Late last month, the New York Times called Hamas “political chief” Ismail Haniyeh “relatively pragmatic.” On Sunday, the Gray Lady suggested that the terror group was at risk of becoming “possibly more radicalized.”
The United States designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization on Oct. 8, 1997. U.S. President Joe Biden said on Oct. 10 that Hamas’s “stated purpose for being is to kill Jews.”
“The brutality of Hamas—this bloodthirstiness—brings to mind the worst—the worst rampages of ISIS. This is terrorism. But sadly, for the Jewish people, it’s not new,” Biden said at the time. “This attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and genocide of the Jewish people.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote on Aug. 1 that he had seen CNN “eulogize arch-terrorist Ismail Haniyeh as a ‘moderating force” and a ‘political leader.’”
“The New York Times called him ‘relatively pragmatic.’ Washington Post called him ‘one of the moderate figures’ within Hamas. Give me a break,” he wrote. “Let’s be clear: Haniyeh was a mass murderer who authorized and celebrated the unspeakable savagery of Oct. 7.”
David Friedman, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, asked: “What does ‘more radicalized’ mean? The only limit on Hamas’s willingness to kill every single Jew is Israel’s power of self-defense.”
Joel Petlin, superintendent of the Kiryas Joel School District, wrote that “The New York Times believes that the Hamas terrorists, who murdered and kidnapped babies on Oct. 7, will now be ‘possibly more radicalized.’”
“Don’t they have any writers or editors at the Times who have a clue about anything, or do they just need to fill up space with nonsense?” he added.
