A New York Times news article from Paris goes out of its way to obscure the motivation of a series of antisemitic hate crimes.

The Times reports: “A number of anti-Semitic episodes have shaken France, including the murder last year of Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jewish woman, by a man of Malian origin who shouted, ’God is great’ before throwing her out a window.”

Other press reports describe the murderer as shouting “Allahu akbar” and characterize him as a Muslim.

The Times goes on:

Other anti-Semitic crimes that have rattled France include the 2015 attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris by Amedy Coulibaly, a heavily armed Frenchman, who killed four people, and the 2012 assault on a Jewish school in Toulouse by Mohammed Merah, who killed three children and a teacher after killing three soldiers.

Other press accounts describe Coulibaly as a follower of the Islamic State and describe Merah as an avowed al Qaeda member who also shouted “Allahu akbar.”

The Times article, headlined, “She Survived The Holocaust, to Die in a 2018 Hate Crime,” goes on for considerable length about all these attacks without mentioning Islamist extremism at all.

As analyst Gilead Ini of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America pointed out on Twitter, the Times “is going to absurd lengths to obfuscate here, to avoid forthrightly describing what French Jews are facing. And we shouldn’t let that slide. There is right-wing anti-Semitism, which the NYT has no problem noting. There is left-wing anti-Semitism, which is increasingly acknowledged, even by the NYT. And there is Muslim anti-Semitism — which is the topic of this article, though the newspaper won’t acknowledge it.”

Said Ini: “Manuel Valls, the socialist former Prime Minster of France, said of the same attacks cited in the NYT piece, ‘The enemy…is Islamist terrorism, it is jihadism.’ This is the conversation in France…. Why dance around it?”

More of Ira Stoll’s media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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