Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: New York Times

Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

The Lie on the Front Page: What the New York Times Chose to Show—and Hide (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

It wasn’t a mistake when The New York Times ran a front-page photo of a skeletal 18-month-old Gazan boy and claimed he was suffering from starvation. It was a deliberate editorial choice — a lie that fit the preferred narrative: Israel is genocidal.

Even Fox News missed the point. Their headline—“NY Times' erroneous cover photo… joins series of media blunders”—called it an error, a media blunder. But this was no “oops.” It was propaganda. And the proof is in the cropping.

Let me just start with other images the media chose not to use. Photographs of Mohammed with his 3-year-old brother Joud. Both mother and brother are healthy and fed.

Any honest journalist should have immediately questioned – and reported - what we were actually seeing. 3/13 pic.twitter.com/FaUsVFsqb2
— David Collier (@mishtal) July 27, 2025

The boy’s healthy brother was edited out of the image. The Times didn’t disclose the child’s medical history until days later, after pressure from Israeli officials. Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq has cerebral palsy, hypoxemia, and a severe genetic disorder. He requires specialized nutrition and therapy—not a ceasefire.

Unlike his brother standing by his side, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq suffers from cerebral palsy.

But BBC, CNN, Daily Express, and The New York Times spread a misleading story using a picture of a sick, disabled child to promote a narrative of mass starvation in Gaza —… pic.twitter.com/UzP5PhNSvU
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) July 29, 2025

The Times eventually tacked on a note that the child had “pre-existing health problems,” but the damage was done. The image had gone viral, a global symbol of “Israeli starvation.” The Times knew what it was doing. That’s why it buried the correction in the digital story and posted it from a PR account with under 90,000 followers—not their main feed with over 55 million.

We have appended an Editors' Note to a story about Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a child in Gaza who was diagnosed with severe malnutrition. After publication, The Times learned that he also had pre-existing health problems. Read more below. pic.twitter.com/KGxP3b3Q2B
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) July 29, 2025

And when real starvation did appear—this time in the form of emaciated Israeli hostages like Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski—the Times’ front page was silent. No photos. No headlines. Just a weak, secondary article headlined, “Hundreds Protest in Tel Aviv After Hostage Videos Surface From Gaza.”

Nothing about Evyatar digging his own grave. No image of Rom weeping, his ribs protruding. Nothing of the horror that millions of Israelis felt—not just a “handful” of Tel Aviv protesters.

As Yaakov Ort, a former NYT staffer, put it: “If the Times had a Jerusalem bureau that reported the thoughts, communications and actions of the vast majority of Israelis… they would have told readers that the reaction… is not fear or protest. It is horror, rage, and resolve.”

The excuse? Mohammed’s condition had worsened due to war. But as Israeli pediatrician Dr. Michal Feldon said, “I’ve been a pediatrician for 20 years and we never see kids looking like this, even very chronically ill children. When we do, we suspect abuse.” Prof. Dan Turner added, “Even patients with background diseases should not be malnourished like that.” In Gaza, it’s not just illness—it’s lack of access, lack of formula, and yes, Hamas theft of humanitarian aid.

This wasn’t bad journalism. It was anti-Jewish narrative warfare—the blood libel of our time, illustrated by a carefully framed photo and a willfully ignored truth.

Because in today’s media: a carefully staged image used to falsely accuse Israel of starvation is front-page news — but the real starvation, suffering, and desperation of Israeli hostages doesn’t make it in at all.

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The @NYTimes' journalistic malpractice to create a false narrative about Mamdani-supporting Jews

The New York Times writes:

Many Jewish Voters Back Mamdani. And Many Agree With Him on Gaza.
Zohran Mamdani won over Jewish voters in New York City who were energized by his economic agenda and unbothered by — or sympathetic to — his views on Israel and Gaza.

Reading the article, you’d walk away with the clear impression that many Jewish voters supported him, and those who didn’t are either scared, confused, or comparing him to Nazis.

That framing isn't just misleading - it’s manipulative. And it follows a playbook that, once you see it, you can’t unsee.

