By Lawrence Martin | June 27, 2025
Image by Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA – New York Times Building – New York Times Logo, CC BY 2.0, Wikipedia
When we lived in New York City many years ago, my wife and I were avid readers of The New York Times. My career brought us to Cleveland, and I changed over to an online subscription which I read less frequently, and never thought much about the paper’s stance regarding Israel. Then in 2017, after retirement, we made our first of several trips to Israel, and I began to dig deep into the history of the Jewish-Arab conflict in the Holy Land. I read books on the subject, and prepared PowerPoint presentations which I gave in my retirement community. I also created a website on the history of the conflict, pointing out the multiple times a 2-state solution had been turned down by the Arabs, who wanted all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In this endeavor I came across an editorial in the Sept 12, 2019 NYT titled “What Won’t Netanyahu Say to Get Re-elected?” After providing information that President Trump had signed a proclamation recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, there was this criticism of Trump’s position, which hit me like a sledgehammer.
The rest of the world, and the United Nations, still regard the Golan Heights as Syrian land.
The UN? By then, in my research, I knew that the UN was irrevocably biased against Israel. The majority of the countries in the UN are Muslim-majority, Muslim allies, or otherwise anti-Semitic in their words and deeds. To that point the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council had passed more resolutions critical of Israel than for all the other countries combined.
Invoking the UN to criticize Israel was like a Southern newspaper in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era quoting the KKK regarding Black civil rights, e.g., “To the rest of the nation, and the KKK, Blacks have no legal claim on white plantation owners.”
I thought it likely that most NY Times readers were ignorant about the UN’s history regarding Israel, which is why the editors could quote the UN as if it had any moral validity. (In fairness, I, too, was largely unaware until I began my own research into the history.)
After that epiphany, I began to pay closer attention to the NYT essays and editorials about Israel. What I found was appalling: anti-Israel bias in almost every one. With the exception of Bret Stephens’s opinion pieces, I found them full of misinformation, hypocrisy, double standards, and omission of relevant history, a combination of features that deserve to be called propaganda.
Many of these anti-Israel essays were (and still are) written by Jews, including Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, Michelle Goldberg, Ben & Jerry, Bernie Sanders, and others.
In 2021 I decided to start a website to document this anti-Israel NYT bias. By October 7, 2023, I had reviewed and written detailed comments on a dozen of these essays, and posted them at www.lakesidepress.com/NYTBiasAgainstIsrael.pdf.
After the October 2023 massacre, the number of essays increased and so did my reviews – another three dozen, which is still only a small portion of all the anti-Israel propaganda that the paper has published. My website is long, now about 88,000 words. In it I quote the full NYT essay and offer yellow-highlighted comments detailing the bias. I also occasionally quote the criticism of others who write about the paper’s bias, e.g., Ira Stoll in algemeiner.com, Jonathan Tobin in Jewish News Service, and Tamar Sternthal in camera.org.
Perhaps the most damaging of all the essayists is Tom Friedman. Mr. Friedman has extensive Middle East experience, personally knows many of the players in the Conflict, and is revered by college-educated NYT readers who love his persistent condemnation of Netanyahu and Israel’s right wing government. These readers offer hundreds of favorable comments to Friedman’s essays (comments available online to subscribers of the paper). The vast majority show no awareness of how or when he misinforms, omits relevant history, or provides an illogical argument. About these commenters I wrote, to an October 19, 2023 Tom Friedman essay:
Based on their college degrees, these people are not stupid. But from my perspective, they are willfully ignorant, which renders their anti-Israel opinions uninformed, a reflection of left wing or progressive biases, and not based on facts or rational analysis. Of course, to them my criticizing Thomas Friedman’s essays is like criticizing the Bible to devout Christians or the Talmud to orthodox Jews. My criticisms are invariably met in one of two ways: I am either called names (“right-wing!” “extremist!”), or they simply walk away and refuse to engage.
That’s been a problem. Fans of Friedman and other NYT anti-Israel columnists don’t seem interested in alternative, pro-Israel views as published in The Wall Street Journal, or on websites like israpundit.org, algemeiner.com, camera.org, memri.org, or, God forbid, Fox News.
