US President Joe Biden addresses rising levels of antisemitism, during a speech at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Annual Days of Remembrance ceremony, at the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, US, May 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Furious at President Biden for publicly holding up an arms shipment to Israel in wartime?

You might consider also directing your ire at the New York Times, which laid the groundwork for Biden’s decision with two articles.

An April 13 New York Times staff editorial, headlined, “Military Aid to Israel Cannot Be Unconditional,” called on Biden to cut off weapons deliveries.

“America cannot continue, as it has, to supply Israel with the arms it has been using in its war against Hamas,” the editorial said. “A growing number of senators, led by Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, have been urging Mr. Biden to consider pausing military transfers to Israel, which the executive branch can do without congressional approval. They were right to push for this action.”

The Times editorial acknowledged, “Pausing the flow of weapons to Israel would not be an easy step for Mr. Biden to take” but weighed against that the argument that “the war in Gaza has taken an enormous toll in human lives.”

When it was published, I called the editorial “tastelessly timed” and “rife with factual and logical errors.”

The arms shipment that Biden cut off reportedly included 2,000-pound bombs. Israel’s use of those bombs was the subject of a December 2023 New York Times “visual investigation.” That article was also one of seven that were among the entry for which the New York Times won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Back when the Times investigation was published, I wrote in the Algemeiner, as part of a larger piece detailing the article’s flaws, that the Times piece was part of a campaign to cut off weapons to Israel: “The policy goal is clear: to cut off Israel’s arms supply. ‘But the US has not stopped supplying weapons to Israel,’ the Times narrator says at one point, implying that is what the US should do.”

On May 8 — less than a month after the Times editorial appeared, and two days after the Times Pulitzer for the 2,000-pound bomb article was announced — Biden went on CNN to disclose that he’d hold up arms deliveries to Israel.

Would he have taken the step without the encouragement to do so from the New York Times? There’s no way to know for sure. Often there is a sort of circular feedback loop between the press and sources in Washington, with government officials advocating for a policy option — like a pause in weapons shipments — leaking their point of view to the newspaper to generate sympathetic articles. These same officials then point to these same newspaper articles in internal administration debates as ostensibly independent backing for the policy options they had favored from the start.

A Times article from this week says, “For a time, the United States held a monopoly on these bombs. But now Mark 80s are made and sold by a number of countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Italy, Pakistan, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. Israel makes its own versions.” If that is accurate (you never know with the New York Times), and Israel does manage to obtain the bombs domestically or from another vendor, then it undercuts the claim that cutting off the American shipments will benefit Gazan civilians. The best thing for Gazan civilians and for Israel is a rapid and decisive Israeli victory over Hamas, so if anything, the American decision is counterproductive.

When it comes to political news coverage, Biden has been, with increasing frequency, criticizing the media. “While the press doesn’t write about it — [applause] — the momentum is clearly in our favor, with the polls moving towards us and away from Trump,” Biden said on May 10 at a Seattle campaign reception, according to a White House transcript. Perhaps if Biden applied some of that same skepticism to the New York Times coverage of Israel and Gaza, the US-Israel relationship, and US policy toward Israel, would be in better shape.

Or maybe the trick is somehow to figure out how to get to Biden the Algemeiner columns debunking and answering the New York Times articles, so that he can read them together and make up his mind with more complete, less erroneous information.

Speculation about the decision has focused on a variety of factors, ranging from the influence of Secretary of State Blinken to Arab-American voters in Michigan to an Arab-American National Security Council official. The malign influence of the New York Times, though, shouldn’t be overlooked.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.