Let’s start with the basics. Mamdani is a polarizing figure because of his aggressive criticism of Israel, including using terms like “apartheid” and “genocide.” That’s a third-rail issue in a city with America’s largest Jewish population. It is a fair journalistic question to ask how he won and what Jews think of him.

But instead of digging into the demographic complexity of New York’s Jewish voters - who range from Orthodox to unaffiliated, politically diverse, and often divided on Israel - the article builds a story around a very specific slice: activist Jews who already support Mamdani and align with his politics.

We hear from a bike mechanic canvasser, a philanthropy exec, a mother at a bus-themed Shabbat event—all Jewish, all pro-Mamdani, all used to build the narrative that Jewish support for Mamdani is meaningful and growing.

What we don’t hear is this: A poll conducted before the election showed Mamdani pulling around 20% of the Jewish vote. That’s not insignificant, but it’s far from the groundswell the article implies. And without that number, phrases like “many Jews supported him” or “double-digit support” are meaningless, designed to feel persuasive, not inform.

The number of words quoted from pro-Mamdani Jews outnumber criticism of Mamdani 435-165. That 2.6-to-1 imbalance portrays the opposite of reality: Most Jews do not support Mamdani and many are frightened about what his election would mean to their day to day lives in New York City. Those voices are minimized or ignored.

I asked a couple of AIs, based only on this article, what their impression of the percentage of Jewish voters appear to support Mamdani. Google Gemini estimated in the 40-50% range, Claude said 30-50%, ChatGPT said 40-60%. Has his support really tripled among Jews since the election, or are we being manipulated?

Then comes the “balance”: a rabbi who compares Mamdani’s win to the rise of the Nazi party in Austria. That’s not a counterargument; that’s a rhetorical trap. By choosing an extreme critic, the article defuses legitimate concerns and makes Mamdani’s Jewish critics look hysterical or out of touch.

This is manipulation of the reader on multiple levels. It is propaganda disguised as news reporting.

I previously looked at who the 20% of Jews who voted for Mamdani likely are. I noted a 2023 poll of New York City Jews:

16% said being Jewish was not important to them
27% said having Jewish grandchildren was not important to them
15% had no connection to the Jewish community
22% did not observe Yom Kippur
48% never participate in any Jewish programs
32% of those who give charity never give to Jewish organizations

Notice how these numbers all cluster around 20-25%.

In other words, the Jews who support Mamdani are the Jews who have already largely abandoned Judaism. They don’t represent the Jewish community: they represent very liberal New Yorkers who, by chance of birth, happen to be Jewish.

The article never defines what it means by “Jewish.” Are we talking about religiously observant Jews? Ethnic Jews? People of Jewish birth who enjoy bagels and lox? Or, in this case, the "as-a-Jews" - activists who only invoke their Jewishness when it’s time to defend anti-Israel positions?

This definitional slipperiness lets anyone with a Jewish identity - no matter how disconnected from Jewish communal life - serve as moral cover. That’s not representation. It’s exploitation.

It matters. This kind of reporting shapes how the public interprets Jewish opinion, antisemitism, and what counts as “mainstream.” When you stack the deck with cherry-picked voices and bury the demographic reality, you’re not just telling a story. You’re building a false moral consensus.

Worse, you are positioning New York Jews with legitimate fears of a Mamdani administration as irrational at best. The reality is that the Jewish majority who care about their people, their religion and Israel are overwhelmingly against Mamdani. Where are the articles about them?

Journalism like this isn’t just biased. It’s structurally deceptive.

And calling that out isn’t about partisanship. It’s about intellectual honesty.

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The @NYTimes master class in anti-Israel slander while adhering to journalistic "ethics": implying the IDF illegally uses poison gas

The New York Times Patrick Kingsley visited the tunnel directly underneath the European Hospital where Gaza leader Mohammed Sinwar was killed.

