The New York Times Fails Jews Again

They Ignore This Week's Anti-Israel Riot Against an Orthodox Jewish New York Community

Tuesday night’s ugly pro-Hamas mob attack targeting Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community stunned the city’s Jewish community - and the newspaper of record, the New York Times, ignored it.

On the night of February 18, about 200 angry, loud and offensive Palestinians descended on Borough Park in Brooklyn, a long-standing Orthodox New York Jewish neighborhood.

The pro-Hamas organization Pal-Awda called on its followers to “flood Borough Park,” an allusion to the “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” which was the operational name that the Hamas high command assigned to the brutal October 7 attack on Israel when they slaughtered 1,200 Israelis.

Of course, other grim events later this week have overshadowed much other Jewish news. The grotesque spectacle of Hamas theatrically parading four coffins of Israeli hostages before jubilant Gazans put a pall over much of Israel and across Jewish communities worldwide.

Israelis and Jews were somber as Israel received coffins containing two small children – 4-year-old Ariel Bibas and 9-month-old Kfir, their mother, and an 83-year-old man. But the sheer evil of the terrorist group was further uncovered when the Israeli Defense Force determined the coffin did not contain the children’s mother Shiri Bibas.

Nevertheless, the existence of a pro-Hamas demonstration in the heart of a Jewish community shouldn’t be overlooked. It marks an escalation of Hamas’ political allies in the United States and portends future ugly attacks by Palestinian radicals.

Israel El Hayon described the hatred emanating from the mob as they entered Borough Park: “Protesters marched through the streets waving Palestinian flags and beating drums while chanting antisemitic slogans, like "Zionists go to hell" and "Settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone." Some shouted "How many kids did you kill today?" while raising their middle fingers at them.

Of course, it was precious when the Hamas apologists asked out loud in Borough Park: “how many kids did you kill today?” At the time, Israelis in real time were about to receive from Hamas the dead bodies of the Bibas children who the IDF now confirms were brutally murdered.

And yet…it was quite amazing as the threatened Jews in the community, left their homes and mobilized. Hundreds of Borough Park residents faced down the demonstrators. One neighborhood resident told them, “Brooklyn doesn’t want you. Get out of our neighborhood. We don’t want you.”

“Nazis go home,” the Jewish counter-group chant.

Meanwhile, two days after the assault the New York Times decided the attack on a local minority community wasn’t worthy of coverage. The Times didn’t respond to a query I made on Wednesday about their failure to report. As of this writing, they have yet to reply or publish an article.

“It was totally not surprising by that they were not there and not reporting about it,” Dov Hikind told me in an interview. For 36 years, as a Democrat, Hikind represented the Brooklyn area in the New York State Assembly. After he retired, he wasn’t done. Before October 7 and the widespread rise of antisemitic attacks, he had already founded Americans Against Anti-Semitism. After the Democratic Party began to abandon Israel and sat on their hands over antisemitism, he became a Republican.

“They pick and choose when they wish to speak out,” Hikind told me about the editorial policy of the New York Times.

However, within hours of the attack, other news organizations jumped on the story. The New York Post reported: “An anti-Israel protest erupted into violence and mayhem as a swarm of demonstrators flooded a primarily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn on Tuesday night.

Other New York papers including the Daily News and the Brooklyn Paper covered the attack.

Additionally, Jewish outlets reported on the assault, including the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Telegraph Agency, the Times of Israel, the Jewish News Syndicate and Algemeiner. The Jewish Pressheadline of the event began, “It’s a War.”

The story also was picked up by other international press including the Times of India, Asian News International and the British Daily Mail.

Prominent New York Democrats attacked the protesters. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a black congressman who is contemplating running for governor posted on X, “It should come as a shock to no one that the pro-Hamas mob targeting Jews and promising to ‘flood’ Boro Park has descended into violence.”

“Violence is not a bug but a feature of the so-called ‘Free Palestine’ movement, which has no desire to free Palestinians from Hamas,” Torres wrote.

Rep. Daniel Goldman, also a Democrat from New York wrote on X, “This “protest” is in fact targeted harassment aimed at a neighborhood with one of the highest populations of Orthodox Jews in the US. To harass and intimidate Jews because of the actions of Israel is textbook antisemitism.”

U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, lame as he has been about the passage on federal legislation to fight antisemitism, did denounce the attack.

“Mask-wearing protestors chanting anti-Semitic slogans in the middle of the most Orthodox Jewish community in the city is all about provocation and not about free speech,” he told the Jewish Insider.

The New York Times, which has been owned by a Jewish family since 1896, has been significantly averse to criticizing anti-Israel bias, owing in large part to its progressive editors and reporters.

The paper created such a hostile environment for Jews that its deputy opinion editor, Bari Weiss resigned in protest in 2020 – five years ago.

When she left the newspaper, she wrote in a blistering open letter about the “Wrongthink” that permeated the newsroom and the attacks she received from her own Times colleagues for her moderate views.

“My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.”

Hikind said the New York Times’ non-coverage of the antisemitic riot in its own hometown isn’t surprising. He reminded me that in the past, the Times has frequently ignored the suffering of the Jewish people.

He recalled how during the Holocaust – the Holocaust! - the New York Times buried the story of mass execution of Jews and the existence of Nazi concentration camps.

“During the Holocaust, when my mother was at Auschwitz in 1944 and her parents, brothers and sisters were being murdered in the gas chambers, the New York Times was missing in action. The NYT was burying the story year-in-and-year out,” he told me.

The Left-leaning History News Network hit the nail on the head when they wrote: “How was it possible for so much information to be available in the mass media and yet simultaneously for the public to be ignorant?

“The reason is that the American media in general and the New York Times in particular never treated the Holocaust as an important news story.”

Hikind was beside himself about the Times’ continued failure to aggressively cover growing antisemitism in our country and abroad. “They just don’t get it. It’s so pathetic.”

Hikind was actually in Borough Park the night of the attack. He said he was “incredibly proud” of his constituents as they came out of their homes to confront the pro-Hamas crowd.

“I am incredibly proud of the people of Borough Park. They were standing out there in the streets with great numbers of bad guys, chanting and being united and not being afraid. It was really a beautiful moment for me personally to watch my former constituents proud in every single way.”

The disgrace wasn’t only that pro-Hamas protesters (again) attacked Jews. It was that the New York Times, which regards itself as the paper of record, decided to close its eyes to it.