The good news is that a small percentage of commenters do recognize the bias, the misinformation, the distortions of history, and I quote some of them. For example, following a February 1, 2024 Tom Friedman essay, one reader commented: “I love how the so called ‘Right to Return’ is glossed over as something they’ll figure out later, as if it wasn’t the issue that makes peace impossible.”
So, I keep plugging along, pointing out the propaganda in these NYT essays at various intervals. Below are just a few examples. You can read the entire essay and my detailed comments on the website.
- In a January 20, 2020 unsigned NYT editorial about Trump’s peace plan, critical history was omitted: no mention that the two-state solution was “moribund” because the Palestinians had turned it down multiple times, and had never showed any intention for their own state unless Israel was gone.
- In a May 21, 2021 Peter Beinart essay, criticizing the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding, he omitted the fact that one day after Israel’s founding in 1948 five Arab countries invaded Israel with the intent to destroy the new country, and that many of the Arabs left at the urging of their own leaders. He also omitted the fact that 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries after the War of Independence. His essay offered nothing more than revisionist history, propaganda designed for the anti-Israel crowd.
- In a May 24, 2021 essay about anti-Semitic violence, Michelle Goldberg criticized Israel’s “entrenched occupation and human rights ” Not a word about Hamas terrorism, or the missiles, the tunnels, the attacks, the intifadas, the wars, the assaults on Jews by Palestinians. To support her condemnation of Israel she quoted Human Rights Watch (HRW). No mention about HRW’s strong bias against Israel, that it is in the same moral swamp as the UN.
- In an October 14, 2023, essay, Peter Beinart wrote about the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) Movement:
Palestinians [can] resist their oppression in ethical ways — by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law — the United States and its allies work to ensure that those efforts fail, which convinces many Palestinians that ethical resistance doesn’t work, which empowers Hamas.
His statement, “…by calling for boycotts, sanctions and the application of international law” ignores the fact that the singular goal of BDS, affirmed by its founder, is the destruction of Israel as a Jewish nation.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/bds–in–their–own–words
Beinart’s seemingly benign comment is pure propaganda, designed for NYT readers ignorant of BDS’s true goal.
- In a November 22, 2023 essay, Senator Bernie Sanders wrote:
Israel has done nothing in recent years to give hope for a peaceful settlement — maintaining the blockade of Gaza, deepening the daily humiliations of occupation in the West Bank, and largely ignoring the horrendous living conditions facing Palestinians.
Why the blockade? What about the tunnels, the missiles? Not a word in this essay. The stated goal of Hamas, which he quotes — “war with Israel will become permanent on all borders” — makes it impossible for Israel to do anything “to give hope for a peaceful settlement.” There is an obvious contradiction here, yet Sanders writes it so glibly, blaming Israel for lack of a “peaceful settlement.” Your neighbor states he wants to kill you, and will never give up, and YOU are blamed for lack of a peaceful settlement!
- In a February 13, 2024 essay titled “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Tom Friedman wrote:
On March 27 and 28 [2002] virtually all the Arab leaders gathered in the Lebanese capital. Working off Abdullah’s basic proposal, they added several other conditions on the right of return of refugees, and on March 28 approved what became known as the Arab Peace Initiative, offering “normal relations” between the Arab states and Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from all the territories back to the lines of June 4, 1967.
It was the first and remains the only comprehensive Arab peace overture to Israel approved by the Arab League, including even Syria.
I honestly thought that this could be the beginning of the end of the conflict. But it never went anywhere. Neither the Israelis nor the Bush administration really seized the moment. How could Israel not have jumped right on it?
Nowhere in his essay does Friedman explain that “the right of return of refugees” is an oft-repeated Arab proposal that, if accepted, would destroy Israel. To the Arabs, “refugees” are those people recognized by UNRWA, the totally corrupt UN organization that has long been in bed with Hamas. Unlike refugees governed by UNHCR, the other UN refugee agency for the rest of the world, UNRWA calls “refugees” all descendants and relatives of the original refugees from 1948-1949 war – in 2002 over 4 million (and in 2024, over 6 million)! They are counted as refugees even if they have citizenship in another country, such as Jordan. Friedman surely knows all this, but hides it from his readers.
