Oy, does The New York Times not want you worrying about rising antisemitism.
For the second time in a week, it jumped on a shocking local story (of the kind it normally wouldn’t even report, given how scarce its local coverage is) to “clarify” that things aren’t really all that bad.
The latest is its report on schools Chancellor David Banks’ visit Monday to Queens’ Hillcrest HS, where hundreds of students the week before had rampaged through the halls to protest a teacher who’d posted pro-Israel content on her personal Facebook page.
The Times took the opportunity to “explain” that it wasn’t so bad, citing Banks’ own damage-control remarks slamming the “notion that these kids are radicalized” (as if he has any way to know) and insisting the teacher “was never in direct danger” (that’s the standard now?), that the war is a “very visceral and emotional issue” and many Hillcrest kids “feel a kindred spirit with the folks of the Palestinian community” — as if any of that excuses the “protest.”
To condemn “the mounting online backlash against students at the school,” the Times trots out lefty Queens Borough President Donovan Richards to make ridiculous “defenses” such as: “To speak of every child in this school as antisemitic is simply wrong.”
The paper reports, “He added in an interview that because the Department of Education had not addressed the war in the Middle East head on, ‘you had this powder keg waiting to explode.’ ”
Seriously? Some statements from the top educrats are all it takes for the kids to behave?
The Times also cites teachers who complain the school mishandled the incident, and ends by quoting Muhammad Ghazali, the senior class president, on how the “entire Hillcrest community was hurt and broken” by the behavior of a few students who “lack maturity”; “It was meant to be a peaceful protest from the very beginning.”
Sorry: Going after a teacher for her personal views is far beyond the bounds, and school during the school day is no place for any protest.
And this piece of Times “journalism” follows by just six days an even more egregious piece of work with the online headline, “Did a Cafe’s Pro-Israel Stance Cause a Staff Revolt? It’s Complicated.”
That was aimed directly at debunking The Post’s scoop on the travails of Caffè Aronne, and consisted almost entirely of reporting what the staff who’d walked out had to say days after the events in question. (Surprise: They insisted their motives for quitting without notice were pure as the driven snow.)
“It’s complicated”: Everything is, indeed. But it sure is strange how the Times keeps on stressing the “complications” that happen to play down antisemitic and anti-Israeli outrages.
When it comes from the same folks that rushed to share Hamas’ lies about a supposed Israeli airstrike on a Gaza hospital, you start to wonder about that “All the news that’s fit to print” motto.