NY Times killed investigation of Israeli hooligans, internal email reveals
Asa Winstanley Media Watch 18 November 2024
Supporters of Israeli side Maccabi Tel Aviv went on a violent rampage in Amsterdam before and after their side’s match against Dutch team Ajax in the Europa League on 7 November.
Robin Van Lonkhuijsen ANPThe New York Times has killed an investigation by one of its own reporters into Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam earlier this month.
In an internal Times email inadvertently shared with The Electronic Intifada, Dutch reporter Christiaan Triebert explained to a manager that he had pitched “a visual investigation I was conducting into the events of [6-8 November] in Amsterdam.”
“Unfortunately, that story was killed,” he wrote. “I regret that the planned moment-by-moment visual investigation was not further pursued.”
“This has been very frustrating, to say the least,” Triebert wrote.
The email was addressed to senior Timesmanager Charlie Stadtlander – a former senior press officer for the US National Security Agency and for the US army.
Triebert appeared interested in carrying out reporting that would set the record straight, remediating the false narrative insistently advanced by his own newspaper – that the Israeli fans were victims of mob violence motivated by anti-Jewish hatred.
The correspondence between Triebert and Stadtlander on Friday was triggered by The Electronic Intifada’s requests for comment to The Times regarding the paper’s highly misleading reporting of Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam.
As this reporter explained on The Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday, the paper actually inverted reality.
There is still precisely zero evidence that even one anti-Semitic attack took place in Amsterdam – let alone the “pogrom” that Israeli government officials immediately claimed had happened.
The Times has come under fire for using a video of Israeli football hooligan violence in Amsterdam last week to claim the exact opposite of what the video actually showed.
The Times claimed footage shot by a Dutch photojournalist showed “anti-Semitic attacks” on Israelis – even though it actually showed Israeli mob violence against a Dutch citizen.
For several days, the footage was attached to the top of the paper’s 8 November report about events in Amsterdam the night before.
But on Tuesday the paper was forced to issue a correction, after the video’s creator – Dutch photojournalist Annet de Graaf – publicly condemned international media for mislabeling her video as evidence of “anti-Semitic attacks” against Israeli football supporters.
In fact, the video shows a mob of dozens of Israeli hooligans attacking someone, after their team Maccabi Tel Aviv lost an away game 5-0 to Dutch club Ajax on 7 November.
Times manager Stadtlander claimed to The Electronic Intifada in a statement on Friday that after the correction, the newspaper had “removed the video at the creator’s request.”
But de Graaf insisted that was untrue. “I haven’t said that at all,” she told The Electronic Intifada by phone on Friday. “It’s not true what the chief editor [Stadtlander] is saying to you in the email. Not true.”
Asked to comment, Stadtlander declined to respond to that, writing only that “my statement to you last night constitutes our comment on the matter.”
Downplaying genocidal Israeli violence
None of the four authors of the article – John Yoon, Christopher F. Schuetze, Jin Yu Young and Claire Moses – responded to requests for comment from The Electronic Intifada.
Stadtlander denied playing any role in the commissioning or editing of the article.
After The Electronic Intifada received Triebert’s “inadvertently copied” email, Stadtlander sent a follow-up email in what appears to have been an attempt at damage control.
He claimed that “the valuable work Christiaan [Triebert] and others on his team were doing did not become a standalone piece” because “much of the material was incorporated” into another article the Times had published.
But the piece that Stadtlander linked to is yet another whitewash of the Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam – one of a number published by the Times.
It obfuscates or outright reverses cause and effect and downplays the Israeli attacks on Dutch citizens while relying almost entirely on the Israeli hooligans’ claims.
It also downplays a video of Maccabi hooligans returning from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv airport chanting an openly genocidal slogan gloating that there are “no children left” in Gaza as merely “incendiary chants against Arabs and Gazans.”
Anti-Palestinian agenda
That the Times newsroom had a pro-Israel agenda from the outset of its coverage of the incident is apparent from reading the earliest version of the piece still available in online archives.
That version did not include the video by Annet de Graaf, and contained no evidence – or even allegation – of anti-Semitism, aside from the baseless claims of Israeli government officials.
One of the main sources quoted in that version was Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right police minister, who wants to expel all Palestinians. “Fans who went to see a football game encountered anti-Semitism and were attacked with unimaginable cruelty just because of their Jewishness,” the article quoted Ben-Gvir as saying.
However, all references to Ben-Gvir were removed from the article, within less than two hours.
To date, The New York Times has published more than a dozen articles substantially focused on the violence in Amsterdam.
This is an astonishingly high number compared, say, to how the newspaper has ignored or consistently downplayed grave crimes perpetrated by Israelis in Palestine, including systematic and well-documented sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli forces.
The Times coverage not only includes numerous news articles baselessly spinning the Amsterdam violence as “anti-Semitic,” but opinion columns with inflammatory headlines such as “Amsterdam Is About Jew Hatred – and Gaza,” “A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’” and “The Age of the Pogrom Returns.”
The willingness of the Times to falsely portray Israel and Israelis as victims in this case is reminiscent of how it has insistently advanced the debunked narrative of “mass rapes” by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023, including false reporting by its star correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman.
Such atrocity propaganda masquerading as journalism has been used to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
A new front in Israel’s genocidal war?
In his internal Times email to Stadtlander, reporter Christiaan Triebert explained that, after a conversation with de Graaf, “I reached out to the authors of the article to address the factual inaccuracies it contained.”
Triebert wrote that he had been unsure “what the rationale was for deleting the video rather than including the detail in the article. I think it would have been helpful to have the video in there with the context that it showed Israeli fans attacking a man.”
De Graaf has repeatedly clarified as much herself, as even the Times’ correction admits.
“What I explained to several media channels is that the Maccabi supporters deliberately started the riot in front of central station returning from the game,” de Graaf wrote on X, also known as Twitter.
The channel falsely claimed in Hebrew that the video showed Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being “violently attacked in the last hour by dozens of Palestinian rioters.”
Israeli football hooliganism in Europe seems to have become Israel’s latest global front in its genocidal war in Gaza.
On Thursday night, Israeli football hooligans attacked supporters of France at a European Nations League match in Paris between the two sides.
British journalist Peter Allen reported witnessing “horrendous violence” by the Israelis. He said he “spoke to three off-duty soldiers who were over from Tel Aviv, while one openly wore” an Israeli army T-shirt.
Despite the attendance of French President Emmanuel Macron, the match was heavily boycotted, with Reuters reporting that the Stade de France was barely one-fifth full and protests taking place in Paris against the event.
It was the lowest attendance for any home match in the history of France’s national team.
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