March 4, 2024: The Intercept’s Jihad Against The New York Times

Supreme Court puts Trump back on ballot; Hamas and the missing hostages; Immigration and productivity

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The Big Story

We’ve spent the last two Big Stories hammering The New York Times for its credulity toward Hamas’ claims about last week’s stampede during a Gaza City aid delivery. But the paper hasn’t been as bad as it could have been—or as bad as some of its employees want it to be, as we can see from this past week’s dustup involving the Times and The Intercept. 

On Thursday, The Intercept published an article attacking the Times’ reporting on the Oct. 7 sexual assaults by Hamas against Israeli women, titled “‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’: The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé.” Bylined by three reporters—including Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill and D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim—the piece is a somewhat strange document. Its central contention is not that no Israeli women were raped—there is too much testimony to the contrary, including eyewitness survivor testimony, first-responder reports, forensic evidence, and confessions from captured Oct. 7 terrorists, including one who said that his military commanders had ordered his unit to “do whatever you want” to women.

Rather, The Intercept’s argument that there is no reliable evidence that Hamas systematically and intentionally used sexual assault “as a weapon of war,” as the Times claimed in its December article. But much of the article, sourced in large part to leaks from current NYT employees, is focused on the social media activity of one of the NYT article’s junior reporters—an Israeli named Anat Schwartz who liked a tweet on Oct. 7 calling on the IDF to “turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse” if Hamas did not agree to return the hostages. 

Unwise on Schwartz’s part? Perhaps. But frankly, the like-policing is a bit rich coming from The Intercept, given that the article cites the Stalinist conspiracy theorist @zei_squirrel multiple times, including in the first paragraph, where @zei_squirrel is presented as the source for Schwartz’s problematic “like.” Speaking of hot takes in the midst of a tragedy, here is what @zei_squirrel had to say on the morning of Oct. 7:

The same account is cited later in the article as one of the sources of “public scrutiny” surrounding some of Schwartz’s other “likes.” Indeed, the central thesis of the article is that the NYT’s reporting “galvanized the Israeli war effort” and had a “life-altering impact of thousands of Palestinians whose deaths were justified by the alleged systematic sexual violence orchestrated by Hamas”—in other words, that the Times editors and reporters who were insufficiently critical of Israeli claims are somehow personally and individually responsible for the deaths of Palestinian civilians. That sounds a lot like @zei_squirrel’s fevered accusations in October that by feuding with anti-Israel accounts on X, Bari Weiss was issuing literal “kill orders” to the IDF. That theory was reposted by none other than Ryan Grim, one of the authors of The Intercept article:

But who cares if lunatics are reposting other lunatics on social media? The key point here is that these arguments are not really arguments—they are attempts by media class progressives to bully and emotionally blackmail their peers, friends, and former classmates at institutions such as the NYT (as well as the State Department, the Pentagon, etc.). Silence is violence; deviating from The Electronic Intifada/Max Blumenthal party line on Hamas’ rapes is personal complicity in genocide, and you have a moral duty to oppose it—just as Times staffers had a moral duty to oppose Tom Cotton publishing an op-ed in the paper in summer 2020 because it literally put the lives of Black Times staffers in danger.

Apparently, given The Intercept’s sourcing, some staffers within the Times agree.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Today’s most passionate antisemites don’t merely loathe Jews; they want Auschwitz, argues Alvin H. Rosenfeld of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism

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The Rest

→The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously overturned Colorado’s decision to remove Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot. In a 9-0 per curiam opinion (meaning that the opinion is not attributed to a specific justice or justices), the court declared that states lack the authority to remove federal candidates from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, an anti-Confederate provision that disqualifies officials from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection” against the United States. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred with the judgment but dissented from the majority’s opinion that only Congress can enforce Section 3 against federal candidates through implementing legislation.

