Israel Updates: 3 People Reported Killed in Attack-headline and article in The New York Times

Daniel Trigoboff submitted the following letter to The New York Times on May 6, 2022. Not surprisingly, given their heavy anti-Israel bias, they chose not to publish it. It's posted here with the permission of Dr. Trigoboff.

The article itself is on The New York Times website at https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/05/world/israel-attack, with the headline "At Least 3 People Reported Killed in Israel Attack" and subhead "The attack follows a wave of violence by Arab assailants that has already killed 14 people in Israel since mid-March."

Dear Editor,

There’s so much wrong with the headline and content of this NY Times article that the question of a deliberate anti-Israel cant is strongly raised. To begin with, the 3 people referenced in the headline were not “reported” killed; they were in fact murdered, there is no doubt about their unfortunate deaths, reported as such by multiple media sources. For a constructive comparison, did The NY Times headline about the 9/11 attacks state that “Almost 3,000 People Reported Killed in Attack?” Of course not.

And, who killed the three people in Israel? Why did this headline omit the widely known and publicized identifications of the murderers as Palestinian Arab terrorists? Why the passive voice? Why not use an accurate headline like “Israel Updates: Palestinian Arab Terrorists Murder Three Israeli Civilians, Wound Six?”

In the body of the article is the heinous misrepresentation of the Temple Mount as “the Aqsa Mosque compound”, supposedly revered by Muslims and Jews alike, and then a statement that Jews refer to it as the Temple Mount, as though the Muslim Arab nomenclature is universally accepted except by Jews. Absolute balderdash on steroids. In fact there is the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the flat plaza which surrounds them which was the site of the First and Second Temples. This elevated plaza which sits on the Temple Mount is Judaism’s holiest site, whereas the Al-Aqsa Mosque is only the third holiest site to Sunni Muslims, not to Shia Muslims. In no sense is Judaism’s holiest site, this plaza, a part of any “Aqsa Mosque compound” which does not exist.

In fact it can be argued that by terming it this way, The NY Times is using discriminatory settler colonialist language since Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock were built on top of the site of the First and Second Temples by Arab invaders, who arrived and displaced indigenous Jews many centuries after the Temples were built and then destroyed. 

In considering these faults in this article’s headline and content, I am reminded of the famous Ian Fleming quote: “Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, three times is enemy action.” What is cause of the obvious enmity borne towards Israel by The NY Times?

Daniel H. Trigoboff, Ph.D.