Turning Terror Into Context

By Abe Greenwald

Here’s a New York Times headline from yesterday on a story about the attempted terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue and its pre-school: “Temple Israel was founded in 1941, dedicated to the formation of a Jewish state.”

Here’s another from today, also from the Times: “Lebanese Family Members of Synagogue Attacker Died in Airstrike.”

One could say that both headlines, and their accompanying stories, count as valid news. This is true, but it’s entirely beside the point. These stories are written and framed to blame Zionism and Israeli military action for an attempted mass-slaughter of American Jews. 

If you check social media, you’ll find that’s precisely how they’re being used by Israel-haters and anti-Semites. One X user with close to half a million followers reposted a version of the “airstrike” story and added, “The part Fox News isn’t telling you.”

What about the part that the New York Times isn’t telling you—or at least not in bold type? Where’s the headline reading “More Than 100 Children in Temple Israel Pre-K at Time of Attack”? Or how about this for a story on the terrorist’s family back in Lebanon? “Synagogue Attacker’s Brothers Suspected of Being in Hezbollah”? 

Not at the paper of record. The important thing for the Times, and many other outlets, is to bring everything back around to supposed Israeli crimes.

Even if we were to pretend that Israel is guilty of every invented charge hurled at it, what does that have to do with 100 Jewish American children sitting in classrooms in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on a Thursday afternoon? The only moral statement one need make about yesterday’s attack is that it’s right and just that the perpetrator is dead. 

From October 7, 2023, to this day, every last bit of the psy-op against Israel and the Jews has relied on inverting both morality and truth. Hamas attempted a genocide, so Israel is accused of genocide. Zionism is, among other things, a means of preventing genocide, so Zionism itself is framed as a genocidal ideology. Hamas targeted innocents, slaughtered babies, and raped women, so Israel is accused of all three. Hamas kept food from Gazans, so Israel is accused of a starvation plot. Jews are indigenous to Israel, so Israel is accused of colonizing a native population. Jews are attacked across campuses and elsewhere in America, so we’re lectured on Islamophobia. The Iranian regime has been waging a half-century-long war to destroy Israel, so Israel is accused of starting a war with Iran. 

Here's another regularly inverted truth: Children die in Israeli airstrikes for the simple reason that genocidal Jew-haters keep trying to rid the world of Jews. This is what liberals might call the “root cause.” If the family of the terrorist who carried out yesterday’s attack was killed in Lebanon, that’s entirely the fault of Hezbollah. That his brothers are suspected of being in Hezbollah perfectly encapsulates the larger pathological loop: In their effort to extinguish the Jews, Jew-haters kill their own—at which point they must go out and try to kill more Jews.

Whether they succeed or fail, the media will be sure to get their message out.

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.