→Hamas does not know how many of the hostages are alive or where they are, according to a Sunday statement from an official in the Hamas politburo. The revelation comes amid a new round of hostage negotiations in Cairo following Hamas’ rejection of a U.S.-drafted truce agreement last week. According to multiple media reports, Israel has refused to send negotiators to Cairo in protest of Hamas’ stonewalling, including its refusal to provide a list of living hostages, to specify which Palestinian security prisoners it wants released, and to agree on an exchange rate between Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Israeli officials quoted in The Wall Street Journal said they are skeptical Hamas is serious about a deal, and suspect that Hamas’ Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar, who has told Hamas’ leadership abroad that he is winning the war, prefers to increase tensions during Ramadan rather than agree to a truce.

→Stat of the Day, Part I: 70%

That’s the percentage of farmworkers in the United States who are either naturalized U.S. citizens (6%), legal immigrants (23%), or illegal immigrants (41%), according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics from 2018 to 2020, the most recent years available. 

→Stat of the Day, Part II: 0.1%

That’s the annual rate of productivity growth in the U.S. agricultural sector from 2011 to 2019, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics cited in a Monday article in The Wall Street Journal on how cheap migrant labor discourages investment in automation and keeps weak firms alive, slowing productivity growth. In Japan, which has restrictive immigration policies, agricultural productivity grew 1.6% per year over the same time period. 

Read the rest here: https://www.wsj.com/economy/business-immigrant-low-skilled-labor-addiction-bf009a83 

→Quote of the Day:

Take all this together and this article exposes a series of serious professional errors by [The Washington Post], reporters and editors alike. The most benign view of these errors is damning enough; the reality, including the possibility of fabrication, may be much worse.

That’s from an investigation by Robert Satloff in The Times of Israel about a Dec. 2 article in the Post about what allegedly happened to several Palestinian babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital, which was evacuated on Nov. 10, 2023. The Post article relied heavily on the anonymous testimony of a single male nurse affiliated with Doctors Without Borders, who claimed to have rescued one of five infants who had to be abandoned in the NICU. Doctors Without Borders, however, said it had only one nurse working at the hospital—a man named Fadi Abu Riyala, who told NBC that neither he nor any of the other hospital staff were able to take any patients, including infants, with them. Another key source, who provided the claim that four dead infants were later found in the hospital, turned out to be the cousin of one of the Post reporters, which the Post did not disclose to its readers. That reporter, Hazem Balousha, also served as the chief of public relations for the Palestinian Central Elections Commission in Gaza from 2004 to 2006, when Gaza was ruled by Fatah. 

Read it here: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/once-again-a-palestinian-babies-story-merits-a-washington-post-apology/ 

→On Friday, a little over three years after becoming the first state to fully decriminalize drugs, the Oregon Senate passed a bill making it a misdemeanor to possess hard drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and heroin. In November 2020, Oregonians voted 58% in favor of a drug decriminalization ballot initiative that was supposed to provide “treatment” for addicts as an alternative to incarceration. Instead, opioid overdose deaths rose from 472 in 2020 to 956 in 2022. The recriminalization bill has passed the state House and Senate and will now go to the desk of Gov. Tina Kotek. The bill is part of a larger West Coast backlash to the soft-on-crime policies of the past four years. Seattle passed a law criminalizing public drug use in September, while polling suggests that San Francisco voters will likely pass two ballot measures on Tuesday: one easing restrictions on city police, and another requiring recipients of public benefits to be screened for drug use and mandating treatment for drug users as a condition of receiving benefits.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Accidental Expat, by Shoshana McKinney Kirya-Ziraba

Growing up in America as a Black Jew, I longed for a sense of unquestioned belonging in the Jewish community. Now, I’ve found that feeling—in Uganda.

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Longing for Auschwitz

The ultimate aims of the war against the Jewish state would rival the worst horrors of our history

By Alvin H. Rosenfeld

Hamas’ assault on Israelis on Oct. 7 was not an act of war as we normally think of it but something far worse. We don’t have an adequate term for what occurred on that day, so people use words like “terrorism,” “barbarism,” “atrocity,” “depravity,” “massacre,” and so on. All are correct, and yet all fall short of capturing the annihilationist fury set loose at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim and small towns of southern Israel. The people attacked in those places were not only to die, but to die in torment. In addition to the merciless torture, killings, slashings, burnings, beheadings, mutilations, dismemberments, and kidnappings, there were gang-rapes and other forms of sadistic sexual assault, including, according to some reports, the cutting off of women’s breasts, nails driven into women’s thighs and groins, bullets fired into their vaginas, and even intercourse with female corpses. Unimaginable? For most normal people, yes. But before going into Israel, the Hamas assassins were instructed to “dirty them” and “whore them.” And that’s precisely what many of them faithfully did.

