Israel’s Ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, on Wednesday responded to the New York Times’ admission that it had failed to disclose that Gazan children it claimed were being starved by Israel, had actually been suffering from pre-existing medical conditions.
In a video posted to his X account, Leiter said that the newspaper’s clarification was too little and too late.
“Israel is facing what is no less than a well-funded propaganda campaign to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel and the Jewish people,” said the Ambassador. “By now, everyone knows about the story on the front page of the New York Times, all the news that's fit to print, about a little boy, the name of Muhammad, being held by his mother. It's a heart-wrenching picture. The accusation made against Israel was that it was starving this little boy, and the little boy was dying because of that starvation.”
“Well, that publication, that photograph, reached perhaps hundreds of millions of people. At the very least, 55 million people on the platform of the New York Times. When it was shown that that was one big lie, that the little boy was actually suffering from cerebral palsy, and that was the cause of his disfiguration, not malnutrition, the New York Times issued a mealy-mouthed, whimpering retraction…well, not really a retraction, just a correction of the story. That correction, so to speak, reached 50,000 people. So the bloodletting was done,” he added.
“The accusation was leveled. The demonization of Israel was accomplished. But in that correction, the New York Times didn't show you the real picture, which was doctored by journalists…blocked out of the picture that was shown in the New York Times was his brother. So how is it that this nice, healthy young boy, the brother of Muhammad, is not being starved by Israel, but only Muhammad is being starved by Israel?”
Leiter continued, “I appeal to you, don't accept the propaganda of the legacy media. This is a social contagion. It is a hysteria that's being fueled by social contagion. Google the satanic panic of the 1980s. That's what we're facing now, except Israel is being branded as the Satan. And now we're dealing with an age of TikTok, where everything moves quickly, where people receive their information through the digital and social media very quickly and very fast. So this well-funded propaganda campaign to demonize the state of Israel is moving swift.”
“Stand firm. Seek the truth. Appeal to us. And we'll send you the real information that you're not going to get from the New York Times,” concluded the Ambassador.