It’s not our practice to use this space to be critical of another publication, especially one as established as the New York Times. We’ve watched over the years and we’ve held our breath as the Times has created a level playing field between Israeli citizens and the Palestinian terrorists who are out to see our relatives, friends, us, dead.
We’ve held our breath as atrocities about Israelis killed or maimed, sometimes parents shot dead in front of their young children or rabbis attacked while praying in tefillin, are placed with regularity far away from Page 1, if reported at all.
But nothing in all of this time of unquestionably biased Times reporting against Israel could quite take our breath away than the article “Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place,” October 9, Page A11.
In this unfortunate piece, Richard Gladstone, the writer, builds an article suggesting that the two Temples might never have existed or weren’t exactly located where our sages, historians and Biblical archaeologists have said. One of his sources, an archaeologist with a law degree, sums it all up for the readers by suggesting that the location of the two Temples depends “partly on what constitutes proof. The answer might be yes if the start of proof is merely a preponderance of the evidence, but no if the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt,” says the archaeologist/attorney.
We were horrified.
As Jews are being knifed by random terrorists on the streets of Jerusalem, the New York Times and other major media outlets herald the cause of Palestinians who claim that Jews are out to take over the Temple Mount, as justification to destroy innocent Israeli lives.
So why shouldn’t the New York Times listen to the Palestinian street and suggest maybe, just maybe, that the Temples either weren’t on the Temple Mount or weren’t exactly where archaeology experts, historians and our traditional sources have placed them? Maybe, this is yet another contrived Jewish plot to claim a connection to the Temple Mount? The voice of Israeli archaeologists seemed strangely missing from Mr. Gladstone’s piece.
But what really seemed to be missing was reason in the reporting and release of such an article.
The same day the story was released, the New York Times corrected itself.
“The question is where precisely on the 37-acre Temple Mount site the Temples had once stood, not whether the Temples ever existed there.”
We’d like to correct the correction, because the legitimacy of the Temples even existing is exactly the empty pap of the Palestinian Waqf, the authority managing the area. The New York Times bought into just the sort of Palestinian historical denialism that is a big part of the paper’s long-standing anti-Israel narrative.
And it should be ashamed of itself.
Because when it comes to the New York Times history of anti-Israel coverage, there are many corrections that should have been written, but never were.