If it were possible to encapsulate all the evil of that day in a single image, it would be that of the violent seizure of a young Israeli woman, Naama Levy, 19, barefoot, beaten, and bloodied, her hands tied behind her back, the crotch of her sweatpants heavily soiled, possibly from being raped, dragged by her hair at gunpoint into a Hamas car, and driven off to Gaza to suffer an unspeakable fate among her captors there. Her assailants filmed every second of her ordeal; and as one watches the clips of her being taken away, one sees crowds nearby loudly shouting “Allahu Akbar”—“Allah is the greatest”—a victory cry that offers religious sanction to the malign treatment of Naama Levy and countless others seized, slaughtered, and abducted on that horrific day.

All wars cause human suffering, but the cruelties visited upon Israelis on Oct. 7 far surpass what normally happens when armies go to war. Hamas’ actions had a different aim: not conquest but the purposeful humiliation of Jews by people who detest them and were sworn to degrade and dehumanize them before murdering them. For those familiar with Jewish history, the mass violence enacted against Jews in Kishinev in 1903 came instantly to mind, as did the Farhoud in Iraq in 1941 and Chmielnicki’s savage decimation of Ukrainian Jewish communities in the mid-17th century. With memories of those earlier massacres newly revived, Oct. 7 instantly evoked the word “pogrom.” With cause. But how could such a catastrophe occur in today’s Israel? The country’s military has been hailed as one of the strongest in the world and was regarded as invincible. And yet on Oct. 7, it failed to protect its southern border and prevent the ruthless assault on Jews in the Gaza envelope. Responding to Hamas’ bloody deeds, one Israeli woman summed up the reactions of virtually every Jew in the country and millions of others abroad when she said, simply and incontrovertibly, “Every Israeli’s worst nightmares have come true.”

Oct. 7, 2023 was the most destructive day of mass violence against Jews since the end of the Holocaust. The carnage carried out on that day, far from being a by-product of war, was a religiously sanctioned, orgiastic display of unrestrained Jew-hatred. One cannot begin to understand it if one ignores the Hamas Charter and other Islamist teachings that make Hamas the organization it is and inspires it to do what it does.

Hamas originates as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is and always has been a jihadist organization, which sees the existence of the State of Israel as an intolerable intrusion into the Domain of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and is committed to removing Israel by whatever means necessary. The preamble to the Hamas Charter declares that “Israel exists and will continue to exist until Islam obliterates it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The “Palestinian problem,” it affirms, “is a religious problem” and is not amenable to a negotiated political settlement. The only way to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” is through “jihad,” a holy war that is a “duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.”

As a result of their success in invading Israel on Oct. 7 and killing and capturing so many Jews, Hamas has incited the passions of many in the broader Arab and Muslim worlds and, alarmingly, well beyond. In doing so, it has made emphatic the Islamist reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict as essentially a Muslim-Jewish conflict. Most people in the West view the problem as basically political and territorial in nature. That is true, but only in part. As represented by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Islamic Republic of Iran (the sponsor of all the others), it is also religious, and at its heart of hearts there resides an annihilationist fantasy of killing Jews and bringing an end to the Jewish state. Hamas and its allies are not looking for a two-state solution but a repeat of the Final Solution. Their brutally successful killing spree on Oct. 7 was an extravagant rehearsal for that larger goal, a genocidal one.