- In a May 8, 2024 essay on campus protests, Tom Friedman wrote:
My problem is not that the protests in general are “antisemitic” — I would not use that word to describe them, and indeed, I am deeply uncomfortable as a Jew with how the charge of antisemitism is thrown about on the Israel-Palestine issue.
Protests not “antisemitic”? There have been no protests against atrocities in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon. Why? Because those were Arab-on-Arab atrocities. No big deal to the campus protestors; since no Jews involved, nothing to protest. And of course, no protests against Russia for invading Ukraine and killing tens of thousands. Friedman is simply pandering to his base by denying the obvious.
- From a Peter Beinart essay, October 8, 2024:
But Israel’s political system is explicitly based on religion and ethnicity. Its controversial 2018 nation-state bill declares that Jews alone can “exercise national self-determination.” Most of the Palestinians under Israeli control — those in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — can’t become citizens of the state that dominates their lives.
Citizens of the state? Five million Palestinians, whose leaders avow the total destruction of Israel, should become citizens? Obvious path to the obliteration of Israel, which is Beinart’s goal. It is not just that Beinart, an Orthodox Jew, advocates for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state in his frequent essays. What rankles is that the NYT gives him unfettered access to its millions of readers. The NYT never allows rebuttal of Beinart’s delusional statements in any essay. Fortunately, it does allow comments from the minority of readers who see through Beinart’s extreme anti-Israel propaganda, his omission of relevant history.
These are but a tiny fraction of the essays and comments on my website NYTBiasAgainstIsrael.pdf. There are of course other media that propagandize against Israel. The work of organizations like Israpundit and camera.org is vital to document this widespread media bias.
***
Lawrence Martin is a retired physician who has traveled to Israel three times since 2017. He has created several websites about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, given talks on the subject in his retirement community, and authored a novel about anti-Semitism on an elite college campus.
Websites
www.lakesidepress.com/NYTBiasAgainstIsrael.pdf
www.lakesidepress.com/Israeli-PalestinianConflict.pdf
www.lakesidepress.com/JewsWhoBlameIsrael.pdf
PowerPoint presentation delivered October 20, 2024: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict – Before and After October 7, 2023.
www.lakesidepress.com/I-P-Conflict-on-PowerPoint.pdf
Novel
From the River to the Sea: A Novel of Love and Conflict on an Elite College Campus.
Kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/River-Sea-Conflict-College-Campus-ebook/dp/B0CSD3KYV5/
Paperback:
https://www.amazon.com/River-Sea-Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions/dp/1879653001/
.jpg#/media/File:New_York_Times_Building_-_New_York_Times_Logo_(48193455772).jpg){kind=link}
It sounds like time to generate a new acronym for people like Friedman and his ilk: Call them JINOs. I guess all who read this know what that stands for.
This prediction from the prophets has been validated throughout our history. This desertion of our people and collaboration with out enemies began early in our history, The Jewish-Roman historian Josephus describes, in his history of the great Jewish revolt , how he began the revolt as a n officer in theJewish rebel army, but switched sides when about to be captured and executed by the Romans. After he talked the Emperor Vespasian into sparing his life, he worked as a propagandist for the Romans, He would be carried on some sort of crane or seige engine, high enough to be heard by the besieged inhabitants of Jerusalem, urging them to surrender to the Romans who were beseiging the city and starving its inhabitants. He made false claims that the Romans would treat the people leniently if they surrendered. Actually, any Jew who attempted to surrender was crucified, and their bodies displayed in full view of the inhabitants in the beseiged city. His book The Jewish War is to some extent an apologia for the Romans’ massacre of the Jewish people. Although he also documents the brutality and ruthlessness of th Roman conquerors.
Josephus was only the first of a long line of Jewish traitors to their own people whoacted as propagandists for their enemies, libelling their fellow Jews in the service of their oppressors. More later.
@Honigman6
https://youtu.be/xcLCe5iBvVc?si=O1XbGWrS8-zpd1mt
Was it Isaiah or Jeremiah who wrote in the Tanach that “our worst enemies will come from within us?” Oplease, can someone find the quotations and the verse numbers and inform us in this comment section?
