The Talmud tells the story of Rabbi Elisha, the son of Avuya, who became the ultimate sinner.
He descended from his respected role as a great teacher of Torah to the depths of adultery, harlotry, breaking the Sabbath, and ultimately betraying the Jewish people to the Romans, helping them execute Torah scholars.
Nevertheless, Elisha shed a tear of regret with his dying breath, and his repentance was accepted. The lesson: No matter how far you fall, and no matter how much you stray from the truth, it is never too late for spiritual rehabilitation.
But it’s Judaism, so of course, there is a caveat.
Realizing the error of your ways and admitting your sins are prerequisites for repentance. That is why we confess our sins in the “slihot” prayers, culminating in what we hope will be the day of our atonement and forgiveness, Yom Kippur.
This all begs the question: If even Elisha ben-Avuya can repent to the point that he is accepted into heaven, what about The New York Times?
NYT spreads distorted information
The newspaper has spread dangerous lies about Israel throughout this war, from its claim that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital killing 500 people 10 days into the war, to its front-page photo of skeletal Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, whom the newspaper falsely accused Israel of starving, along with other Gazan children.
The Times ran the outrageous headline “No proof Hamas routinely stole UN aid, Israeli military officials say.” The article quoted unnamed, anonymous “military sources,” even after official IDF Spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said and proved that the opposite was true.
It published, uncritically, one of the most grotesque and easily disprovable claims made during the war – that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours. And the newspaper has lionized terrorists Zakaria Zubeidi and Anas Al-Sharif.
Professional studies by journalist Lilac Sigan and Bar-Ilan University Prof. Eytan Gilboa have found that the articles sympathetic to the Palestinians have outnumbered any that expressed empathy for Israel, four and a half to one.
Former Times bureau chief Patrick Kingsley, who led the coverage until recently, screamed at Israeli diplomats, and even at me, for suggesting that his photographer Yousef Massoud infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7 with Hamas. One of his most shocking claims justifying the physical and ethical boundaries Massoud crossed was that the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip is not internationally recognized.
It was Kingsley who hired Fady Hanona to cover the August 2022 war in Gaza without checking his social media posts.
“I don’t accept a Jew, Israeli, or Zionist, or anyone else who speaks Hebrew. I’m with killing them wherever they are: children, elderly people, and soldiers,” Hanona wrote in a post revealed by pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. “The Jews are sons of the dogs… I am in favor of killing them and burning them like Hitler did. I will be so happy.”
Soon after Kingsley was compelled to fire Hanona, two more Palestinian staffers who lauded Adolf Hitler and Palestinian terrorism emerged: Soliman Hijjy, who praised Hitler; and Hosam Salem, who praised the 2014 terror attack in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood in which terrorists killed five congregants with axes, knives, and a gun.
After Hijjy was fired in August 2022, Kingsley rehired him on October 8, 2023. The rehiring was justified by saying that he broke the paper’s guidelines before, but would not again.
If there was any article that could be remembered as his saving grace, Kingsley published an endearing article in May 2023 about the endangered monk seal named Yulia which frequented the Jaffa shore.
Halbfinger rationalizes October 7 massacre
Anyone hoping that the coverage would improve when Kingsley left recently received bad news: His replacement is one of his least fondly remembered predecessors, New York Times political editor David Halbfinger.
Halbfinger served as the bureau chief for three and a half years, from 2017 to 2020, during which time he regularly proved his anti-Israel bias that should disqualify him from returning to the sensitive role. His articles and posts frequently marginalized Israeli perspectives, elevated fringe or extreme criticisms, and omitted essential context.
Perhaps the most egregious error of his tenure came in 2018, when he falsely described Israel’s Gaza security fence as “electrified,” evoking the possibility of Palestinian children getting zapped just by touching the structure.
Despite being called out, Halbfinger flatly refused to fix the error until the Times issued a correction anyway, following complaints from HonestReporting.
His bias was also evident after he left Israel. On Oct. 7, 2023, Halbfinger shared a deeply problematic post on X. Rather than condemning the atrocities unfolding in real time or sharing neutral posts, he chose to amplify a message that framed the massacre as an expected result of Israel’s policy of “pogroms” against Palestinians.
Halbfinger shared an X thread by Avner Gvaryahu, the director of the politicized NGO Breaking the Silence, which regularly publishes fabricated or exaggerated testimonies from former soldiers motivated by politics or stipends to further a pro-Palestinian agenda.
Since Halbfinger wrote that it was a “thread worth translating,” HonestReporting did so and found that it disturbingly rationalized the massacre.
“While the fools leading us decided that escorting a weekly pogrom in Huwara is more important than anything, and that running a military operation in Gaza every two months constitutes deterrence, the very foundation of the ‘conflict management’ concept collapsed,” Gvaryahu wrote.
In 2020, Halbfinger shared “an open letter to the Israeli government” against the annexation of the West Bank. The letter lacked any credibility or transparency, but Halbfinger felt entitled to tout it on his X platform, effectively disqualifying himself as a neutral observer expected to cover the region objectively.
Alarmingly, during Halbfinger’s tenure as bureau chief, there were too many examples of the Times implicitly legitimizing violence against Israelis. One piece, published five years ago, reported that an Israeli soldier was “struck in the head by a heavy rock” – a passive and sanitized framing that ignores the intent and ideology behind the unidentified person who threw the rock.
So will Halbfinger continue the biased coverage by The New York Times that readers endured during Kingsley’s tenure, and before that, under him? Or will he be like Rabbi Elisha, the son of Avuya, and change his ways?
We will see whether what comes out of the paper’s Jerusalem bureau is news that’s fit to print.
The writer is the executive director of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.