This section of the article is a perfect example of how a reporter can subtly accuse Israel of war crimes without violating any journalistic standards:

When we entered the tunnel on Sunday, we found it almost entirely intact. The crammed room where Mr. Sinwar and four fellow militants were said to have died was stained with blood, but its walls appeared undamaged. The mattresses, clothes and bedsheets did not appear to have been dislodged by the explosions, and an Israeli rifle — stolen earlier in the war, the soldiers said — dangled from a hook in the corner.

It was not immediately clear how Mr. Sinwar was killed, and General Defrin said he could not provide a definitive answer. He suggested that Mr. Sinwar and his allies may have suffocated in the aftermath of the strikes or been knocked over by a shock wave unleashed by explosions.

If Mr. Sinwar was intentionally poisoned by gases released by such explosions, it would raise legal questions, experts on international law said.

“It would be an unlawful use of a conventional bomb — a generally lawful weapon — if the intent is to kill with the asphyxiating gases released by that bomb,” said Sarah Harrison, a former lawyer at the U.S. Defense Department and an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

General Defrin denied any such intent. “This is something that I have to emphasize here, as a Jew first and then as a human being: We don’t use gas as weapons,” he said.

The evidence that the reporter saw was a mostly undamaged room with bloodstains. The Israeli general suggested two possible scenarios - suffocation as a secondary result of bombings, or a shockwave. He then quotes an expert saying if Israel's intent was to kill with gases from the bomb that would be illegal.

I asked an AI to rank the possibilities of how they died given the evidence. A shockwave is the most likely scenario: the pressure from a shockwave can easily cause internal injuries which would result in coughing blood.

#2 is that explosions nearby could consume the oxygen in the room, suffocating the people. Blood is less likely but possible from people struggling to breathe, yet the amount of blood described makes this seem unlikely.

Every other scenario (damage from shrapnel or debris from the airstrikes, tunnel damage) do not fit the evidence at all.

And intentional use of poison gas is the very bottom of the list: there would be no blood, there is zero evidence that the IDF would use that method.

So why is that possibility even discussed?

Did the legal expert bring this possibility up on her own? That seems unlikely, since forensics is not her area of expertise. It seems that Kingsley asked her about the legality of Israel intentionally using bombs with the intent to gas the terrorists to death (with the carbon monoxide that bombs might release?) something that makes no military sense.

So Kingsley made upo a war crime scenario, he got an expert to confirm that it could be a war crime, and he then could credibly quote the expert to surface the possibility, He then asks the general, who of course denies it, and now he created a "he said/she said" story out of literally nothing, but subtly implying for readers that there is a 50% chance that this could have happened that way.

It is the equivalent of asking an animal rights expert "If the IDF is strangling puppies with their bare hands, would this be an animal rights issue?" and then quoting an Israeli denial that they strangle puppies. See? They quoted both sides!

This is a particularly disgusting slander that is perfectly ethical according to journalistic standards. And the editors at the New York Times happily allow this one-sided reporting to be published.

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Who is more antisemitic: The Heritage Foundation or the New York Times?

Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times:

In The New York Times this weekend, Katie J.M. Baker described a fund-raising pitch that the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that gave us Project 2025, made for a campaign to crush a subversive movement that threatens “America itself.”

The pitch, she wrote, “presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by ‘progressive “elites” leading the way,’ which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois.” Whether intentionally or not, Heritage was deploying a classic antisemitic trope, the notion of the wealthy Jewish puppet master. In the contemporary version of this conspiracy theory, Soros looms especially large; the Anti-Defamation League has multiple pages on its website about the antisemitic underpinnings of right-wing claims that Soros is working to destabilize society.

Really? The Heritage Foundation published a pyramid that singled out Jews as puppet-masters?

I wanted to see this pyramid myself.

The top tier includes seven people, of whom only two are Jews.

That context changes the accusation of antisemitism a bit, doesn't it?

I haven't studied the Heritage Foundation's Project Esther in detail to see if the criticisms hold any water, but even the criticism of the Heritage Foundation mentioned disparagingly in the previous New York Times article shows how it is the NYT that is twisting facts, not the Heritage Foundation:

But the group decided to begin their own national task force and released a statement of purpose that affirmed a definition of antisemitism that is hotly debated because it considers some broad criticisms of Israel to be antisemitic.

