The New York Times report on the recent soccer clashes in Amsterdam was so biased that you wouldn’t be entirely surprised if you found out that Israel’s propaganda/disinformation ministry had kidnapped the paper’s reporters and put guns to their heads.
At this site, Sana Saaed has already done an impressive post surveying the widespread global media bias about the events. But, unfortunately, the New York Times is the most important source of coverage of Israel/Palestine for Americans. The Times sets the tone for the cable TV networks, and other U.S. papers have cut back or ended their foreign coverage. So a closer scrutiny of its ongoing slant is indispensable.
The Times report, which started on page 1, used the word “antisemitic” six times, beginning in the headline. The first six paragraphs uniformly described the “Israeli soccer fans” as the victims, recounting their injuries, and dwelling on the Israeli government’s chartering of “at least three flights to bring Israeli citizens home,” insinuating that innocent people had to completely flee the country for their lives.
You had to jump to paragraph 7, buried on an inside page, to learn that the Israeli fans had, in fact, been violent and provocative the night before the game: they “vandalized a taxi and burned a Palestinian flag.” On game day itself, Israeli fans shouted “an anti-Arab chant,” but the Times never bothered to tell us what they were shouting. (Reports elsewhere said that one of the chants was: “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.”)
After these brief hints that at least some of the Israelis had not behaved like peaceful sports fans, the Times got back to hammering away at the antisemitism theme. The next to last paragraph is a cunning example of the slant.
To further illustrate the alleged rise in antisemitism in Europe, the paper said:
“Earlier this year, when the Netherlands opened a National Holocaust Museum — almost 80 years after three-quarters of the Dutch Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust — an angry crowd of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside and yelled, ‘There is a holocaust in Gaza.’”
1.) The murder of Dutch Jews, although of course tragic, has nothing to do with Israel’s murder of Gazans today. And if you are going to bring up percentages, what proportion of the Gazan people are also already dead? 2.) Outside a Holocaust museum is an entirely appropriate place to protest another holocaust that is ongoing. 3.) The Times dismisses the demonstrators as “angry” and “yelling,” loaded words that the reporters left out of their vocabulary in their earlier brief mentions of the chants from the visiting Israelis.
The Times could have reported this story more fairly. By contrast, let’s look at how it was covered in the Jewish Daily Forward. A reporter there named Arno Rosenfeld apparently knows how to use the telephone and/or the internet, because he was able to quickly get through to Amsterdam’s Jewish community, an obvious move that the (three) Times reporters failed to do.
Rosenfeld did report that many Amsterdam Jews were in fact fearful after the violence. But he also informed Forward readers that there was another side to the story:
But some Dutch Jews noted that roving bands of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights marauding through the city center chanting racist anti-Arab slogans, climbing a facade to rip a Palestinian flag off the second story of an apartment building and assaulting a Moroccan taxi driver.
Jelle Zijlstra, who is Jewish and works as a community organizer in Amsterdam, made a post that went viral on Instagram stating that ‘multiple truths can exist at the same time.’ It highlighted both the assaults on Israelis and footage of the fans shouting ‘F— Palestine’ the night before.
There was definitely antisemitism involved in some of the events that took place, Zjilstra said in an interview. ‘Were Jews attacked in the streets? Yes, but those Jews were also violent hooligans.’”
Arno Rosenfeld showed that reporting on the Amsterdam events with balance and fairness was not impossible. Maybe the New York Times should offer him a job?