Where does that leave Israel? Right now, at war with Hamas in Gaza and in a simmering battle with Hezbollah in the north that could rapidly explode into a full-scale and even more fearsome war. What is at stake, as most Israelis understand it, is nothing less than the survival of the state itself. Hamas spokesmen have said as much. On Oct. 24, Gazi Hamad, speaking as a representative of Hamas to a Lebanese television station, declared that the Oct. 7 attack “is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth … until Israel is annihilated.” Iran, long sworn to finish off “the criminal Zionist entity,” has inscribed some of its newest ballistic missiles with the words “death to Israel” in bold Hebrew letters. The Houthis in Yemen, well-armed with powerful Iranian-supplied missiles, chant “death to America, death to Israel, and a curse upon the Jews.” Iran itself, as recent reports indicate, continues its progress toward building nuclear weapons. As far back as 2001, Hashemi Rafsanjani, then president of Iran, boasted that “the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.”

What is new here are not the threats against Israel but the determination to carry them out and the capability of doing so. Hamas’ successful penetration of southern Israel and the extreme violence it displayed has no precedent in Israeli history. The country was traumatized on that day and remains traumatized, making Oct. 7 a date frozen right now on the national calendar. Most of the world has moved on, but to Israelis every day will remain Oct. 7 until all the hostages are returned home from Gaza, Hamas is militarily disarmed, and its aim of obliterating Israel is definitively nullified. Whether Israel can succeed in achieving these goals is an open question. What is clear is that Israelis today feel seriously let down by their national and military leaders, less secure, and far more vulnerable than they did before Oct. 7.

Although the existential circumstances of Jews living outside of Israel are much different, on the emotional and psychological levels they, too, have been shaken by recent developments. The anti-Israel passions set loose in street demonstrations and on college campuses and social media have heightened already resurgent displays of open Jew-hatred and rattled a previously assumed sense of security. Academic scholars will continue to debate whether anti-Zionism and antisemitism are similar or separate phenomena, but to most others, the links between hatred of Israel and Jew-hatred are apparent. The reasons are clear: The widespread and unapologetic branding of Israel as an apartheid, genocidal, even Nazi state—defamatory accusations that were in wide circulation well before Oct. 7—are rapidly becoming normalized. The same is true for both verbal and physical hostility to Jews. As these impassioned animosities coalesce and go mainstream, Jews everywhere are experiencing an unease about their place in society that is new and unnerving for many of them.

Reactions vary: For reasons of self-protection, some feel it’s best to be less visibly Jewish, set aside Jewish markers, and distance themselves from Israel. For reasons of pride and self-affirmation, others refuse to be cowed, step forward as strongly identified Jews, and publicly proclaim themselves in solidarity with Israel and other Jews. Oct. 7 has sharpened both responses, and what lies ahead remains to be seen, but the date’s significance for how Jews see themselves and others see Jews is evident.

Also evident is the following: There will be no Jewish future worthy the name without the State of Israel. At present, something like 47% of world Jewry lives in Israel. That’s almost one out of every two Jews alive. Were Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and their allies ever to succeed in liquidating Israel, the loss would be immeasurable and irrecoverable. Most Jews still alive elsewhere would be physically imperiled, psychologically traumatized, and spiritually enervated to the point of collapse. That might have been the Jewish condition after the Holocaust, were it not for Israel’s founding only three years after the liberation of the death camps—an act of collective revival that demonstrated a level of national resilience and spiritual rebirth almost without parallel in history. But far from recognizing the Jewish people’s reestablishment of national independence and political sovereignty in its ancient homeland in positive terms, some of Israel’s neighbors have seen the existence of the Jewish state as an intolerable affront that needs to be reversed.

Hamas set out to reverse it as forcefully as possible on Oct. 7. Its murderous deeds on that day were meant to debase and kill Jews and rally others to collectively put an end to the Jewish state, a strategic objective that recalls some memorable words of the Hungarian Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész: “The antisemite of our age no longer loathes Jews; he wants Auschwitz.” Today’s most passionate antisemites continue to loathe Jews and, for that very reason, want Auschwitz. If Israelis were not fully aware of those hateful passions before Oct. 7, they surely know them now. They also know that one Holocaust is one too many and are committed to doing whatever they must to make sure there will not be a repeat. They need and deserve all the support we can give them.