Statement of Purpose
Antisemitism: We recognize any attempt to delegitimize, boycott, divest, or sanction the modern [state] of Israel or bar Jews from participating in academic or communal associations must be condemned. 

We recognize that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the different manifestations of the same hatred against Jewish people.

Let us be clear: anti-Zionism is not "broad criticisms of Israel." By definition, anti-Zionism states that Israel is - uniquely among all nations - illegitimate, and that the concept of a Jewish state itself is racist, while Arab and Muslim and Christian states are all kosher.

Anyone who claims that "anti-Zionism" is identical to "criticism of Israel" is being knowingly disingenuous. And that includes the New York Times here.

So here we have two examples where the New York Times is whitewashing antisemitism - one by extending a definition of antisemitism to include criticizing anti-Zionist Jews, and the other by limiting the definition of antisemitism by claiming that wanting the Jewish state destroyed is legitimate criticism and has nothing to do with Jews.

By summer 2024, Heritage had finalized a national strategy that aimed to convince the public to perceive the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States as part of a global “Hamas Support Network” that “poses a threat not simply to American Jewry, but to America itself.”

Once again, we must see if the facts support the Heritage Foundation or its critics.

Have we ever seen any of these "pro-Palestinian" groups condemn Hamas, outside of pro-forma "condemnations' of October 7 that end up blaming Jews for Hamas' actions? As far as I can tell, the answer is no. Which means that the Heritage Foundation's characterization of them being part of the Hamas "support network" is in fact accurate - their failure to hold Hamas to any standard whatsoever while demanding Israel adhere to their idea of moral perfection is effectively supporting Hamas.

Even their criticism that many of Project Esther's supporters are Christian, not Jewish, show their hypocrisy. Because the moral yardstick that they demand of Israel is not Jewish at all, but Christian - they are saying Israel must turn the other cheek in response to October 7, that destroying the terror group is a "disproportionate" response and that Israel should at best drop some symbolic bombs in open spaces to restore balance between the Jewish state and the Islamist terror group.

They effectively endorse Hamas' use of every Gazan as a human shield.

Maybe Project Esther goes too far; as I said, I have not examined it. But if these are the worst accusations that the New York Times can find against it, then it is the NYT's moral compass that is askew, not the Heritage Foundation's. And it is the New York Times that tacitly whitewashes some forms of antisemitism.

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Once again, @PeterBeinart in the @NYTimes supports those who violate Jewish rights on campus

Peter Beinart writes in the New York Times with an article originally titled "You Want to Protect Jewish Students? What About Jewish Student Protesters? and later "Trump Doesn’t Want to Protect All Jewish Students — Just Those on His Team."

You can already see where this is going:

On April 29, 2024, Tess Segal, a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Florida, joined her fellow activists at a prominent plaza on campus calling on the university to divest from weapons manufacturers and boycott academic institutions in Israel. Some protesters studied or played cards. Later they read obituaries of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip.

Then law enforcement moved in. And although Ms. Segal says she did not resist arrest, she was handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was held overnight.

....In an era in which students without U.S. citizenship are snatched off the street by federal agents, Ms. Segal’s punishment may seem comparatively mild. But her case contains a special irony. Ms. Segal is Jewish.

I didn't spend any time researching this specific case, but it is obvious from Beinart's description that Tess Segal was not arrested or discriminated against because of her Jewishness or her support for the Jewish state. On the contrary, she was part of a campus mob protesting against Jewish rights and to make an exception for academic freedom for Jewish Zionist students who may want to study in Israel or collaborate with their Israeli counterparts.

Beinart can argue all he wants for free speech rights for anti-Zionists, but pretending that Jews are being targeted on campus for anti-Zionist speech and require special protection as Jewish Zionist students do is peak Beinart-style deception.

His deceit extends to other examples in the article:

Since Oct. 7, at least four universities have temporarily suspended or placed on probation their chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace.

