s what Hamas tried to do on October 7th. That’s what they would do again tomorrow if given the chance.
But Omer Bartov and The New York Times don’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 authority, 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 of genocide 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 you about Biden. They’re lying to you about Israel. And they will keep lying to you, so long as the lies serve their agenda.
I know it when I see it.
“When the New York Times lost its way.” The Economist.
“Resignation Letter.” Bari Weiss.
“אני במילואים בזמן מלחמה. תחביב זה לא.” Ynet News.
I was taken aback by the title of Bar-Tov’s op Ed. He appointed himself judge and jury having zero actual knowledge of what is actually happening. It feels like he is writing from a place of hatred for his own country and that is something I will never understand. I wrote about this phenomenon but this piece goes much deeper. Great essay.
We used to tease that copies of the NYT were mostly useful for lining bird cages. Now, out of respect for their pets, many have discontinued even this practice.
The NYT and their colleagues at the New York Review of Books had a long-standing tradition of always trotting out some hack with a Hebrew-sounding name whenever they published a libelous article that smeared Israel. Hey, if even a Jew says it, it must be true...