Not that they are necessarily working on how to help bring such incidents to
light and help fight antisemitism.
No.
Instead, there are those in the media trying to figure out how best to
frame
these attacks, or to omit altogether.
On July 5, The Guardian reported, ‘Torrent of abuse’: Jewish man targeted twice in an hour in London:
A Jewish man subjected to antisemitic abuse twice in an hour in central London was physically threatened because of his appearance, his family have said.The article goes on to note that according to the brother, Yosef received “ugly racist remarks and death threats” and that there British Jewish groups reported a "horrific surge" in antisemitic attacks:
The man, named only as Yosef, was on his way home when he was subjected to a “torrent of abuse”, with threats made to his life.
Footage showed the researcher from north London travelling on a bus to Oxford Street just before midnight on 3 July when another passenger got up and began to verbally assault him.
Later the same evening while walking down an escalator at Oxford Circus tube station, he was subjected to further antisemitic abuse by another male.
The Community Security Trust (CST) recorded 351 antisemitic incidents between 8 and 31 May, more than for any single month since records began in 1986.
The CST said the rise was fuelled by antisemitic reactions to the escalation of violence in Israel and Gaza. It called the situation “utterly predictable and completely disgraceful”.
So from the article, we can tease out:
o A Jew was attacked verbally and almost physicallyo There were death threatso The attack followed the Israel-Hamas war the previous month
What did the journalist leave out of the story?
It refrained from connecting the dots.
According to CAMERA UK, the actual threats were not mentioned, nor how prevalent they were:
o One of the things the perpetrator yelled was “Free Palestine”
o According to the recording, this person threatened "I'll slit your throat for Palestine"o The journalist mentioned the CST report without noting that CST pointed out that there were "several incidents of individuals shouting 'Free Palestine' with abusive or threatening language or gestures at random Jewish people, who are selected for abuse because they are Jewish"
The CAMERA article concludes:
So, the reporter had the information to properly contextualise the antisemitic incident in question by noting that it fits a pattern of racist behavior – as well as attitudes – towards Jews by pro-Palestinian activists in the UK. But, by omitting this crucial information about the perpetrator’s Palestine-related verbal abuse, she failed to do so.While the media has not been shy to describe attacks on Jews when they can be tied to "right-wing" racists, when the perpetrators are left-wing or Muslim, the attackers are often faceless and vague.
Enter The New York Times, which has discovered an easy way to get around
this problem!
Just don't report those kinds of attacks on Jews.
Rabbi Shlomo Noginski was stabbed repeatedly on July 1 outside a Jewish school building in Boston. A rally the next day organized by Boston Jewish community groups drew Boston’s acting mayor, the district attorney, and a member of Congress. An individual, Khaled Awad, was arrested in connection with the attack and pleaded not guilty to assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and assault and battery on a police officer. People who knew Awad in Florida described him as violent and “antisemitic.”
A national, even international news story? Plenty of news organization thought so.
...But for the New York Times, the news wasn’t fit to print.
Stoll's claim that the Times has not covered the story is easy to check:
And the New York Times omission may be part of a growing pattern of the Times's blindness to Jew-hatred:
It’s at least the second time recently that the Times has skipped covering news of an attack on a Jewish target. In May, rock-throwing attacks against four synagogues in the Bronx attracted coverage from CNN, the Daily Mail, the Washington Post, the Arizona Republic, and the Wall Street Journal. Then, too, the Times apparently found the news not fit to print, and the metro editor failed to respond to an Algemeiner inquiry about why the Times thought the attacks weren’t newsworthy. [emphasis added]
In his May article on how The New York Times ignored the 4 rock-throwing attacks on Bronx synagogues, Stoll wrote:
Yet the New York Times — which has as part of its name “New York,” the city where the attacks happened — hasn’t found the news fit to print.
A search on the Times website for the name “Jordan Burnette,” the person arrested and charged on 42 counts, including hate crimes, for the attacks, produces no results from 2021. A search for “Riverdale,” the Bronx neighborhood where the synagogues were targeted, turns up no results about these synagogue attacks, either. [emphasis added]
Writing for The Washington Examiner, Melissa Langsam Braunstein notes the obvious spike in antisemitic attacks in New York City:
Since the NYPD regularly updates hate crime data, let’s review New York’s statistics. Of the 238 hate crimes reported in the nation’s largest city from Jan. 1 through May 30 of this year, 86 targeted Jews. This marked a 37% increase over January to May 2020.
So why is The New York Times burying these stories?
Stoll considers some possibilities.
One possibility is The New York Times's bias against Orthodox Jews,
a pattern we have written about before.
Another possibility is that the Times does not want to consider its own role
in the increase in antisemitism and anti-Jewish attacks:
Perhaps at least part of the reason the Times can’t bear to share the news of violent attacks on synagogues in New York or a rabbi in Boston is because a fair-minded, thorough investigation into such attacks might eventually force the newspaper to examine unflinchingly the role that the Times’ own coverage has played in inciting the violence. For anyone who makes the mistake of actually believing what the Times writes about the Jews — killing innocent children in Gaza in a possible war crime, spreading the coronavirus via skullcaps — attacking Jews might actually be a logical step. That’s not a legal or moral excuse for the perpetrators of violent antisemitic acts. But it is a call for the Times to reckon honestly with its own role in stoking hatred of Jews. Or, if that’s asking too much, at least to stop suppressing the news of such violent attacks from the newspaper’s readers. [emphasis added]
A final consideration, according to Stoll, is that while The New York Times
was ready to report on antisemitic attacks and even saturate its pages
with such stories while Trump was president (Trump’s Big Achievement: Making the New York Times Care About
Antisemitism) -- now, "the Times has abandoned interest just as rapidly as it had
acquired it."
While any or all of these possibilities may explain The New York Times's
self-imposed editorial lobotomy, the merging of their anti-Jewish and
anti-Israel bias into a full-fledged news blackout is a new
development in its agenda.
The well-known motto of the Times --
All The News That's Fit To Print -- is a promise to the reader that
the paper will be the go-to destination for reporting on everything that is
going on in the world that people want to know about.
But it also implies a promise of honesty, that The New York Times will not
hide important news from its readers -- news and information that its
readers need to know and be aware of.
The New York Times has broken this promise.