He doesn't mention that it was because they violated campus policies. Should Jewish students be allowed to violate policies because they are Jewish? Only if they agree with Beinart's anti-Zionist politics, it seems.

At a pro-Israel event at Rockland Community College at the State University of New York on Oct. 12, 2023, a Jewish student who briefly shouted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “Jews for Palestine” was reportedly suspended for the rest of the academic year.

This was an indoor event, a "Unity Gathering in Support of Israel," held while the kibbutzim were still smoldering. Most colleges recognize that disrupting an event is not free speech - it is a violation of the free speech rights of the organizers of the event. In fact, many of the college suspensions of anti-Israel protesters are for that exact reason - there is no inherent right to disrupt normal activities on campus.

Beinart is claiming, in effect, that pro-Zionist Jews do not have the right to have their own events free from being interrupted, disrupted and shut down by protesters. He is against free speech when that speech goes against his hateful "principles."

In May 2024, a Jewish tenured professor in anthropology at Muhlenberg College said she was fired after she reposted an Instagram post that declared, in part: “Do not cower to Zionists. Shame them. Do not welcome them in your spaces. Do not make them feel comfortable.”

First of all, the post by Maura Finkelstein also said "Why should these genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist." She is directly saying that 90% of Jews - on campus or anywhere - should not have the same rights as anyone else and calling them fascists. Can anyone who attends her classes feel comfortable?

They don't. Beinart omits the other reason she was fired - because within a week of October 7 she taught two classes of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda. In her own words, on October 12, "I had dedicated both of my classes to contextualizing the events unfolding in Gaza and giving my students space to ask questions. ...In our first meeting, the provost told me that several Title VI complaints had come to her through the college’s Title IX office; “Multiple students felt you created an unsafe atmosphere and that you have been targeting and harassing them.”

Beinart, skillfully posting half-truths and omitting context about college policies and the events he is describing, is pretending that Jewish students and faculty are being targeted when in most cases they were violating the rights of Jewish students whose opinions they disagree with. On campuses where free speech is supposedly a sacred right, Beinart is supporting those who want to quash it - in one direction.

His last example is even more absurd:

Even when protest has taken the form of Jewish religious observance, it often has been shut down. Last fall, when Jewish students opposing the war during the holiday of Sukkot built Gaza solidarity sukkahs, temporary boothlike structures in which Jews eat, learn and sleep during the holiday, at least eight universities forcibly dismantled them, or required the students to do so, or canceled approval for their construction. (The universities said that the groups were not allowed to erect structures on campus.)

These groups obviously tried to use sukkahs as a way to get around existing regulations against building encampments or other structures by pretending that they are for a religious purpose. They clearly weren't - none of the people who built them would ever build a sukkah for religious purposes. They pervert Judaism for politics, and Beinart pretends that they were just practicing their religion - much like those who blow shofars at any "Jewish anti-Zionist" occasion and pretend that this is a religious obligation.

No one is saying that anti-Israel students, Jewish or not, do not have the right for protests and speech that do not violate campus policies. Beinart is claiming that anti-Zionists, uniquely, have the right to violate campus policies.

This is not a defense of free speech. It is a demand for privileged speech – for one side only.

By selectively presenting facts, omitting crucial context, and portraying violators of others' rights as victims, Peter Beinart is not merely misleading. He is manufacturing antisemitic propaganda: turning those who seek to destroy Jewish communal life on campus into the new “Jewish victims.” And the New York Times eagerly provides him the platform, without even basic fact-checking.

It’s not just deception. It’s complicity.

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The @NYTimes @NickKristof whitewashes Palestinian Christian antisemitism

Nicolas Kristof writes in the New York Times:

In the face of this American Christian enthusiasm for crushing Palestinians while saying it is God’s will, I wondered what Palestinian Christians thought. So I visited Bethlehem and asked them.

I didn't quote the beginning of the article where he sarcastically attacks American Christians who support Israel as hypocrites. Let's focus on the main part of his article.

