The New York Times has no regrets for promoting anti-Israel propaganda. And I’m not talking about the opinion article the paper published this week by Diana Buttu, a former adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which the United States declared a terrorist organization in 1987.
Rather, the New York Times is sticking by its decision to include in the former terrorist operative’s article an illustration parroting note-for-note the old “four maps” lie.
The image the New York Times added to Buttu’s piece depicts four maps, each one supposedly showing Israel’s hostile takeover of territories previously owned by Palestine. It’s all agitprop, but more on that later.
Don’t call it propaganda, says New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy. Also, he adds, don’t take what the graphic depicts literally, because it’s just art.
“This image was used as art atop an opinion essay by a Palestinian writer — she was arguing in her piece that the idea of coexistence in Israel is a myth,” Healy said in a statement, “and we felt that the art image helped illustrate her arguments like this one: ‘We are those who survived the ‘nakba,’ the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 when more than 75 percent of the Palestinian population was expelled from their homes to make way for Jewish immigrants during the founding of Israel.’”
Except that is not an opinion — it is an assertion of fact. Saying, “It’s not fair we should share territory with Israel” is an opinion. Accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing” is a declarative statement and an easily disproven one at that.
“This is her opinion,” Healy continued, “and we chose to publish the essay and — as with almost all opinion essays — we chose artwork for it. This artwork is not meant to represent any historical boundaries and it is not meant to serve as a literal, factual map — our data graphics department would handle such maps. This was an illustration conveying a sense of shrinking space for the Palestinians. It is art.”
But the graphic isn’t metaphorical. It isn’t just an artistic representation of an opinion. The image is an exact replica of the one PLO activists use to argue that Israel stole land that belonged to Palestine. It depicts very specific, erroneous, claims regarding a heated and bloody territorial dispute.
What’s so bad about the “four maps”? For starters, the first image falsely asserts Palestinians owned nearly all of the land in the region prior to 1948, the year State of Israel was proclaimed. That isn’t true. Palestinians never owned most of the land, and they have never agreed to a division of the land — which, again, includes territories they never possessed.
Another problem is the map deliberately fails to “differentiate between private property and sovereign land, as well as a total erasure of any political context,” as former Director of Foreign Policy for the Israeli National Security Council Shany Mor explained in 2015.
The following video ably dissects many of the other problems with the PLO-promoted illustration:
<mediadc-iframe data-state="{"cms.site.owner":{"_ref":"00000161-3486-d333-a9e9-76c6fbf30000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b93390000"},"cms.content.publishDate":1622216939509,"cms.content.publishUser":{"_ref":"00000162-07b0-de22-a173-2ffa3d100000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"cms.content.updateDate":1622216939509,"cms.content.updateUser":{"_ref":"00000162-07b0-de22-a173-2ffa3d100000","_type":"00000161-3461-dd66-ab67-fd6b933a0007"},"title":"Four Maps","iFrameEmbedCode":"","_id":"00000179-b3a9-da70-a3ff-bbaffe500000","_type":"00000161-b425-d761-a563-f7e77e270000"}”>Four MapsIn short, the “four maps” visualization promoted by the New York Times comprises a series of bald-faced lies. It’s not just “art” — the PLO certainly doesn’t feel that way about it.
By the way, the visual the New York Times included in Buttu’s article is the same one MSNBC aired in 2015, which resulted in a speedy retraction and unequivocal apology. Even the left-wing cable network recognized the “four maps” graphic as a lie. What’s the New York Times’s excuse?
It’s bad enough the paper of record published Buttu’s falsehoods unchallenged. It’s worse the newspaper gave her an assist by including artwork favoring her bogus claim Israel has stolen almost all of the territories previously owned by Palestine.
