The New York Times Rushes To Delete Vile Article

The New York Times was forced to retract a line and issue an apology after it published an article that criticized Israel as having a victim mentality regarding the horrors of October 7.

Yesterday we told you how The New York Times, often called the paper of record, had sunk to a new low, running a vile article calling out Israelis for viewing themselves as “the victims of October 7th,” referring to the day that Hamas attacked and slaughtered over 1,200 innocent lives in Israel.

Those victims were people at a music festival, and people in their local communities, just going about their lives. They were no threat to anyone, and they were mercilessly tortured and slaughtered. 

The particularly grotesque line has now been deleted from the article, and the paper is chalking it up to an editing error. According to the Editors’ Note that has since been added to the article:

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.

Their decision to remove the line matters.  We hear a lot of people ask, how do you combat bad speech, or dangerous speech? The answer is with more speech – louder speech. It’s by pointing out the bad speech and attacking it with facts. This isn’t censorship. This isn’t canceling The New York Times.

We, and many others, firmly pointed out the egregious offense of the statement, and they had to respond because it was so obvious. Had they stuck their heads in the sand, or worse, dug in and defended the piece, there’d be little other way to interpret that other than blatant antisemitism, and clearly even they realized that.

But the fact they removed it also vindicates something we said yesterday about the arbitrariness of including that sentence in the first place. The controversial article was from The New York Times’ senior correspondent in Jerusalem, Isabel Kershner. It was not an op-ed piece that they intentionally ran as something controversial.

The article was essentially a review of a new documentary that’s getting a lot of praise at the Venice International Film Festival. The film is critical of Israel’s military response to October 7, but there was absolutely no reason for the author to take a jab at the people of Israel.

And beyond the removed sentence, the story remains exactly as it was, proving it was biased and totally unnecessary. It was a writer trying to slip their own narrative into the article and hoping to get away with it. They did not.

Today’s Sekulow broadcast included more discussion with my brother, ACLJ Executive Director Jordan Sekulow, about The New York Times erasing the disgusting line bashing Israel for feeling like the victim of the October 7 atrocities. We also gave an update on a major pro-life case we’re currently engaged in at the Supreme Court. And we discussed infamous social media commentator Hasan Piker’s latest incendiary claim that America has committed more terrorism than al-Qaeda. 

Watch the full broadcast below: