New York Times Shocked That Israelis Still Think Oct. 7 Was, Like, a Bad Thing

The New York Times is upset with Israel — which tells you that today is a day ending with a y. This time, however, it’s not a fictional genocide or an equally fictional occupation that has the Paper of Record in a snit; instead, the Times is upset because the Israelis still think of themselves as the victims of the Oct. 7 jihad attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis. If the Israelis were thinking the way the Times wants them to think, you see, they’d realize that the Palestinian Arabs who attacked them were the real victims.

This is standard establishment media practice. On Sept. 5, I published an article here at PJM called “From Now to the 9/11 Anniversary, Expect Wall-to-Wall ‘Islamophobia’ Coverage,” and if I were that right all of the time, I could make a killing in Vegas. The establishment media’s 9/11 coverage was almost entirely devoted to telling us what a rough time Muslims have had in the U.S. in the last 25 years, and how the rapid growth in Muslim numbers and political power shouldn’t distract us from the fact that they’re the actual victims.

And now the establishment media’s flagship publication is extending the same treatment to Oct. 7. On Sept. 14, the Times published an article about a new piece of anti-Israel propaganda, casting the producers of this propaganda as standing heroically against censorious Israeli officials: “After Accolades Abroad, an Israeli Documentary Faces a Backlash at Home,” with this subtitle: “The film ‘NAZA’ investigates the killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces in Gaza. Israel’s culture minister has suggested revoking the directors’ citizenship.”

That was usual Times fare, but in this paragraph, longtime Times reporter Isabel Kershner went far, far beyond that: “Israelis are deeply divided over how to apportion blame for the policy, military and intelligence failures that preceded the attack and the war. But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7. The militants’ attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel, and about 250 more were taken hostage, according to the Israeli authorities. It was the deadliest day in the country’s history.”

Kershner is clearly not intending by this to enter into tinfoil-hat territory. She is obviously not denying that the attack happened. But she apparently wants us to see the murders of those 1,200 people, and the taking hostage of 250 more, as a justifiable response to the alleged Israeli oppression of the Palestinian Arabs, to the degree that the Israelis are no longer the victims of Oct. 7, but the perpetrators of atrocities that were so much greater that Oct. 7 was a justified response.

This is so palpably wide of reality that even the Times, as inveterately hostile to Israel as it is, had to retreat. The offending sentence was neatly excised from the article and thrown down the memory hole, with the rest of the paragraph still in the article exactly as before. The Times was good enough to append an Editors’ Note, dated Wednesday: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It has been removed from the article.”

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Great, but not good enough. Tamar Sternthal, director of the Media Research & Analysis Department and director of the Israel Office of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), wrote: “Wait, what, @nytimes @IKershner? That Israelis are victims of the Oct. 7 massacre is a matter of Israeli *perception*, and not simply fact? If they're not the Oct. 7 victims, then what are they? The perpetrators?” And: “Can you imagine if @nytimes wrote: ‘Americans still largely view themselves as the victims of Sept. 11’?”

Well, yes, actually, I can quite easily imagine the New York Times trying to convince Americans that they’re not the real victims of 9/11. In fact, on Sept. 11, 2026, the Times ran an article entitled “After 9/11, Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers,” and another called “Facing Islamophobia, Mamdani Keeps Focus on 9/11 Victims,” which is more than can be said for the Times itself.

So why shouldn’t the Times suggest that Israelis weren’t the real victims of Oct. 7? It’s what the Times does whenever there’s a jihad attack: it focuses on the alleged enormities that drove the poor dears, that is, the jihadis, to violence. The New York Times used to an American newspaper, but those days passed long ago.

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