A billboard paid for by CAMERA lambasting The New York Times ahead of its headquarters in January. Photo: Screenshot / Twitter / @JCCWatch.

The New York Times has an article about the looming war over statistics of what percentage of the Gaza casualties were civilian and terrorist.

It pretends to be even-handed, although it falls very short.

The article downplayed the fact that Hamas killed collaborators and counts them as civilians killed by Israel, and the possibility that many of the victims were killed by Hamas rockets and bullets and mortars. It didn’t mention that Hamas took steps to ensure that terrorist casualties were not reported or named – something that the PCHR, a group mentioned, adhered to. It didn’t mention that PCHR goes out of its way to minimize the number of terrorists counted. It didn’t mention the flawed methodology of the information gatherers that the UN relies on, at Israel’s expense. It gives credence to  the uninformed guesses of a volunteer from New Zealand – a volunteer for Hamas. It didn’t mention that at the end of Operation Cast Lead, Hamas had claimed only a few dozen killed; only much later did they admit that Israel’s statistics of 709 terrorist deaths were largely correct. It didn’t mention comparable statistics of civilian dead in other wars in urban areas, including wars fought by Western powers that killed orders of magnitude more people. It didn’t look up the latest statistics from the Meir Amit ITIC published on their website, only saying that their much earlier statistics before the ground war were impressive. It didn’t mention that on Sunday, the day of the casualties outside the Rafah UNRWA school, even according to the Hamas-obedient PCHR more than 60 percent of those killed were terrorists.

But even if Jodi Rudoren’s team had done all of that, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because accompanying the article was a large, poignant photo of a dead child.

There is no such thing as objectivity when there the subconscious message is that Israel is murdering babies. The message from the photo overwhelms the article, no matter what it says.

Of course it is newsworthy to mention civilian casualties. But anti-Zionists and anti-Semites are using the photos of dead children as their most potent weapons. Even though this article notes that the proportion of children and women killed were far smaller than their percentage of the Gaza population, all of that is meaningless when there is a dead child’s hand hovering over the article.

The Israel-haters are repeating over and over, implicitly and explicitly, that the rules of war do not allow a single civilian to be killed, and every violation is a war crime.  This is nonsense, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the NYT. On the contrary, the newspaper is playing up that lie, without explicitly saying it.

Did The New York Times ever a similar number of photos of dead children killed by Western armies in Afghanistan or Iraq or Pakistan? Did the newspaper ever investigate the number of civilians being killed in Egypt’s similar battles against Islamists – that are being covered up?

The photos may be accurate, but they poison any accuracy that may have been in that article. No amount of IDF videos showing Hamas shooting rockets from civilian areas and the IDF avoiding innocent civilians can counteract those images.

And the haters of Israel and Jews couldn’t be happier at this coverage.