New York Times You Can't Hide, You're Committing Genocide

How Western Media Manufactures Consent for Genocide and Silences the Voices Buried Beneath the Ashes. New WAWOG Report Shows Israeli Influence on the NYT

Almost two years ago, Palestinian children held a press conference outside of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza, where they called upon the world to stop the unfolding genocide faced by people all over Gaza.

"Since the 7th of October, we've faced extermination, killing, bombing over our heads—all of this in front of the world," one child said at that press conference. He continued: “We come now to shout and invite you to protect us. We want to live, we want peace, we want to judge the killers of children. We want medicine, food, and education, and we want to live as the other children live."

That press conference was held on Nov. 7, 2023. I often wondered what happened to those children. Are they alive? What type of brutality stole their last breath? Or were their lungs crushed?

They say journalism is the first draft of history. But what happens when that draft is written not with ink, but with the blood of the colonized? What happens when the institutions tasked with informing the public instead shape the narrative to conceal a genocide? The New York Times has become more than a newspaper. It has become an accomplice. It has published the lies that justified the siege, the airstrikes, the starvation. It has erased the names of Palestinian children while elevating the grief of those who wore the uniform of an occupying army.

Across two years of bombardment, the Times’ headlines have wielded syntax like a scalpel. Passive voice for Palestinian death. Active voice for Palestinian resistance. When Saif al-Din Musalat was beaten to death by settlers, the headlines took two days to admit settlers killed him near Ramallah. When Amer Rabee was shot eleven times by Israeli soldiers while picking almonds, his name appeared in no national paper until we demanded coverage. And still, for neither Amer or Saif, there is no accountability. But when an Israeli dies, regardless of their role, regardless of whether they served in a genocidal army, their death is mourned in ink, amplified across platforms, translated into policy. Their humanity is assumed. Ours is interrogated.

A recent dossier by Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG)showed that the New York Times’ record is not incidental. It is systemic. Its current CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, served on the advisory council of B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, a group with the explicit goal of instilling Zionist values in young Jews. Its executive editor Joe Kahn reportedly launched an internal investigation to root out staff critical of Israel. One of its most infamous columnists, Thomas Friedman, once wrote, "Israel had me at hello." Patrick Kingsley, reporting from the paper’s Jerusalem office, an office built on stolen Palestinian land—described the slain Palestinian professor and poet Refaat Alareer as someone "known for posting hateful comments about Israel." Isabel Kershner, a veteran Times reporter, has cited her husband's Israeli military think tank over 100 times. Her sons have served in the Israeli Occupation Forces. This is not bias. This is allegiance.

But the Times is not alone. The BBC shelved a documentary on Israel’s targeted assassinations of doctors in Gaza, citing "concerns." Sky News edits its footage to remove Palestinian suffering. CNN routinely offers Israeli government officials uninterrupted airtime while Palestinian voices are relegated to two-minute rebuttals, if they are invited at all. A recent study showed that for every Palestinian voice aired on Western outlets, there are more than three Israeli voices given the same platform. This is not journalism. It is the manufacturing of consent.

What is the cost of this manufactured silence? According to the UN, over 55,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023. More than 17,000 of them are children. Hundreds have died not from bombs but from hunger, waiting in line for flour, gunned down while seeking aid. Over 90 babies have died in incubators after hospitals lost power, their lives extinguished by a siege defended as "self-defense" by American columnists and European news anchors. This is what propaganda enables.

When Palestinians screamed from the ruins, the world asked for proof. When our hospitals were bombed, the world asked for context. When our mass graves were uncovered, the world asked for "both sides." But last week, when an Israeli historian finally declared that, yes, this might be a genocide, the Times ran his words on its opinion page as if it were a revelation. As if our truth, long spoken, only became legible when whispered by one of our colonizers. The message is clear: Palestinian pain is only real if an Israeli confirms it.

This erasure is not just rhetorical. It is lethal. The lies told by the Times, by the BBC, by CNN, by Reuters, are not harmless distortions. They are accomplices to war. They protect the arms shipments. They justify the starvation. They allow for the continued occupation of the Palestinian mind, as well as the body.

Under international law, incitement to genocide and complicity in its execution are crimes. The Rwanda Tribunal found that Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines played a central role in fomenting genocide by dehumanizing Tutsis and calling for their extermination. The journalists and broadcasters were tried and convicted. Why, then, do the editors who erase our dead face no consequence? Why do the headline writers who hide our massacres behind passive verbs still collect Pulitzers?

To erase a people is not only to bomb their homes or poison their water. It is to refuse their narrative. To deny them the dignity of grief. To suggest that their lives are complex and their deaths inevitable. The New York Times does not merely report on genocide, it participates in it.

This is why campaigns like "Boycott, Divest, and Unsubscribe" matter. They are not symbolic. They are necessary. When a paper becomes a tool of empire, silence is complicity. And we will not be complicit.

Palestinians have always told our own stories. We told them in refugee camps. In exile. In poetry. In the streets of Haifa and Hebron and Rafah. In the olive groves our grandmothers would not leave. And in the silence that follows a child’s final breath. We have never needed validation from The New York Times. But we do demand that the world stop pretending that paper is truth.

The next time a Palestinian mother stands over the grave of her child, know that her sorrow is not complex. It is not political. It is not theoretical. It is the most honest thing in the world. And the journalists who refused to print her story have blood on their keyboards.

We will not forgive. We will not forget. And we will not let the record remain theirs alone.