First of all, every single person Kristof spoke to is an anti-Israel activist. He did not speak to random Christians but professional haters. (And I mean "professional" literally. Every one of them makes money from their anti-Israel positions.)

“Do we feel betrayed?” mused Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran Palestinian pastor who is president of Dar Al-Kalima University and, like many Palestinian Christians, against annexation. “Yes, to some extent. Unfortunately, this is not new for us.”

Raheb wrote a book based on the lie that Israel is guilty of "settler colonialism." He does not accept that Jews have any historical, legal or moral rights in their ancient homeland.

He loves to promote the propaganda lie that Jesus was a "Palestinian" and not a Jew from Judea.

Moreover, Raheb is a leader behind the Palestinian Kairos document which uses supersessionist language, the antisemitic idea that the Christian church has replaced Jews as the Chosen People. (Even though most Lutheran churches have rejected Martin Luther's explicit antisemitism, the Palestinian churches do not seem to have done so in practice.) And he embraces the antisemitic Khazar theory, denying Jews are really Jews.

Fewer than 2 percent of West Bank Palestinians today are Christian, but they are an influential minority who endure the same land grabs and hardships as the majority Muslim population.

Funny how Kristof ignores the reason why there are so few Palestinian Christians left compared to 1948. As with the rest of the Middle East, it was Muslim hate for them that forced them out. Seems like a relevant point.

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian Christian writer and the author of the new book “State of Palestine NOW,” says that far-right American Christians have embarrassed the Christians who actually live in the holy land.

“When the Bible is used to justify land theft and war crimes against civilians, it puts the faithful in an awkward position,” he said.

Kuttab himself justifies terrorism against Israeli Jews, even in Tel Aviv. In 2016, after a shooting attack at a cafe that killed four people, he claimed that the attack was a natural reaction to Israel rejecting some forgotten French peace plan: "overdone live @cnn coverage of Tel aviv attack but not a single word on the CONTEXT of the situation, the israeli rejection of french plan?" And he followed up with another post that evoked "context" saying that the attack was Israel's fault.

So this Christian quoted as a moral authority by Kristof justifies war crimes against Jewish civilians. Awkward!

One group in the West Bank where biblical themes of love and justice do prevail is Tent of Nations, a Christian community that promotes nonviolence and declares, “We refuse to be enemies.” It operates on the farm of an old Palestinian Christian family, the Nassars, who have used their property to hold youth camps and advocate peace toward all.

That attitude has not been reciprocated.

Tent of Nations and Daoud Nassar are not exactly supportive of the themes of "love and justice" when it comes to Israeli Jews. Nassar, also a Lutheran, does not reach out to Israeli Jews; he doesn't condemn Hamas attacks like October 7 as far as I can find. His idea of "peace" is a Palestinian state that only has Jews living in fear like most Christians do under Muslim rule.

I am not trying to justify any crimes that may or may not have been done by Jewish settlers against these people. I trust the Israeli judicial system to determine who owns specific lands based on evidence and law, not emotion. But this op-ed goes out of its way to canonize these Palestinian Christians and their antisemitism while attacking American Christians who have shed theirs.

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Applying a Jewish ethical lens to identify and call out media bias (@NYTimes, again)

My series on antisemitism has evolved into something broader: using Jewish ethics as a baseline for personal and political judgment. Today, I want to apply this lens to a case of subtle media bias - a recent New York Times article on the International Criminal Court.

Leaders Flex Muscles Against International Criminal Court
The leaders of Israel, Hungary and the United States have moved to neutralize the judiciary both at home and abroad.

There are several things going on here, analysts say, which tie together the affinities of Mr. Orban, Mr. Netanyahu and President Trump.

Bonding: The International Criminal Court is the most ambitious and idealistic — if deeply imperfect — version of an global judicial system to enforce human rights. Most liberals love it. Mr. Orban, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump hate it.

Signaling: Mr. Orban is telling the world that Hungary does what it wants: It may be a member of the European Union, but it is not constrained by it. He’s telling China and Russia that Hungary is open for business. And he’s telling his voters at home that it’s Hungary First all the way.

