Just in case anyone still had the idea that The New York Times is an actual news source, the Times itself put that notion to rest once and for all Monday when it issued an epic five-paragraph correction that sums up virtually everything that’s wrong today with the corrupt and compromised Leftist propaganda organ known as the “Paper of Record.”
It all started on November 16, when the Times published a lengthy puff piece about Refaat Alareer, a professor at Islamic University in Gaza City. The Times maintains a consistently anti-Israel stance and seizes upon every opportunity it can to depict the Palestinian Arabs as wise, brown, indigenous people suffering under the oppression of white occupiers. This requires downplaying and misrepresenting a great deal of encouragement for jihad terrorism, rocket attacks, and genocidal rhetoric, and it calls for the elevation of Palestinians who would likely appeal to Western sensibilities as heroes.
Enter Refaat Alareer. He seemed well suited for the role of a noble voice for peace; the Times story begins with him giving literature undergraduates a poem about Jerusalem and then asking them who wrote it. “To the students, all women,” (the Times shows no interest in why that is), “the poet’s identity, or at least background, was obvious,” writes author Patrick Kingsley. “This was a text about Jerusalem, a city that they, as young Palestinians unable to leave Gaza for most of their lives, had long cherished but never visited. And the poem was written from the perspective of a wistful onlooker who, like them, loved but could not enter the city.” Alareer’s students couldn’t name the poet, but they were sure of one thing: “Only a Palestinian could have written with such warmth about Jerusalem.”
Alareer then shocks the class by revealing that the poem that so moved his Palestinian students was written by an Israeli, Yehuda Amichai. Kingsley drew from this a narrative of Palestinian victimhood and Israeli paranoia. “It was a moment that added nuance to two contrasting narratives: That embraced by the students themselves, many of whom knew someone killed or injured by Israeli missiles, and whose interaction with Israel is often limited to airstrikes; and that of many Israelis, who often assume the Palestinian education system is simply an engine of incitement.”
The Palestinian rockets that led to those Israeli airstrikes were not mentioned; nor was the actual incitement in Palestinian textbooks. Instead, the Times marveled over Alareer. “Here was an appreciation of one of Israel’s best-loved poets from a Palestinian professor at a university co-founded by the former leader of Hamas, the militant group that runs the Gaza government, does not recognize Israel, and was responsible for dozens of suicide attacks on Israelis. Experts say the study of Israeli poetry in Palestinian colleges is rare, though not unheard-of.”
Even better, as far as the Times was concerned, was its claim that “what Mr. Alareer admired about the poem, ‘Jerusalem,’ he told his students, was the way it blurred divisions between Israelis and Palestinians and implied that “Jerusalem can be the place where we all come together, regardless of religion and faith.” Kingsley quotes Alareer as saying: “When I read this, I really was like, ‘Oh my god, this is beautiful. I’ve never seen something like this. I never thought that I would read it.’ And then I realized: No, there are so many other Israeli people, Jewish people, who are totally and completely against the occupation.”
There it is. Here is a good, decent Palestinian noting that there are some good, decent Israelis, i.e., those who accept the Palestinian propaganda about an Israeli “occupation.” As The Palestinian Delusion shows, there is no “occupation”: Israel is the only nation in the world with any actual legal claim to the land that is almost universally known as the “occupied Palestinian territories.” But The New York Times relentlessly pushes the Palestinian narrative, and that’s why we were hearing about Refaat Alareer in the first place.
Related: Failing New York Times Caught Publishing More Fake News
But then came the correction, euphemistically entitled an “Editors’ Note,” on Monday. It seems that the Times was a bit hasty in canonizing Refaat Alareer. “After publication of this article, Times editors reviewed additional information that is at odds with the article’s portrayal of Refaat Alareer, a literature professor at Islamic University in Gaza, who was described as presenting Israeli poems in a positive light to his Palestinian students.”
The new information the Times discovered made it appear as if Alareer had deliberately misled them. “In the class witnessed by a Times reporter, Mr. Alareer taught a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, which he called ‘beautiful,’ saying it underscored the ‘shared humanity’ of Israelis and Palestinians. He said he admired how it showed that Jerusalem is a place ‘where we all come together, regardless of religion and faith.’”
That all sounds wonderful, but the reality was a trifle different. “However, in a video of a class from 2019, he called the same poem ‘horrible’ and ‘dangerous,’ saying that although it was aesthetically beautiful, it ‘brainwashes’ readers by presenting the Israelis ‘as innocent.’” He also discussed a second Israeli poem, by Tuvya Ruebner, which he called ‘dangerous,’ adding ‘this kind of poetry is in part to blame for the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestine.’”
When the Times confronted Alareer with the difference between what he taught in 2019 and when their reporter was present, the good professor complained that Israel used literature as “a tool of colonialism and oppression.”
The Times accordingly admitted, “In light of this additional information, editors have concluded that the article did not accurately reflect Mr. Alareer’s views on Israeli poetry or how he teaches it. Had The Times done more extensive reporting on Mr. Alareer, the article would have presented a more complete picture.”
And in light of this massive Mother of All Corrections, why should anyone continue to take The New York Times as a reliable source of information?
