NY Times Shocker: Colluding with Radical NGOs to Upstage White House Summit

The Gray Lady becomes a politicized vehicle for a campaign timed to cause maximum embarrassment and target pro-Israel advocacy groups.


Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
07 July '10

Only hours before Israeli PM Netanyahu's White House meeting with US President Obama, the New York Times published a major story "Tax-Exempt Funds Aid Settlements in West Bank".

The report stated that US Treasury tax breaks have helped West Bank settlers to receive $200 million in tax-free funding from American donors and that it is actually easier to fund settlement outposts that are illegal under Israeli law through the US than Israel due to differences in the law.

The report pinpointed at least 40 American groups that have raised over $200 million in tax-deductible gifts for Jewish settlers in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem over the past decade.

Related: NY Times: Tax-Exempt Status Only for Groups That Agree with the Administration

The settlement enterprise is not a consensus issue even amongst Israel's supporters and we do not intend to address the issue here. However, we were suspicious of the timing of the release of this story. Did the New York Times deliberately set out to create a new bone of contention between Obama and Netanyahu to further strain relations?

Collusion by the NY Times?

More disturbingly, research by NGO Monitor and a number of bloggers reveals that the NY Times story is not the piece of investigative journalism that the paper would have you believe. In fact, the story bears an almost identical framework to a campaign launched by the radical left-wing Gush Shalom organization a full year ago.

In a confidential July 2009 memo, somewhat bizarrely publicly reproduced on an anti-Zionist blog site, Gush Shalom outlines a campaign that:

(Read full report)

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