Adam-
It’s a quote from the Christian Gospels, maybe Matthew of Luke.
Israel is Never Allowed Total Victory.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lel817/p/israel-is-never-allowed-total-victory?r=1q2uiq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/403966
My comment: 51 year Anti-Israel Legacy beginning in 1974 when he led an anti-Israel student group at Brandeis University. 1974 is the year Arafat issued his phased plan to destroy Israel which became Oslo. 20 years later.
https://iris.org.il/plophase.htm
He conned the world by claiming to have lost faith in Israel during the Lebanon War. The body of
the article goes into this though not the phased plan which the “peace” with Egypt deliberately facilitated as well. as Israel fell into Sadat’s trap. See, “Sadat’s Strategy – history in the making” by Paul Eidelberg (1979)
In free PDF form courtesy of Americans for a Safe Israel (of which Moshe Philips is chairman)
https://afsi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/SadatsStrategy_Eidelberg1.pdf
in book form on Amazon
https://a.co/d/9AHLgnz
Here’s what happened when, by amazing chance, I happened to attend a new synagogue for High Hoy Day services last year at the same time Friedman and Denis Ross, of Oslo Peace of the Grave fame gave their after Yom Kippur joint presentations.
Friedman was left stuttering, squirming, and speechless after I followed up my exposing questions which illustrated his duplicity in front of hundreds of congregants (not in a nasty way, but “firmly”), and Ross jumped in to try to save his pathetic derrière and got his own whooped in the process as well.
Here’s two versions of this “bashert” encounter:
https://www.newenglishreview.org/bashert-encounters-of-the-high-holiday-season/
And INN’s rendition of the encounter with both Thomas Friedman and Denis Ross:
“Bashert encounters of the 2024 High Holiday season…”
https://share.google/HpLn2NY3kM4bT8mUo
As a footnote to the above encounter, when I tried to get to Ross after the presentation when people were leaving, his wife grabbed his arm and quickly pulled him out the door.
His and Bubba Clinton’s infamous Oslo Peace (of the grave) accords resulted in thousands of Jews blown apart—killed, maimed, etc., and resulted in ancestral Jewish towns like Bethlehem and others in Judaea and Samaria being torn apart from Israel and awarded to the latter day Fakestinians of Arafat’s concoction in suits of “Pay to Slay” Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah:PLO/ PA.
Wikipedia
I think that’s the name of the organization – then reduced to one reform rabbi who had retired to Florida but kept his office open – out of whose office the NY chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee operated in 1988 on Fifth Avenue before moving to the office near the World Trade Center on John Street, which I’m embarassed to say, I found for them as a newly drafted member of the steering committee upon joining, my apologies. No worries. I was duly punished through the death of my sister in a man-made natural disaster. I’ve been wrong so many times, I have fled in the opposite direction, whenever anybody has asked me to lead anything – since my realization that I was wrong abou the Soviet Union, not to mention the pals, and had been wrong all along in 1999 or 2000. That was the last one.
Whenever I make a good practical suggestion – in everyday life, not online – about politics, and somebody says they’d vote for me if I ran for office, which happened at least a couple of times, once recently, that I recall, I have quipped:
If I ever run for president, I will attach the caveat to my campaign: If elected, I reserve the right to sub out for gigs, especially on weekends. I will go down my list of violists and say, are you available to manage a nuclear crisis on such and such a date from this time to that?
Though, I suppose a free-lance wedding musician for president would be about as qualified as a female Chicago social worker specializing in helping battered women to be a nuclear negotiator with Iran. 😀
“AI Overview
+11
Based on the provided search results, it appears you are interested in the Iran nuclear deal negotiated during the Obama administration and the people involved.
Wendy Sherman was a lead U.S. negotiator on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). She served as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, which was the fourth-ranking position at the State Department. She previously worked as a social worker, and credits her background in this field with developing her negotiation skills. ”
Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the publisher of the NY Slimes.
Some days I can’t even make up my mind whether to get out of bed. Maybe I should do a tarot reading. 😀
NY Times article from 1922
https://www.nytimes.com/1922/09/12/archives/palestine-arab-strike-against-the-mandate-leaders-talk-of-a-near.html