Raja Abdulrahim, the New York Times reporter who prepared and wrote the splashy A-Section feature story in today’s print edition, says in her linked bio that “I abide by The Times’s ethical journalism standards. That includes refraining from promoting or protesting issues related to my work.” Can she possibly believe this while writing a piece of “Poor Palestinians!” propaganda like “There Is No Childhood in Gaza”? [Note: This is a gift link from me to get you past the paywall]

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, I suppose; it’s the ethical thing to do. Her story, and the way it is written, however, can evoke no possible response from typical semi-attentive and easily manipulated readers than “Think of the children! The Jews are monsters! Cease fire now! The Gazans have suffered enough! Justice for Palestine!”

And this is exactly the end result that Hamas sought when it launched its cease-fire shattering surprise terror attack on Israeli civilians, including infants, on October 7.

The words “terror,” “terrorism,” and “terrorist” don’t appear anywhere in Abdulrahim’s story. I can’t give her the benefit of the doubt on that: it amounts to deliberate misrepresentation. Here’s the smoking gun paragraph that constitutes the entire context provided for the article:

After the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the Israeli military launched the war with the stated aim of eradicating Hamas, unleashing one of the heaviest aerial bombardments the world has seen in this century on densely populated Gaza. Israel has accused Hamas of taking advantage of Gaza’s urban terrain to provide its fighters and weapons infrastructure with an extra layer of protection, running tunnels under neighborhoods, launching rockets near civilian homes and holding hostages in city centers. Hamas denies these accusations and says its members are Gazans themselves and live among the population….”

This is reducing a key reality of the war in Gaza to a “he said/she said” dispute, and hey, how can you know who do you believe? There is no genuine question about the existence of Hamas tunnels under schools, hospitals and civilian communities in Gaza, or about whether Hamas uses the naive citizens who voted them into power as human shields to provoke exactly the kind of outrage against Israel—and Jews—that the Times story will.

Gaza is no different from any war zone since the beginning of time. Children suffer because of the decisions of adults. The photo above struck me in its resemblance to a set in “Saving Private Ryan” that supported a harrowing scene where desperate French parents try to give their child to American troops to protect her. American bombs created that landscape during D-Day. There were no stories in American newspapers during World War II about the suffering of German and Japanese children, in part because wartime censors didn’t permit it, but substantially because American journalists knew that the Nazis and Japan’s imperialists would be the direct beneficiaries of “Think of the Children!” propaganda. There are no government censors blocking stories about how hard the war against Ukraine has been on Russian children, but there haven’t been any, and I woulkd be shocked if there ever were.

Yes, this is ethics zugzwang again: the public has a right to know what its government is doing in a war, but because the public will always let emotion overwhelm logic and common sense, its reaction to information such as what children go though when their country is fighting another country will often assist “the bad guys,” or worse, “the evil guys,” like Hitler and Hamas. This photo, for example…

….a classic in “Think of the children!” porn, helped the Communists win the Vietnam War.

“International law experts have said that Israel has a responsibility to protect civilians, even if Hamas exploits them the way Israel says it does. The Israeli military says it takes “all feasible precautions” to mitigate harm to civilians,” Abdulrahim writes. “The children of Gaza have suffered in myriad ways. Of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the war, an estimated 15,000 were under 18, according to Gazan health officials. The United Nations estimates that at least 19,000 more children have been orphaned. And nearly one million children have been displaced, according to UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency.”

Obviously, the war must be stopped then…

International law is a myth. People who have barely thought about the concept believe there is really some duly passed and executed body of laws that governments are bound to obey regarding warfare. This is part of the hopeless confusion the Nuremberg Trials created, probably forever. The people who write and “pass” international laws constricting warfare really and truly think they can legislate war out of existence. These are John Lennon fans. They may not do more harm than good, but it’s a close call.

This section in the quote is a smoking gun: “International law experts have said that Israel has a responsibility to protect civilians, even if Hamas exploits them the way Israel says it does.” There is no “even if” about it, Hamas does exploit its own civilians, and what the Times and “international law experts” are saying is—literally— that if wiping out an organization dedicated to destroying Israel (and that has made it clear that it will never stop trying to accomplish that goal) requires making life terrible for children until that organization is removed as a threat to slaughter Israeli children, then it is illegal and unethical for Israel to pursue that objective.

This is the “thinking” of Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, “The Squad,” Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, hoards of campus anti-Semites, much of the Democratic Party and, as this story shows, the New York Times.