As the Gaza genocide nears two years, the vast majority of Western news outlets continue to grossly underreport the countless crimes and abuses of the slaughter.
Added to the merciless Israeli bombardment and enforced starvation of the Gaza Strip has been the grotesque charade of mercenaries, underwritten by the American government in the guise of an aid organization, that have slaughtered hundreds of Palestinian aid-seekers, close to a hundred each day, with a sadism that makes fiction look tame. Though scores of videos and testimonies have emerged to leave no doubt of the slaughter, it remains grossly underreported in Western media, most of which has preferred to ignore or only fleetingly and ambiguously refer to the butchery. A case in point is The New York Times’ bureau chief for the region, Patrick Kingsley, who was revealed by Palestinian writer Mosab Abu-Toha this week to have stoutly ignored evidence of the crimes in Gaza.
Taking to social media this week, Abu-Toha revealed screenshots of a WhatsApp conversation earlier this month between himself and Kingsley. Therein, Abu-Toha asked the bureau chief if he had seen photographs of a particular atrocity (the decapitation of a Palestinian child at the Shati camp) and offered both to share the footage and to connect him with witnesses and families who could report on the crime. Kingsley’s noncommittal response was a cold pleasantry and assurance not to worry: “We have a great team.”
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When Abu-Toha pressed him on whether he would report the story, Kingsley did not respond. He failed to respond over the next ten days despite repeated follow-ups, at which point Abu-Toha shared the exchange on the social media site Twitter, often known as X. Having lost a cousin, Ali, in the interim, Abu-Toha revealed that their connection had begun four years earlier when Kingsley had visited his home to do a story on him: a story that, similar to so many war crimes since, was never published by the self-styled “paper of record”.
What was more, Kingsley’s only reference was to the widely available evidence of the crimes of the American-funded Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. As reported by MuslimMatters last month, this supposed aid organization, led by an anti-Muslim ideologue and manned by mercenaries in close coordination with the Israeli military, has been responsible for gunning down scores of aid-seekers on a nearly daily basis. Since our last report, in addition to Israeli airstrikes and starvation, hundreds have been killed by an organization purportedly seeking to give them aid.
The sickening ritual, conducted in close coordination with the Israeli military, sets out aid at a distribution site and gives the Palestinians ten minutes to collect it; even as much of it is promptly plundered by the collaborator militia of Yasser Abu-Shabab, a notorious local thug who has been promoted by Tel Aviv as a counterweight to Palestinian resistance. When the ten minutes have passed, any remaining Palestinians are subjected to fire in a grotesque game that the Israeli army has named after a local game, “Salted Fish” – known as “red light”, “green light” elsewhere. Hundreds of Palestinians, likely well over a thousand, have been killed in this sadistic parody of aid. It should be noted that the organization only moved into a vacuum that Israel, again with either the active support or indifference of the American government, had created by vilifying, attacking, and expelling accredited aid agencies, including those linked to the United Nations, who were always overwhelmed by the genocide.
Most Western media have been either silent on the atrocities or downplayed them: one notoriously pro-Israel British broadsheet recently gave Abu-Shabab a softball interview and wondered if he might be “Gaza’s best hope” despite the overwhelming infamy of his militia. Kingsley himself referenced the massacres in such vague and sanitized terms: simply as “Israel’s failure to plan for a power transition,” rather than as the undisguised extermination plan referred to by any number of Israeli leaders and officials. He represents, as well as anybody, the outwardly neutral and non-committal reporter who is in fact deeply invested in and has constantly sanitized the genocide.
Referred to by American scholar Norman Finkelstein as “the Whore of War Par Excellence”, “chief stenographer”, and more sarcastically as “Ace Sleuth” for his less-than-intrepid reliance on Israeli officialdom, Patrick Kingsley lives in a stolen Palestinian home in Jerusalem where he works as New York Times bureau chief. He had studied at those strongholds of the British elite, Eton and Cambridge, before working for The Guardian.
It was, however, for the New York Times that he earned a questionable distinction, where under his watch the paper churned out a stream of Israeli propaganda, especially when the genocide began in October 2023. These included debunked claims of sexual crimes and animalistic slaughter by Palestinian militants that are the more galling when viewed against the systemic butchery, sexual crimes, and torture that they have helped whitewash. Indeed, Kingsley’s eagerness to publish such lurid propaganda contrasts with his tepid response to overwhelmingly documented crimes by Israel and American mercenaries, as evidenced in his interaction with Abu-Toha.
This is part and parcel of a long pattern, particularly notable at Kingsley’s paper and recently uncovered by the “Writers against the War on Gaza”: in a stunning exposé, they revealed the extent of ties between Israel and its institutions and political class on one hand, and the supposedly neutral New York Times staff on the other. Many of the propagandistic claims about Palestinian barbarism were spread by the paper’s staff with strong links to the Israeli military and thinktanks in what must be among the most galling and demonstratively harmful conflicts of interest at any major paper.
“We have a great team,” Kingsley had assured Abu-Toha. That, like so much else that he and his paper have churned out, was utterly untrue.
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