The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A New York Times news article about Secretary of State Blinken’s visit to Saudi Arabia is so egregiously slanted against Israel that it reads as if it were dictated by the Iranian information ministry.

The article describes normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel as “a move that would be opposed by many Saudi citizens.”  Why the negative framing? It’s also a move that would be favored by many Saudi citizens. Why doesn’t the Times say that?

Public opinion polling in unfree countries is always a dicey proposition because people aren’t accustomed to expressing freely their genuine views, but a March/April 2023 poll for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 38 percent of Saudi citizens agreed with the statement, “If it would help our economy, it would be acceptable to have some business deals with Israeli companies.” The Institute noted, “affirmative responses to this question in Egypt or Jordan, both officially at peace with Israel for several decades, have hovered at around the 10% range in every recent survey. The relatively high and steady level of Saudi popular support for such initiatives is especially notable because most of the fieldwork for this survey was conducted during Ramadan—a month of heightened tensions between Israelis and Palestinians around the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, as was widely reported in Saudi Arabia.”

The focus solely on opposing public opinion would be unacceptable in Times reporting on U.S. domestic policy. Imagine the Times writing about, say, gun control or abortion laws or racial preferences in college admissions by merely noting that they are “opposed by many American citizens” without probing the motivation of the opposition or the underlying merits of the policy, and without noting that some people also favor the policies or laws. Maybe those Saudis opposing normalization with Israel oppose it because they were fed antisemitic propaganda for years by state-controlled media, mosques, and school textbooks, some of which are now changing for the better?

It’s not only the framing and context about public opinion that is slanted, but the source selection.

Two paragraphs are devoted to quoting Hussein Ibish, who is identified only as “a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.” The Times doesn’t explain what the Arab Gulf States Institute is, but its funders include Aramaco, the Saudi oil company, and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a law and lobbying firm that has been a $150,000 a month registered foreign agent of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Two additional paragraphs are devoted to quoting Sarah Leah Whitson, who is identified only as “executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now” and introduced as an advocate of “tougher policies on Saudi Arabia.” The paragraphs from Whitson are worth quoting in full because they are pretty rich:

“Human rights is nowhere on the agenda other than this reduced, dumbed-down version: We’re going to lobby to get Americans released from prison,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now. She added that she saw little difference between Mr. Biden’s actions and those of President Donald J. Trump, who sought to befriend Prince Mohammed. (Six months after leaving his White House job, Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, received a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by the prince.)

“Look at the Biden administration’s actual policy, look at the actual relationship,” Ms. Whitson said. “It’s similar, if not far more humiliating. MBS has been spanking President Biden for the last two years.”

The Times doesn’t tell readers that “Democracy for the Arab World Now” is, according to NGO Monitor, a group, funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, that advocates boycotts and sanctions against Israel, opposes arms sales to Israel, and promotes the “Israel-apartheid” lie.

According to NGO Monitor, Whitson “frequently invokes antisemitic rhetoric” and “used the classic antisemitic blood libel.”

In 2017, I described Whitson as “well known as one of the most consistent anti-Israel, verging on anti-Jewish, activists in public life.” I wrote then, “She was caught fundraising in Saudi Arabia for Human Rights Watch’s anti-Israel work. NGO Monitor has an entire dossier on her. She’s part of the reason Human Rights Watch’s founding chairman, Robert Bernstein, publicly quit HRW.”

For the Times to kvetch about Jared Kushner taking investments from Saudi Arabia for a fund, without disclosing that Whitson was involved in fundraising in Saudi Arabia for Human Rights Watch, is an outrageous double standard. The Human Rights Watch fundraising included, as reported by the Intercept, raising money on the condition that it couldn’t be spent to support LGBT-rights advocacy. Whitson was executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division from 2004 to 2020, a time that included some of the organization’s most egregious anti-Israel activity. Her new group’s website includes a “culprits gallery” in which four of the nine first “culprits” listed are Israeli.

It’s a joke for the Times to quote someone like Whitson as an authoritative source in a news article about U.S.-Israel-Saudi relations. Given her track record, her main agenda seems to be hurting Israel, not advancing democracy. Without some kind of signal to readers or context about this, the Times reporters just look like a couple of rubes.

Between the selective sourcing and the “opposed by many Saudi citizens” nonsense framing, it adds up to a sorry showing under the bylines of Times reporters Edward Wong and Vivian Nereim. In typical Times fashion, the names of the editors of the article are not disclosed. Next time around, those editors may want to take a more skeptical look.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.