THE NEW YORK TIMES HAS A HISTORY OF HIRING ISRAEL-HATERS

NYT hires another anti-Israel extremist to cover Israel

Hardly a week after the Oct. 7 attacks, the New York Times hired a committed anti-Israel ideologue to help with its coverage of Israel.  

 

By Gilead Ini

 

JNS

Jul 7, 2024

 

Bora Erden was a committed anti-Israel activist prior to joining the Times last October.

 

The New York Times has a type. 

It hired a reporter who once said she couldn’t bring herself even to look at Israelis, and who admitted that her objectivity “got thrown out the window.” 

It hired another who in college was an apologist for Hamas and Hezbollah, denying that they were terror organizations, that they were fundamentalists and even that they have murdered Israeli civilians. 

It hired another not long after she expressed outrage that Israel had killed a Hamas commander after the terror group fired a barrage of rockets toward Israeli civilians—and even charged that the strike amounted to “murder.” 

Shortly after the Oct. 7 massacre, the newspaper commissioned a journalist who had posted on social media, “How great you are, Hitler.”

So it is unfortunate, but hardly surprising, that the Times has now hired Bora Erden to cover the Israel-Hamas conflict. Erden was a committed anti-Israel activist prior to joining the Times last October. In May 2021, after Hamas rocket attacks into Israel and a consequent round of fighting, Erden signed a letter supporting what was termed the “Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonial rule and its apartheid system.”

The letter, which called for a protest at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (or “Occupied Mannahatta,” as the protest organizers put it), took aim at the museum because it has board members who support Israel. The problem seemed to be Jewish money. At least four of the the five board members named in the letter were Jewish, while the fifth was pointedly described as using money that came from her husband, who is also Jewish. 

Erden was a signatory to another letter that attacked Israel (or rather, “the settler colony known as Israel”) while celebrating academic censorship, including with regard to Israel. The letter slammed Cornell for suggesting, during an anti-Israel lecture, that it would later organize a lecture “that presents other viewpoints.” It approvingly stated that many academic institutions understand it is “no longer acceptable for them to provide their students and faculty with curricula and lectures that reinforce the white-dominated, settler colonial, patriarchal, and heteronormative status quo,” a euphemism for any non-radical scholarship, and lamented that Cornell didn’t get the memo. 

If someone thinks academia should suppress perspectives, he would hardly be expected to think differently about journalism. And yet, hardly a week after the Oct. 7 attacks, the New York Times hired this committed anti-Israel ideologue to help with its coverage of Israel. 

 

Originally published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.