Testing boundaries: At a moment when global institutions are crumbling and a new order has not yet emerged, no one knows what’s allowed and what’s forbidden anymore.

But Mr. Orban’s defiance of the court is also about something else: a desire to sideline independent judges, both at home and abroad.

“Quite simply, some international institutions have become political bodies,” he told a Hungarian radio program on Friday. “Unfortunately, the International Criminal Court is one of these. It is a political court.”

The power struggles between leaders and judges — whether international or domestic — have become a defining political theme in many countries, including Hungary, Israel, Brazil and the United States.

The article presents a narrative: these three leaders share authoritarian instincts and want to weaken legal checks on their power. The ICC, we’re told, is “ambitious and idealistic — if deeply imperfect.” The reader is left to assume that criticism of the court is just another sign of creeping despotism.

But when we step back and apply a Jewish moral lens, the picture becomes clearer — and the bias more obvious.

Jewish political ethics, which heavily influenced Western philosophy, begin with the idea of covenant (brit). At Sinai, the Israelites voluntarily accepted God’s authority. In return, they became a nation bound by a system of law. That covenantal relationship is the foundation of Jewish nationhood and moral order.

This is the same foundational principle behind Western liberal democracy: the “social contract” described by Rousseau and embedded in the U.S. Constitution. It assumes that power is legitimate only when it emerges from a shared moral agreement between rulers and ruled.

Within that framework, national leaders must be subject to their own legal systems. Jewish ethics demands this, as does the Western tradition it helped inspire. So when leaders attempt to subvert or ignore national courts, it’s morally right to criticize them.

But the International Criminal Court is not grounded in any covenant. It presumes universal jurisdiction - even over nations and individuals who never consented to its authority. This is not law through covenant. This is law through imperium.

The ICC was created through the Rome Statute in 2002. Unlike most international treaties, it explicitly prohibits reservations. Signatories must accept the court’s authority in full or not at all. That’s not a covenant — that’s submission.

Even democratic nations that joined expressed concern. Australia, for example, stated upon ratification, “Australia reaffirms the primacy of its criminal jurisdiction in relation to crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court.”

Spain similarly insisted that any ICC sentence for its citizens must be compatible with Spanish law. These caveats show that even member states were wary of the court’s overreach.

More tellingly, Israel and the United States never joined — and not just under Netanyahu or Trump. Both nations have long been concerned that the ICC could become politicized, would undermine national sovereignty, and lacks the checks and balances that protect fairness in domestic legal systems.

In fact, the Rome Statute includes a war crime category created specifically for Israel, exposing its political nature from the outset and violating the Jewish (and democratic) principle of equal law for all.

The New York Times acknowledges that the ICC is “deeply imperfect,” but then drops it. No elaboration, no context. That small phrase is the only hint that critics of the ICC might have legitimate concerns. But the article doesn’t explore those. Instead, it funnels the entire critique through the lens of autocracy.

This is where the Jewish moral lens becomes essential. It reveals what the article hides: The ICC lacks the covenantal legitimacy Jewish ethics demands. It violates national self-determination - a core moral right.

I cannot read Orban's or Trump's minds. Maybe they really are power-hungry strongmen. But the NYT, by ignoring the deeply problematic nature of the court, doesn't even admit the possibility that they may be defending a deeper ethical principle that justice must be rooted in shared moral commitment, not imposed authority. Without that lens, readers may miss the difference between resisting accountability and resisting illegitimate power.

Jewish ethics doesn’t oppose international law. But it insists that law must emerge from covenant, from mutual responsibility and consent. Without that, “law” becomes just another tool of power. This became clear last year when the ICC rushed to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu while the Gaza war was still ongoing, even though in other cases it has given nations years to demonstrate their inability or unwillingness to prosecute before stepping in.

The ICC lacks covenant. The NYT lacks context. And the moral arguments against both are not partisan, but principled.

Once you put on those Jewish moral glasses, the picture becomes much clearer. And without that framework, it is much easier to be swayed by media bias and propaganda.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)