The New York Times, ever true to its anti-Israel self, provided a slanted coverage of Pope Francis’ Easter Message, one that focussed on his brief remarks on Gaza, as if they were central to his remarks. More on the Times’ report on the Pope’s urbi et orbi address can be found here: “New York Times Imposes Its Own Anti-Israel Tilt on Pope’s Easter Message,” by Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, April 1, 2024:
Pope Francis on Sunday delivered his Easter message. He talked about abortion. He talked about migrants of the sort that are crossing the southern border into America and making their way into cities like New York. He talked about the need to free the Israeli hostages seized on Oct. 7. He talked about conflicts in at least 12 different places, including Ukraine, the Western Balkans, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Haiti, Myanmar, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mozambique.
So what was the New York Times‘ headline about the pope’s speech? The online headline was, “Amid Health Concerns, Pope Delivers Strong Easter Message Calling for Gaza Cease-Fire.” The print headline was, “As Health Concerns Loom, Pope Calls for Gaza Cease-Fire in Easter Message.”
Not “calling for peace” — as he did, naming a dozen different countries where wars and rumors of wars were continuing. No — the Times title has Pope Francis calling “for Gaza Cease-Fire.” What about his calling for peace in conflicts including those in Ukraine, the Western Balkans, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Haiti, Myanmar, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mozambique? The Pope gave all of those wars as much attention as he did to the war in Gaza — but in the Times coverage, his call for “a ceasefire in Gaza” was the main point of his Easter Message.
The Times news article also ended by emphasizing Gaza: “And in Gaza, he said the eyes of suffering children ask: ‘Why? Why all this death?’” Yet if one read the pope’s text carefully and in context, it seemed clear that the “eyes of the children” comment applied not restrictively to Gaza, but generally, to conflicts worldwide, including the one in Ukraine, where the pope also called for peace….
The Pope did not mention “Gaza” in his passage about “the eyes of children.” That came from The Times itself, putting words into the Pope’s mouth and hoping no one would notice.
Say what you will about Pope Francis — he’s been reasonably sensitive to the problem of post-Oct. 7 Jew-hate. Unfortunately, the Times itself hasn’t entirely lived up to Francis’ standard. In a Feb. 2 letter to “my Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel,” the pope wrote, “The path that the Church has walked with you, the ancient people of the covenant, rejects every form of anti-Judaism and antisemitism, unequivocally condemning manifestations of hatred towards Jews and Judaism as a sin against God. Together with you, we, Catholics, are very concerned about the terrible increase in attacks against Jews around the world. We had hoped that ‘never again’ would be a refrain heard by the new generations, yet now we see that the path ahead requires ever closer collaboration to eradicate these phenomena.” As far as I can tell from an archive search, the New York Times failed even to cover that letter.
Wouldn’t you think that this expression of sympathy and support by Pope Francis for “my Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel” in his letter of February 2 — just a month before his Easter Message — would have been given front-page coverage by the Times? The sometimes fraught relations of the Catholic Church with the world’s Jews, including the antisemitism of Pope Pius XII, who refused to speak out against Mussolini’s racial laws (leggi razziali). Worse still, he failed to protest the Nazi persecution and murder of Jews all over Europe, and did not even help the Jews of Rome who were being rounded up by the Germans, right under the windows of the Vatican, and sent off to death camps. But the Times not only did not reproduce or report on that letter — it avoided mention of it altogether. Was it perhaps because the Pope had addressed his letter to the Jews “in Israel,” and the expression of such support to the “Jewish brothers and sisters in Israel” was displeasing to the anti-Israel editors at The New York Times?
The New York Times report on the Pope’s Easter Message should have made clear that he had called for peace not just in Gaza, but all over, in nearly a dozen countries that he names, that are currently wracked by war. The Times made it seem that the call for a “ceasefire” in Gaza was the central point of his message, but it was not. The Pope called for peace in nearly a dozen countries, naming each of them. And as he has many times before, he also called for Israeli hostages to be freed by their Hamas captors. But the Times did not mention this part of his message.
It bears repetition: The Times deliberately misstated the Pope’s impassioned plea for peace that began thus: “How much suffering we see in the eyes of the children: the children in those lands at war have forgotten how to smile! With those eyes, they ask us: Why? Why all this death? Why all this destruction?”
Here is how The Times misreported the Pope’s words about the “eyes of the children” in his last paragraph: “And in Gaza, he said the eyes of suffering children ask: ‘Why? Why all this death?’ Why all this destruction?” The words “And in Gaza” were added by the editors at The Times. The Pope intended to address not only, and not even mainly, the conflict in Gaza; the words about the questioning eyes of children were meant to address conflicts everywhere.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish owners of The Times wanted to downplay possible charges that the Times was “a Jewish paper,” paying too much attention to “Jewish stories” about the persecution and murder of the Jews of Europe, and trying to “get the United States into a war.” Consequently, the Times scandalously underreported those stories, and did so at a time when a better-informed public could have put pressure on FDR’s administration to do more to save the Jews of Europe. In fact, Jewish readers of the New York Times, had they been better informed by the “newspaper of record” about what was happening to Jews in Germany before World War II, might have worked harder to get their own relatives out of Europe before it was too late. The Times is now doing the same: misreporting on Jewish matters, which nowadays means misreporting on Israel and those who would destroy it, displaying a want of understanding and sympathy for the Jewish state which is horrible to behold. I don’t see how the Sulzbergers sleep at night.
Taffy says
When I was in sixth grade in the early 70s, I read the New York Times every single day. Back then it was a legitimate newspaper, and it helped build my vocabulary and writing style. Nowadays, the New York Times is not fit to line a birdcage. Maybe, their reporting in the science section is still OK, but the editorializing leaves the op-Ed pages and creeps into news stories big time. I would not pay two cents for that rag, and I only read it when somebody abandons a copy on the train. And then, I only read it for the science section, and to a lesser extent the financial section.
somehistory says
News people regularly leave out words, or use other means to make what they say cause certain reactions or thoughts in the minds of the hearers.
In this case, they took the ‘in gaza’ from one part and put it where they thought it would do the most to make the reader have certain thoughts about Israel, the pope and the Catholic church.
When Jesus was with His apostles sharing their “last Supper” before His death and resurrection, He told them to “keep doing this in remembrance of Me.”
He had told them plainly that before He would return, there would be “reports of wars and rumors of wars, famine, earthquakes, increasing lawlessness,”
He gave no indication that His disciples would need to try, nor be able to stop, any of these foretold occurrences.
The pope could have focused on this fact: we are living when all of these things are increasing, giving proof of what Christ said, and that He told His disciples “I am with you all the days.”
Then the pope would not have had to talk so much about “why” in the eyes of the children. He could have given them the answer to their “why” and given them hope beyond a ‘ceasefire’ in those war-torn places.
Let the dishonest reporters at the nyt have something else to try to distort. Jesus was “born a Jew” after all.
Robert_l says
The Sulzberger’s NYTImes cover up of the Holocaust is described by “Buried by The New York Times” by Laus Leif .
It is traced to Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s Classical Reform Judaism’s denial of a Jewish Nation and its right to Statehood. That is why the The New York Times threw the Jews under the bus during the Holocaust and throws Israel under the bus today.
The New York Times is a good source of news for people like Chuck Schumer.
Lisa T. says
I should preface this by saying that as a Protestant Christian I don’t really care what the Pope has to say. However, I would hope that on Easter he would preach a sermon about Jesus’ death, resurrection and forgiveness of sins. And while he’s preaching about man’s inhumanity to man around the world, I would hope he would have mentioned the genocide of Christians going on in Nigeria.