In a report titled Whose Promised Land? A Journey Into a Divided Israel, the New York Times painted a highly inaccurate and distorted view of Israelis, who are generally happy and content with life according to all the polls. As Camera writes:
A New York Times reporter and photographer go into a car. They travel across one of the world’s happiest countries—and find only anger, alienation, and regret.
The New York Times promises to tell readers “what it means to be Israeli today.”
The opening paragraph is phrased like a joke because New York Times coverage of Israel—its efforts to curate, conceal, and contrive the faraway land for its American readers—has descended into hilarity. Indeed, yesterday’s front-page story by Jerusalem bureau chief Patrick Kingsley, which promises to help readers “discover what it means to be Israeli today,” is a comical caricature of the paper’s own biases, exposing much more about the New York Times than about the country it is supposedly covering.
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This isn’t a holistic reflection of Israel. It is not, as promised, a discovery of “what it means to be Israeli today.” Rather, like the parable of the blind men and an elephant, it is a microscopic exploration of extremities that misses the bigger picture and misinforms.
There is little or no sense given, World Happiness Report be damned, that anyone in Israel is living their best possible life. Nor is there a hint of the widespread contentment found by pollsters. Far from it.
In order to highlight the absurdity of this report, Camera launched a #SadSadIsrael hashtag campaign on social media, in which those of us living in Israel were invited to post photos showing just how “sad” we really are.
I joined in on the frivolity, posting a recent photo of me and my children at the movie theater:
The tweet received many likes and general positivity, except for one vile response:
That is the disturbed creator of Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the vile game that glorifies murdering Israelis, which I have posted about a number of times.
In other words, he saw my tweet celebrating my beautiful family and our happiness living in Israel by pointing to his video game celebrating the murder of Israelis.
For the record, my daughter at the front of the photo is currently in the army. Given he seems to be paying attention to what I tweet, he likely knew that as well. So beyond being vile, I take his tweet as a threat.
Meanwhile, his video game continues to be available on Steam and other major platforms.
