According to the New York Times, rocks now throw themselves. Or at least that’s what The Scrapbook was forced to conclude upon reading the paper’s curious headline: “Jewish Man Dies as Rocks Pelt His Car in West Bank.” The Times eventually “corrected” this headline, but only after it appeared in print. It now reads “Jewish Man Dies as Rocks Pelt His Car in East Jerusalem.” So the Times obviously gave this some thought. The editors realized they had gotten the location wrong, but remained untroubled by the notion of self-propelled rocks.
The body of the article didn’t do a lot to clarify what happened, either. The article began, “A Jewish man died early Monday morning after attackers pelted the road he was driving on with rocks.” We fail to see how pelting the road killed the driver, and the article’s slouching toward literacy did not much improve thereafter. At National Review, Kevin Williamson went so far as to “copy edit” the entire embarrassing piece, an exercise that amply demonstrated that the article was written with the intention of avoiding at all costs the primary fact that the attackers were Palestinians out for blood and that a “Jewish man was murdered for the crime of driving while Jewish.”
Even acknowledging that the Times has set a low bar for itself with its shoddy Israel coverage, this article is particularly inexcusable. As the website Israellycool notes, it was written by Diaa Hadid, who has been reporting for the Times since March and has racked up no shortage of well-justified complaints of anti-Israel bias. Hadid’s pre-Times résumé includes a number of articles written for Electronic Intifada (EI), a publication “aimed at combating . . . pro-Israeli, pro-American spin,” according to the Jerusalem Post.
That’s fine and dandy, except for the fact that Electronic Intifada’s idea of combating pro-Israeli spin means publicly supporting the terrorist organization Hamas. NGO Monitor notes that EI “frequently compares Israeli policies with those of the Nazi regime.” But that’s not all. Hadid was also, per her bio, a “public advocacy officer at LAW—the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment.” As Israellycool reminds us, this group was a major player in the conception of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at discrediting Israel. (And speaking of divestment, the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment no longer exists, thanks to embezzlement by its former executive director.)
We’d suggest complaining to the paper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, about the Times’s appalling hiring decision. However, it turns out that Sullivan may be part of the problem, albeit somewhat inadvertently. Last fall, she addressed complaints about the paper’s Israel coverage. She noted that pro-Israel readers were unhappy with the paper’s coverage, yet for some reason also highlighted the discreditable opinions of “pro-Palestinian websites like The Electronic Intifada [that] have detailed the ways in which, as they see it, Times coverage fails to do justice to an outcast people.” Sullivan suggested the paper’s Jerusalem desk address the fact that the “Times has no native Arabic speakers in its bureau.”
That’s a sensible complaint in the abstract, but professionalism and objectivity require more—matter more, in fact—than language skills. The Times now has an Arabic-speaking reporter in its bureau, and it seems its coverage is worse than ever.
