Highlighting some of the most egregious examples of the New York Times’s dishonest and misleading reporting on the Jewish state and its conflict with the Palestinians, Gilead Ini identifies several patterns. These include covering up the extreme positions of anti-Israel groups and public figures, to the extent that Omar Barghouti—founder of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (BDS)—wrote a letter clarifying that BDS’s goal was not to protest settlements in the West Bank, as the Times had it, but to destroy the Jewish state. In another case, a reporter selectively quoted an anti-Israel statement, along with objections to it, so that the latter came across as nonsensical. And then there are things the Times does not consider fit to print:

On March 20, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas called David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, the “son of a dog.” The New York Times ignored the story, leaving readers in the dark about a dramatic diplomatic incident. You might ask whether the newspaper would likewise look away if an Israeli prime minister denounced an American ambassador.

The record gives a clear answer. A couple of years earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized a statement by then-U.S. ambassador Dan Shapiro as being “unacceptable and incorrect.” At the time, the Times shined the spotlight on Netanyahu’s incomparably milder statement, covering it in a news story and again in an editorial that slammed Netanyahu’s critique as “unusually personal and unfair.” Apparently “son of a dog” is neither of those. . . .

Mahmoud Abbas was far from the only beneficiary last year of the newspaper’s selectively gentle touch. Consider this headline, published during the wave of Palestinian riots along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel: “Battle Weary, Hamas Gives Peaceful Protests a Chance.” . . . Only a day before the Times headline [was published], Israel had uncovered a Hamas attack tunnel leading from Gaza into Israel. A few days before that, Hamas’s leader Yahya Sinwar declared to Palestinians gathered at the Israeli frontier, “We will take down the border, and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies”—a chilling and illuminating threat that Times reporters opted not to report.

That tunnel and those words are not peaceful. Nor were the rocks, firebombs, and explosives hurled at Israeli targets during what another article . . . nonetheless insisted was Gaza’s “experiment with nonviolent protest.”

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.