You can see what the New York Times is attempting from the headline.
“The Dueling Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” is an attempt to provide journalistic “balance” on a story where none exists.
We could say a lot about the article, with its lopsided reliance on Palestinian sources and reference to Hanan Ashrawi’s charge that police had planted knives to frame innocent Palestinians (a charge she even admitted she had “no evidence” to back up.)
But the worst example of the bias of the article is the following paragraph.
The videos Israelis share include a film of a Palestinian employee of the Israeli phone company who rammed a car into an Orthodox Jew and then hacked him with a meat cleaver. Palestinians pass around clips not of the attacks but their aftermath, like a boy bleeding on the street as Jews curse him and Israeli officers stand idle.
In the article, the words “boy bleeding on the street” are linked to a YouTube video uploaded by the Palestine Ministry of Information. I am not linking to the video because doing so would be spreading completely false Palestinian propaganda, something the Times had no problem doing.
There are a few things that neither the article nor the video make clear.
1) The boy had just stabbed a thirteen year old Israeli child.
2) He was lying in the street because after he stabbed the Israeli child, he ran into the street and was hit by a car.
3) An irate Jewish man does indeed curse the young injured terrorist. The video does not show that there was more than the one man doing so.
4) The police did not stand idle. They kept the irate man away from the injured terrorist and ensured that Israeli medics could provide treatment.
5) The injured terrorist was treated at the scene and then taken for further treatment to an Israeli hospital.
The New York Times did not include these five points because they are not part of the Palestinian “narrative.” That’s fair if their goal was simply to show that Israeli and Palestinians have “dueling narratives” over what has been happening.
But that also means it is critical for the Times to explain to its readers that in cases like this, the Palestinian narrative is simply not true. Rather than attempting to be “balanced,” the Times needs to make clear that the Palestinian “narrative” is based on lies and half-truths.
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